Rossputin.com: Rational Thinking About Our World

I'm pleased to announce that this is my first posting in the Denver Post's "Gang of Four" blog, which resides in their Politics West section. You can read the blog, which includes me, John Andrews (conservative Republican), Nancy Watzman (who appears to be a liberal), and David Sirota (who appears to be a socialist and whom I particularly looking forward to debating and debunking). The Gang of Four blog can be found at:
http://www.politicswest.com/blogs/gang_of_four

In Saturday’s Denver Post, Bob Ewegen makes many of the same standard liberal arguments against “TABOR reform”, by which he actually means “removing substantial restrictions on the growth of taxes and government”, that we’ve heard before from those who want to dig their hands even deeper into our pockets.

There are so many flaws with the original pro-Ref C argument, but since the issue is rearing its ugly head again, let’s tackle a couple old ones and add a couple new ones.

First, some of the same old problems:

Liberals argue, using Ewegen’s words, that “real growth is the reason mankind no longer lives in caves”. We are supposed to infer from that statement that the words “of government” should be present just after the word “growth”. But if growth of government were beneficial to improvements in the human condition, the situation for the average person in India and China…and even in “civilized” Europe...should have improved faster than ours has. Instead, it’s the places with the most economic freedom, including the US, Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, where people make the biggest gains in standard of living, essentially each and every generation.

Tax raisers argue that they’ll use the money for very particular projects, usually roads and schools. But what ends up happening is that they funnel the money into new government projects, adding only a fraction of what they promised to the areas which voters expected to get the lion’s share of their confiscated earnings when they reluctantly approved the tax increase. Then, because the money went to new projects and the old problems were largely neglected, the politicians and their big-government supporters in unions and the media come back to us saying “If we don’t take even more of your money, the roads will crumble under you and your kids won’t get any school lunches.” It’s a tired old story and people should stop falling for it.

A couple of relatively new issues:

Ewegen argues that TABOR hits Colorado government especially hard now because of inflation, so that the state needs to take more of our money to keep doing whatever it is that they plan to spend our money on. However, this ignores the fact that individual citizens are also facing at least the same inflation problem as the government is. We’ve all seen the price of gas, of a loaf of bread, of a gallon of milk, rise at the fastest rate in decades. But how many of us are seeing our incomes rise to keep pace? I dare say just about none of us. So, we are all making choices about what things we should cut back on in order to make ends meet within our family budgets. Cut back on the vacation in order to afford food. Cut back on milk in order to afford school.

The tax-raisers argument is that we should all have to cut back even more on everything so that politicians don’t have to make the same hard choices we do. You and I should eat less, drive less, and enjoy our lives less so that the State government does not have to cut back on handouts to unions, trial lawyers, and “the children” (the default beneficiary of government spending because, apparently, people just aren't fit to be their own kids' parents). The Senate’s budget increased the state’s personnel head count by 1,334 jobs…just at a time when many private companies have to downsize because of a slowing economy. I don’t know about you, but I’m not interested in feeding the ravenous and never-satisfied desires of government to buy votes with my money, and particularly not during a time when I am being financially squeezed from every direction.

Ewegen argues that TABOR causes the government to shrink as a percentage of the state economy…as if that’s a bad thing. One of the key aspects to success of a large corporation is the idea of economies of scale. As a company gets larger, they can increase their output of a product (at least up to some point) at a lower cost per product. For example, Dell can make computers much cheaper than I could if I tried to do so because they have 1) much more efficient processes in place for assembly, 2) the ability to buy the CPUs, disk drives, and memory at much lower prices than I do because they buy so much at one time, and 3) over time they’ve learned the key dos and don’ts that keep them from making costly errors that I might make. The idea that government should stay the same size, as a percentage of the economy, implies that the government can never get any economies of scale. We should require our government to get more efficient, and in particular to use more competition in bidding for jobs, large and small, so that taxpayers are not constantly held hostage to the unions who, unfortunately for the rest of us, own our state’s Democratic Party.

It implies, for example, that the bloated of bureaucracy of our public education system has to grow as rapidly as the number of students. And I’m not talking about teachers, but rather about the levels of management bureaucracy which the Colorado Education is so anxious to protect even though all evidence shows that spending more money on public education doesn’t improve outcomes…precisely because the unions do not want to realize economies of scale! It implies, for example, that the cost of public transportation can’t gain from scale…that if we spend $100/person to build the system initially, we need to continue to spend $100 plus inflation adjustments for each person…even though the tracks and infrastructure are already built. No, Mr. Ewegen, your suggestion that government should not shrink as a percentage of a growing economy is exactly wrong. A reduction in the relative size of government as the state gets more prosperous is exactly what we would expect if you replaced “government” with “management” and replaced “the state” with “a business”, and it’s exactly what we should demand, rather than let liberal politicians suck us dry with scare tactics.

And finally (for today), I’d point out that we’ve heard all this before. Supporters of Referendum C told us that it would take care of our problems, that we would see the good things which happened because we sacrificed our financial well-being to feed the gaping mouth of the state. And now, not even two years later, they’re already telling us that it’s not enough. You know the old saying about "Fool me once..." (not that they fooled me the first time.) It’s time to tell the money-grabbers to take a hike. It’s time to just say no to another huge tax hike. And it’s time to elect a majority in state government who will actually practice some fiscal responsibility.