In 2015, Susan Ricks hit the jackpot – literally. After winning $250,000 from the Illinois Lottery, Susan planned on cutting back on her seven-day-a-week work schedule, fixing up her house, and visiting her daughter in Minnesota. That was until the state of Illinois sent her an IOU instead of her winnings. Why? Because the state was in financial trouble and couldn’t afford to pay its bills.

Whether you play the lottery or not, here’s something that you won’t want to gamble on. Colorado voters will likely face what we are calling the “Frightening Four” on their November ballots. If passed, these four potential ballot issues would devastate our economy and put us in a position far worse than Illinois.

The Frightening Four would increase our taxes to pay for government-run healthcare, bail out Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, steal our property rights and decrease opportunity for low-wage workers. Yes, “frightening” might be an understatement.

These ballot issues are spearheaded by the most egregious of them all – Amendment 69. So called “ColoradoCare” is a single-payer, VA-style health care system that would raise taxes by an initial $25 billion. The 10-percent tax increase would give Colorado the highest state income tax in the country and would help drive businesses out of the state. Though proponents want you to believe that ColoradoCare is the answer to the failures of Obamacare, it is actually just doubling down on it. ColoradoCare would lead to lower quality care, long lines, and rationed care.

The second frightening ballot issue would gut our Taxpayer Bill of Rights in order to bail out Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Currently, if government grows more than inflation plus population growth, we get refunds. A group called Building a Better Colorado wants the state government to keep these refunds instead. With 25 percent of Colorado’s population on Medicaid, our state’s spending health care is ballooning. This ballot initiative would simply be used to bailout this growth in healthcare spending at the continued expense of our roads and schools. Instead of raising our taxes, our elected officials should reprioritize the money that they already have.

But that’s not all. For the third “frightening” ballot measure, environmental activists are pushing to infringe on our property rights and virtually ban fracking in Colorado. Whether this ends up being a ballot issue about “setbacks” or “local control” or both, it would be a massive blow to our state’s economy. Studies have shown that banning fracking would cost the state billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs. We also know that fracking has been going on in Colorado for over 40 years, and it’s safe. Just ask Gov. John Hickenlooper, who drank fracking fluid and is alive to tell the story.

Lastly, there is a ballot issue to greatly increase minimum wage. This is unfortunate because it would only serve to price people out of the economy that need jobs the most. A recent study by the Common Sense Policy Roundtable found that raising the minimum wage would cost Colorado 90,000 jobs. Instead of trying to create artificial wage floors, we should focus on promoting economic policies that grow the economy and lead to more good paying jobs.

Colorado cannot afford to go down the path of more taxes, less jobs, and bigger government. Over the next several months, our organization will use our large grassroots infrastructure to help educate voters about these terrible proposals. We will also be asking elected officials to weigh in on these ballot issues so that citizens know where they stand.

So come November, vote against the Frightening Four. They are simply too extreme for Colorado.