05-1-25 *INTERVIEW* DJ Summers of the Common Sense Institute Talking TABOR

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You may recall I mentioned one or two or three
times that I have the privilege of being this year's
Mike A. Loprino Free Enterprise Fellow at the Common Sense Institute.
I know that's a mouthful. The Common Sense Institute is
a great research and public policy analysis organization, nonpartisan organization,

(00:20):
right here in Colorado. They've done so much great work
for a year after year, and I was just very
very honored to be asked to be involved. And today
is the release of the first report that I'm involved with.
Joining us to talk about it, DJ Summers, DJ as
director of Communications and Research Operations at the Common Sense Institute.

(00:42):
Welcome back. You were here just a couple of weeks Agoach.
Good to see you.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
It's great to see you, and it's great to be
here discussing these findings. I mean, this is this is
what it's all about. We're bringing heads together who want
to talk about the data, who want to talk about
how it's impacting our public discourse, our public lives. So
this could not be a better outcome for us.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Well, so tell people what our first report together is about.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Well, this report is just kind of in response to
where the public conversation is right now around Tabor. You know,
the Colorado legislature has started talking again about maybe mounting
a legal challenge against TABOR. So we felt that it
would be a really good input to the public discourse
for the service of Colorado's to talk about what TABOR is,

(01:28):
what it does, how it's impacted the economy, how it's
impacted lives in Colorado, what it's contributed to in terms
of state spending and our state's economy. And I mean,
this was something that we really vibed on with you
because it's been a topic of conversation for you for
a long time. So it kind of just checked a

(01:50):
lot of boxes together and felt like it would be
a good report. It would be a good addition to
what we're talking about at the state level right now.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
So I have posted this on my blog today at
Rosskiminsky dot com. If you just scroll down a little
bit to this section that says today's guest, and you'll
see DJ's name, and just a couple lines down it says,
you know, here's my first report, and there's the link,
and it's called the Legislative Assault on Tabor. How Colorado
lawmakers are rewriting the rules and this was very important

(02:22):
to me because part of what makes Colorado special is
the fact that we have the taxpayer Bill of Rights
that limits the ability of the government to grow. And
you know, you can read the report and you probably
know a lot of the mechanics of it, but I'm
talking about the philosophy of it, especially when you have

(02:42):
a state that is completely controlled by a party that
always wants to grow government as much as it can.
And I believe that a massive growth of government reduces
both freedom and prosperity. And so I think that Tabor
tends to maxim to the extent that you can freedom
and prosperity. And this report is about what the legislature

(03:07):
essentially democrats in this case, although if Republicans were doing it,
we'd call them out too. Are are changing the rules
to attack that? You encapsulated it pretty well.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
I mean, we could flip the script here and let
me prompt a little bit, because this is your report.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
Man, So while do you want to go through some numbers?
Some numbers too, So let me ask you one and
then we'll do that. Let's go back. So yeah, so
in this report, some of the fabulous researchers at CSI
have put together some numbers about the economic benefits of TABOR,
of having these limits on spending and in particular of

(03:44):
the refunds that come back to taxpayer. So just tell
us a little bit about the quantitative findings and then
we'll do what you just said for a couple of minutes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Absolutely, I mean the quantitative findings that we were able
to generate here were really substantial. Through twenty twenty five.
Just in the last four years, the economic benefit of
TABOR surpluses has been up to twenty six thousand new jobs,
two point nine billion of GDP, and two point five

(04:16):
billion in personal income. So when we're talking about TABOR,
we're talking about that distribution of refunds, We're talking about
that cap on revenue. We are talking about something that
has potentially generated massive amounts billions of dollars both in
personal spending and in state economic activity. That is what

(04:39):
the what the gist of it is here. That's the big,
the big impact statewide.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
I'll add one more thing and then you can ask
me a question. We've got about We've got about three minutes.
So one of the things you'll see in this in
the report, there's a chart that shows the revenue and
the surplus, and the surplus is the amount that we
get back. A lot of the rest of the report
goes on to talk about why our surpluses are going
to be less, why you're going to get less money back,

(05:08):
And it's because there have been so so many pieces
of legislation passed by Democrats or referred by Democrats to
the ballot and then passed by voters that have the
effect of redirecting those tabor surpluses to their pet programs. So,
for example, next year, there may be little or no

(05:29):
tabor surplus where there might have been if all these
laws hadn't been passed. All right, we got a couple minutes,
So why don't you do what you want to do?

