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In Colorado, conservative Republicanism has devolved into acceptance of the Big Government mentality and an acquiescence to a spirit of dependency. The GOP has become everything it once opposed and in that spirit, Colorado's Republican Governor Bill Owens and the state's business community led the way to scuttling fiscal restraints. The Democrats were all for it of course but when you have Republicans behind a tax hike, its a watershed moment. Its a whole new era and both parties are pushing along to socialism in the Mountain West. The appeal of the rugged individual Westerner is now dated by recent events.

("Denny Crane: Gun Control? For Communists. She's a liberal. Can't hunt.")

Colorado has major financial problems. And while all the usual rhetoric about cutting spending sounds nice, there are some things that just need to be done by the gov't. I realize that FR is dominated by radical libertarians who hate government in all forms and taxes are regarded as the incarnation of evil in the modern world, but there was no way to bring Colorado's budget in line without either draconian cuts in services or raising taxes. I am an old fashioned Republican who believes that "debt" is a four letter word. No variation on the word "tax" comes out to four letters. This is a major reason I am appalled at the Republican Congress and the the current administration for their fiscal policies. They are creating a huge mess that they will be content to leave for the next president to clean up. This is the most non-conservative administration in a hundred years when it comes to spending and budgets. I love W's foreign policy. But I am horrified by his domestic policies.

What has happened in Colorado is what has happened everywhere else at some point. More of the GOP hierarchy has simply been foolish enough to go along this time.

The process in a nutshell:
A) The government is well run with a low tax bite.
B) Big companies move there to take advantage thereof.
C) Big companies bring employees from other states that have big tax bites and commensurately larger government services.
D) Big companies become entrenched; their transient employees become entrenched and discuss with locals the things they missed about government services back home.
E) Government expands its tax bite and its "services" to i. protect the businesses that are entrenched and ii. respond to the transients and the fools that never ask the new residents WHY they LEFT such a government paradise in the first place.
F) Big companies begin search for a state like that in A, repeat process.

The only solution to the problem is to do what the Founders did, make it nigh impossible to grow government without a supermajority--except in the federal system, the Founders missed that a sonofabitch named Marshall could expand the power of the judiciary beyond all recognition of its intended power, which was probably to have been little more than that of the power of the British system. At least, I have yet to see any document from the FF that demonstrates the actual intention of the Founders was to empower justices with the ability to rewrite the Constitution.

Perhaps the only changes I would have made, were I in the shoes of those Founders, would have been to include a clause that explicitly limited the growth of government by requiring that all tax increases be approved by 100% of the states in order for it to be binding upon them, as the Constitution had to be. And of course, I'd have included a clause that more explicitly allowed states to leave the Union, since so many evidently thought it was Constitutionally appropriate to compel the "consent" of the governed in the South in forcing them to rejoin the Union.

To avert the Colorado problem, the first TABOR should have forced a Constitutional supermajority for its own REMOVAL. Colorado is doomed for some lean years. Californication sucks.