Multiple sources are telling the Peak that the confluence of a tax-hostile political environment, Senator Rollie Heath's bumbling political roll out, and concerns over huge new job losses in an already fragile Colorado recovery have all but doomed Heath's $3 billion tax hike plan slated for the ballot this November.

Two sources in particular say amplified chatter recently makes them more and more confident that the measure may not even make the ballot at all. If it does, all of our sources say that there is no financial commitment from any of the major financial players on the Left that would be needed to get an unpopular measure like Heath's passed.

Said one Peak source, "I guess they don't have a rebuttal to 119,000 lost jobs."

This news is a remarkable turn of events for Colorado's anti-TABOR conspirators, who earlier this year seemed hell bent on going to the ballot for a new revenue fix in the wake of education cuts meted out by Governor Hickenlooper and Speaker Frank McNulty.

Led by Liberal Loon Carol Hedges, Colorado's left-wing non-profit under-world was chomping at the bit for tax increases for months.

But ultimately, Hedges' push succumbed to a competing tax increase written by Boulder Senator Rollie Heath, which is now having its own near death experience.

If Heath's measure does in fact die in the way that we are hearing, all tax increasers in the future will be compelled to remember not to kidnap children during a press conference for an initiative billed as being "for the children."

Even more critically, Colorado's left would do well to remember that killing 119,000 jobs in the middle of a recession is a message point so damning and so powerful that apparently it can defeat an initiative before the fight even really begins.  As our source suggests, a rebutal for these unemployment numbers probably ought to be the first order of business for the (inevitable) effort to raise taxes next year.

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