With any luck, a proposal to hit Colorado workers and employers with the enormous costs of paid family leave will die on life support.

Media throughout the state reported Monday that two key sponsors of the long-awaited family leave bill – a key goal of the Democratic Party for the 2020 legislative session – might not be introduced this year. Rep. Monica Duran and Sen. Angela Williams, Democrats, yanked their support because the tortured bill did not go far enough.

Advocates of the leave act blame the looming failure on Gov. Jared Polis. We prefer to credit him for demanding moderation.

Given free rein, lead sponsors Sen. Faith Winter and Rep. Matt Gray, along with Duran and Williams, would establish a state insurance bureaucracy. It would pay for any private-sector employee to take months of leave for child care or medical issues.

Under the version they want, one could migrate to Colorado, get a part-time job and take family leave benefits almost immediately. The sponsors have made clear they oppose the most reasonable restrictions. They don’t want a six-months-on-the-job requirement to qualify for leave. They want the mandate to cover seasonal workers, such as ski instructors. They want coverage for immigrant workers. They would mandate family leave for all businesses, even mom & pop startups with two or three employees.

What they would do, if they could, is make Colorado among the more frightening environments in which to start or grow a business. Imagine hiring a whitewater rafting guide, only to lose the person to family leave a week later for the season. Unrestricted, this proposed law would create the incentive to take such a job merely to qualify for family leave benefits.

We can give thanks that Polis and enough legislators from both major parties don’t believe in mermaids and dragons. Polis supports family leave but wants a bill that makes sense. He prefers one that doesn’t make employees so expensive that it kills small businesses and reduces employment. He doesn’t want a giant new state-run insurance pool that inevitably competes with other state programs for taxpayer revenues.

Polis, a successful business entrepreneur, told sponsors he wants a bill that gives employers the option to fulfill the proposed family leave mandate through private insurance plans. He won’t sign a plan built on a fully state-run model. Family leave, he says, should start small and grow over time. Learn to fly before leaping.

“My hope is that this program will be in effect by January 2021, with the intent to responsibly expand the program over time,” Polis wrote in a letter to a “task force” formed last year to devise a family leave proposal.

Duran, Williams, Winter and others don’t like the private insurance idea. Winter said private insurers want “profits,” so it “probably costs more.” Never mind the fact private-sector agencies typically cost less than their government counterparts. That’s why governments outsource.

Extremists on each side of the political divide are seldom OK with incremental change or small victories that advance big goals over time. On the right, we see abortion opponents sabotage regulations if they fall short of immediately outlawing every conceivable abortion. With family leave, we have social justice warriors abandoning anything short an anything-goes, damn-the-consequences bill.

“The only person who has failed Colorado today is Gov. Jared Polis,” said a statement by the left-wing Colorado Working Families Party, in response to the proposal’s likely demise.

Polis should take that as a compliment. By standing for reason and moderation – by demanding a sensible bill – he might spare employers, employees and the state’s economy from going off a cliff.