The 2022 gubernatorial campaign season officially kicked off this week with Jared Polis toadying up to voters with random musings on eliminating the state income tax.

Is he really serious about proposing such a plan?

Of course not, and his party’s already pissed at him for even suggesting such an idea that usually comes from the Republican side of the political aisle.

Polis just wanted some love and positive news headlines, and of course the media obliged.

The Democrat’s remarks came during a High Country event where he pontificated that the income tax rate should be zero, while “taxing pollution or carbon or something that we fundamentally don’t want.”

Buried deep inside the Denver Post story is the reality check that Polis’s idea is a dead-end topic for Colorado’s Democrat Party, which happens to control the state legislature. 

Scott Wasserman, president of the liberal Bell Policy Center, said the governor’s remarks show he is “disconnected” from the reality of state budgetary pressures and the particular burdens on low- and middle-income people.

 

“The question the governor never seems to want to talk about is, ‘Lower taxes for whom?’ If he wants to eliminate the income tax and get behind a wealth tax, then that’s a conversation starter,” Wasserman said.

Leave it to a politician like Polis to try and erase income taxes, then turn around and tax human beings — the largest source of carbon-dioxide on the planet’s surface — just to breathe.