By Jesse Russell

[Johnson]: TABOR has failed to strengthen Colorado’s economy.
That was Nicholas Johnson with the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities concerning the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. Various versions of a Colorado amendment dubbed TABOR are being considered across the country this year. Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Oregon join eight other states in looking at legislation modeled after Colorado’s limit to state taxes and expenditures. A new report from the Center on Budget Policy Priorities suggests that Colorado’s rapid economic performance in recent years was not due to the TABOR. In fact, the residents of Colorado voted to suspend the law after the quality of public services began to decline. Therese McGuire, a coauthor of the report said their study shows that what really drove the state’s economy was the highly educated workforce and investment in information technologies - resulting from investments made in the 1940s.

[McGuire]: What this means is that any short term gain that is correlated with the passage of TABOR in the first five years after TABOR is completely wiped out in the long term. So we conclude that TABOR has not had a positive effect on Colorado’s economy.