Colorado Public Radio interviewed Gov. Polis on an elevator to get his elevator pitch for passing Proposition HH, which if passed would eliminate our Taxpayer Bill of Rights tax refunds with a pledge not to hike property taxes too awfully high.
That’s right, an elevator pitch, because that’s how gosh darn seriously the media considers the issue of state and local governments keeping more of our tax dollars while pretending it’s actually a tax cut.
Only they left out that part. Again.
Polis continues to be completely disingenuous in pretending that reining in wildly inflated property taxes would somehow lead to a tax revenue cut for local governments and force them to close libraries or stop watering the lawn.
Polis’s twisted logic that an inflated economy is a successful economy continues to cloud his judgement.
He thinks government should get even more of our TABOR (Taxpayer Bill of Rights tax) refunds in a successful economy.
And yet taxpayers should be the ones keeping more of the money they’re earning in an inflated economy where the price of everything is so much higher, because their take-home pay is not keeping pace with the (checks notes) inflated economy.
Polis completely avoided answering this key question posed from CPR to Michael Fields, president of Advance Colorado that is leading the lawsuit for counties across the state to fight Polis’s proposition to ultimately end TABOR tax cuts for all Coloradans while continuing to allow property taxes to rise.
Michael Fields: “Governor, in 2019, voters rejected Proposition CC, which would’ve ended TABOR tax refunds permanently. Last year, you made a big deal about sending $750 TABOR refund checks to every taxpayer. According to the nonpartisan Legislative Council, Prop HH would take as much as $10 billion in TABOR refunds over the next 10 years. So why do you support it when the legislature can fix this problem without touching TABOR at all?”
Here’s how Polis dodged answering:
Polis: Because we have such a strong economy, we have a strong surplus, which is wonderful. And, so what Prop HH does is, it cuts property tax and it uses some of the surplus to backfill. Meaning, we’re going to make sure that school budgets aren’t slashed, that fire district budgets aren’t slashed.
Not to beat a dead horse, but if localities aren’t getting a cut in property tax revenue and can increase property taxes on their own, budgets are not getting slashed.
Polis continues:
Remember the state doesn’t get those property taxes, they go to your local district. So, that’s the key thing people need to understand. If we were slashing money that came to the state, it would be easier in a sense — we just say we want less revenue, but we’re not, it’s library districts, it’s fire districts, it’s water districts, it’s school districts. So, what we’re saying is, ‘yes, we’re gonna slash the property tax rate, but we’re going to use some of the healthy surplus we have from the record strong economy to backfill some of that.’
And again we say, if government is awash in a healthy surplus of our tax dollars because of the economy government inflated, Polis needs to be backfilling our own money back to us.
Government wrecked the economy causing our taxes to skyrocket. Government should not benefit from the windfall of more of our tax money — by keeping even more of it.