It’s that time of the year again when the long bill, or the state’s budget, is debated. Naturally, Democrats blamed TABOR, or the taxpayers bill of rights, for budget cuts. Here is a verbal weeping and gnashing of teeth by Democrat state Rep. Lois Court from Colorado Politics:
“If it weren’t for TABOR, these contortions wouldn’t be happening; if it weren’t for TABOR we wouldn’t have these problems….We have had opportunities this session to deal with that and we failed to do it. We are damaging our state because of TABOR, and until we fix it we are not going to fix our budgets ever.”
Can’t you picture her wringing her hands as she says that? Fortunately, Republicans fired back reminding everyone about the money suck that Medicaid in our state has become since the state voted to expand Medicaid. At this point, nearly a quarter of Coloradans are on Medicaid. This system is broken, but more on that later. Regardless of how you feel about the Medicaid expansion, it must be acknowledged that this is swallowing an increasing amount of our state’s budget.
Nonetheless, when Democrats are still fighting for superfluous tax credits and grants for rich people like the film subsidies and breaks for folks buying Teslas (which, by the way, cost approximately $100,000), legitimate prioritization has failed.