My recreational reading this past week, while sheltering at home, has been a book entitled Too Much Magic, borrowed through the Ruby Sisson Memorial Library inter-library loan program. The full title of the book, by political analyst James Howard Kunstler, is Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation. Mr. Kunstler wrote the book in the midst of the Great Recession, and it paints an understandably dark picture of America’s economic prospects during the second decade of the 21st century… a decade that turned out a bit more sunny than might have been expected in 2011… at least until the arrival of the coronavirus.
The middle section of the book describes the massive fraud perpetrated on the American public by numerous corporations in the financial industry, leading up to an economic meltdown that began in 2007 and became a painful part of nearly everyone’s life. Mr. Kunstler then highlights the billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded bailouts provided to criminal investment bankers, insurance companies, and mortgage lenders by Congress and the Obama administration.
A story of prodigious greed, deceit and corruption to match any in recent American history.
By way of contrast, I am thinking about the passage, on November 3, of Amendment B by the Colorado voters, by a margin of 57% to 43%. The approval of this measure repealed a section of the 1982 Gallagher amendment, which has, over the past 38 years, steadily reduced the portion of total state property taxes contributed by each residential property in Colorado.
There were certainly arguments on both sides of the issue (as demonstrated, perhaps, by the 43% who voted ‘No’). The residential property tax rate was projected to drop from 7.15% to less than 6%, if Amendment B had not been approved, and the owners of residential property — homeowners, landlords, purveyors of vacation rentals — would have seen a significant reduction in property taxes owed, compared to what they will now owe in 2022 and onward as a result of the repeal.
In a September Denver Post op-ed written by the chief architect of the original 1982 amendment, Dennis Gallagher, we read the following warning about Amendment B:
According to the Colorado property tax administrator, residential property tax owners will pay an additional $203,781,937 in property tax increases in the first year after repeal. Over five years we will pay an astronomical increase of $1.02 billion…
Perhaps the voters did not read Dennis Gallagher’s op-ed. But I prefer to think that most Coloradans truly want to support certain government services such as schools, fire departments, hospitals, road and bridge departments, libraries, and so on. I prefer to think that most Coloradans are nothing like the greedy, deceitful, corrupt investment bankers and financial industry criminals who brought about the Great Recession.
However that may be, it appears that we property owners might be contributing, in the first year, about $204 million more to state and local governments than we would have contributed if Amendment B had failed. On a per capita basis, that would come to about $36 per person, or $144 for a family of four. (I have not fact-checked Mr. Gallagher’s numbers.)
Which brings us to Governor Jared Polis’ preliminary budget for the 2021-2022 fiscal year. Governor Polis has proposed a budget of $35.4 billion, an increase of about $3 billion over this year’s budget. The preliminary plan restores funding to school district, colleges, universities and college financial aid programs that were cut due to the COVID crisis. Last June, facing a projected $3.3 billion revenue shortfall, lawmakers cut K-12 and higher education by more than $1 billion.
“The most important investment that we all make as a state, and that we make in our future, is in our children and is in education,” Polis said during his budget announcement.
Apparently, he is assuming that the health crisis will be less serious by next July? That seems a somewhat daring assumption — at the moment, as we watch coronavirus cases increasing in almost every county in Colorado.
From a November 2 analysis of the budget by reporter Jason Gonzales on the Chalkbeat Colorado website:
Related to education, the governor wants to:
- Restore statewide per-pupil funding, increasing funding by $902 per pupil. It would also return the budget stabilization factor — the amount that legislators hold back from what the state constitution mandates for education — to last fiscal year’s level of $572 million. That is a historic low in percentage terms, according to Polis’ office. Since the Great Recession, Colorado lawmakers have withheld more than $8 billion due to schools.
- Maintain $215.6 million in state financial aid that can be tapped by Colorado students.
- Restore cuts amounting to 58% of state funds for the operating budgets of public higher education institutions — $852 million. Polis is proposing to cap tuition increases at 3%.
- Protect key initiatives that include free full-day kindergarten, the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program, and the Colorado Preschool Program. The child care and free preschool program subsidize learning and care for children of low-income families.
- The budget would also provide $50 million to support child care providers.
On the evening of Election Day, we received an email from the Colorado Education Association (CEA) that read, in part:
While we await the results of many of Colorado’s ballot measures, Colorado voters agreed that it was time to repeal the Gallagher Amendment. As a result, nearly a quarter of a billion dollars will remain in Colorado public schools next year; funding desperately needed in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic and more than a decade of K-12 budget deficits…
We are happy that voters chose families over corporate interests with the passing of [family and medical leave measure] Proposition 118. Many of our members and their students’ families now won’t have to choose between caring for their families and their job…
Too many of our local school districts are forced to go to voters each year to make up for budget shortfalls. With many districts still struggling to recover from the Great Recession and now suffering the impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic, we know that we need to come together as a state to find creative and sustainable ways to improve public education funding. When we come together, we make the way for a better future for all Coloradans.