Speaker 2 (05:36):
I think one of the big portions of this conversation
just revolves around Tabor itself, that guard rail, and what
would happen if that guardrail didn't exist. What exactly is
in our report to give some sense of that if
Tabor had not been in play, what would have happened?

Speaker 1 (05:59):
Right, again, your researchers have done this hard work. After
we all sat down and talked about what do we
need to focus on here? And you can actually go
through and look at the changes on a year by
year basis and the overall aggregate changes of how much
money would have ended up being spent slash wasted by

(06:23):
government in ways that tend not to generate private sector jobs.
And I don't need to explain to this audience the
benefit of private sector spending versus government spending. So essentially
we're talking about billions of dollars that would have filtered
through government's grubby little hands and gone to you know,
projects where you know, what government does, rather than getting

(06:46):
refunded back to taxpayers to buy what they want to
buy and generate and generate private sector jobs. And you
mentioned some of the numbers before, and I won't go
through a lot of numbers right now, but qualitatively that
that's the idea, that's exact exactly the idea. I mean,
if this had been repealed before twenty twenty one, it
would have meant I mean, almost ten dollars more in

(07:12):
state government spending since then. So when you talk about
TABOR potentially being an effective guardrail against the growth of
government spending, that is true.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
Now. At the same time, there's been a lot of
movement to try to circumvent some of that. You know,
we are in a budget crunch, and state legislators, as
you mentioned, are looking for more dollars to spend, and
there's been a lot of increase in those kinds of movements,
those kinds of things that reclassify exempt tabor spending or

(07:47):
they'll take it, put it into tax credits, redistribute it
like that. So there's there's a lot of working around
tabor that does exist even right now.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
I'll just make one other comment and then, you know,
I ask people to read the report and maybe we'll
get you back at some point, you know, in another
week or two and go throw it in some more details.
But I just want to make one other point. You know.
We the report talks about roughly ten billion dollars that
would have been spent slash wasted by government rather than
going back to the people who paid too much in tax.
But that ten billion dollar number massively understates the actual

(08:21):
benefit of tabor in this sense. In twenty twenty two,
for example, there was a tabor surplus of three point
seven billion dollars. If that money had been allowed to
be spent by government, that would have become the new
baseline for the amount of money that government would spend.
And so what the tabor surplus, what the taber mechanism

(08:42):
does not just give us back where we, you know,
paid too much in tax but the restraint in the
in the cost of government is it's very difficult to describe,
and you just got to go look at these charts,
but if you imagine that three point seven billion dollars
would have been think about what's going on with the
federal government. I got to do this quickly because we're

(09:03):
running out of time here, but think about what's going
on with the federal government. We had all of this
crazy spending for COVID that in people's minds was one
time spending, but in fact, the actual amount of federal
government spending has never come back down below that, and
so it became the new baseline, and it's massively blowing

(09:24):
up the federal budget and the federal deficit and our
national debt. And what TABOR does for us is to
prevent that kind of thing from the higher amount of
taxes that they collected when they overtaxed us becoming the
new baseline. And this is what democrats are trying to destroy.
I'll give you the last word.

Speaker 2 (09:39):
I think that's one of the things that we were
able to find here is that in the last couple
of years, TABER has been a really, really big part
of the conversation, specifically because we had one time federal
spending that just poured into the state coffers, and one
of the things that happened is that state leaders ended

(10:00):
up putting a lot of that to ongoing expenses. They've
expended on one time expenses, they set up ongoing expenses.
So when you talk about expanding the baseline to a
very real degree, that did happen here in the state
of Colorado too.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
Folks go to Commonsense Institute US dot org, or just
look up common Sense Institute and you'll find the link,
Or go to my blog at Rosskominsky dot com and
the link is right in there. My report is called
the Legislative Assault on Tabor, How Colorado lawmakers are rewriting
the rules. Read it, share it, or with it with

(10:34):
everybody you know who lives and votes in Colorado. DJ Summers,
thanks so much for joining us. Again, thanks a million
for having me.

Speaker 2 (10:41):
This is great