A fiscal policy report card on America’s governors who’ve cut taxes and spending gives Gov. Polis a C grade, which suggests he’s not putting much energy into his work and should be grounded and sent to his room to study.
We should also take away his video games and cell phone until his grade improves.
Thanks to Polis’s mediocre fiscal prowess, Colorado’s rankings are in league with California, West Virginia, Louisiana, Wisconsin, and six other states.
The A students who cut taxes and spending hailed from the states of New Hampshire, Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming.
Not surprising, they were all Republicans. All of the F scores were Democrats. Big shock.
Here’s the complete list of score from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Polis’s spending score is 53 and his revenue score is 47.
According to the Cato Institute report card, governors who rank in the middle tend to oscillate between different fiscal approaches of raising taxes or controlling spending from one year to the next.
They’ve only been grading Polis since last year.
The report card noted Polis’s positions on the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR).
In 2019, Polis supported retaining excess revenues and using them to boost spending on education and highways. However, voters rejected that idea at the ballot box …
In 2020, Polis approved a bill (HB 1420) that increased business taxes, despite TABOR’s requirement that voters need to approve tax increases. Polis compromised on a version of the bill that will raise taxes about $100 million in 2021 after opposing a larger tax increase favored by Democrats in the legislature.
Read the entire report here.