Like a broken record stuck playing one of the greatest flaws in this great state ad nauseam, voters will likely be asked again to tax themselves to fund Colorado schools.

The education news outlet Chalkbeat reported this week that a group of advocates for increased school funding cleared the first hurdle in getting a tax increase on the ballot in November. Nic Garcia reported that any of eight measures that are being proposed would adjust Colorado’s flat income tax into a graduated income tax (taxing wealthier individuals more) to raise somewhere between $1.4 billion and $1.7 billion more for Colorado schools every year.

The ballot questions are similar in size and approach to Amendment 66, which the state’s voters resoundingly defeated in 2013. More than $10 million was spent lobbying voters to approve the tax, yet it still failed. Supporters of this new measure must be gluttons for punishment.

This constant noise from school funding advocates would be annoying if the need wasn’t so acute.

By some accounts, Colorado schools are underfunded by more than $800 million, a deficit known as the negative factor and calculated based on how much less the state has spent on schools than was mandated by the voter-approved Amendment 23. But that number is somewhat arbitrary (as is the formula capping state spending, as determined by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights).

Read more at denverpost.com