I’ve always felt lucky that I made the blind decision to live seven blocks into Jefferson County, west of the Denver city limits. when I signed a mortgage on my home 19 years ago. 

I’ve felt luckier each time Denver passed another tax hike, followed by another and then another.

If you want tax money provided willfully, if not eagerly, by voters, then the Mile High City is the right place. 

In the past decade, Denver voters have approved nine tax requests — as in every single one of them — by an average margin of 65% to 35%.

If not a new tax or fee, you can always count on Denver to take out a loan, which the same taxpayers will be on the hook to cover someday. The latter comes later with interest.

In 2017, city and county voters approved seven bond requests worth an aggregate $937 million. Toss in another $30 million in interest by the time that’s paid back. The interest alone is enough to cover the Broncos linebacker Von Miller’s salary this season and almost have enough left to cover Bradley Chubb, too. 

The rare proposal to lower taxes in Denver is on the ballot this year. Initiated Ordinance 304 would lower the city’s sales levy from 4.8% below a cap of 4.5%. Based on what I’ve seen in two decades of watching, I don’t give it a puncher’s chance in ever-more-liberal Denver.

Good luck with that.

I wonder sometimes if the free spenders in the city eventually move out to the suburbs and become fiscal conservatives after they add up all the taxes they’re paying.

One way or another, the tax man is fleecing about half my income, if you throw in things like the $800 car tag larded up with hidden fees, each passed with good intentions. In other words, every day I work for Colorado Politics is followed by a day I work for the government. 

Don’t even look at your cable, internet or telephone bills, fat with fees that equate to the government taking more nibbles off the apple you worked hard to pick.

Maybe I’m the only one tired of paying and paying and paying. That’s not the prevailing mood in Denver.

Yet, other than Utah, Colorado has the lowest average for combined state and local sales taxes, 7.72%, according to the Tax Foundation. The average city sales tax across our state is 4.82%.

Colorado comes in third in the country for the highest average local sales tax. Denver clocks in at 8.81%. In good ol’ thriving Edgewater, it’s 3.5%.

Before you get all partisan and start flinging around a-ha’s about liberals and spending, keep in mind conservative Colorado Springs comes in at 8.2%. Four of the five highest taxed states are in the deep red South: Tennessee, 9.55%; Louisiana: 9.52%; Arkansas: 9.51%; and Alabama: 9.22%, which came in a shade behind No. 4 Washington state.

But while my financial system is bleeding cash, let me tell you who is not hurting for it: the political industry, the spin factory that drives ballot initiatives. There’s a whole financial and political ecosystem built around collect and spending big bucks to rile up the hoi polloi. 

One of the realities of doing what I do for as long as I have is seeing the things I thought were great ideas prove to be bad ideas.

Initiative and referendum was the rage when I was coming up in the business in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Direct democracy, how can you beat that? One man, one vote, nobody saying the election was stolen — a political gunfight at high noon in the fiscal town square, may the best idea or quickest draw win.

What’s really happened is a special-interest and sore loser holiday, a nonstop series of ballots so larded with hidden agendas and half-baked ideas, voters get too confused, tired or jaded to think out their choices or even listen to the arguments. That counts double when the ballot question reads like the instructions to repair a television.

I can’t say much about that. When I don’t know anything about any of the local candidates for judge, constable or regent, I pick the name I like best. People make political decisions based on worse.

Another byproduct of whiz-band democracy is recall elections. State and local leaders who try to make a difference or an unpopular decision can count on sweating out a recall campaign to oust them from office.

Sometimes a recall is warranted, most times it’s not and proves to be a waste of time and tax dollars to finance somebody else’s hissy fit.

Oh, on the laundry list of things piled on the back of the weary taxpayer: ponying up for elections.

There will never be a cap on proponents of good causes who will assure you that you are taxed too much or aren’t taxed enough — not by them, anyway. 

Statewide, low-tax conservatives have a friend in the frugal voter. In Denver, the progressive spenders have a layup. That’s how democracy is sometimes.

For me and my tax dollar, we’re just fine in Jeffco. We’ll come visit the nice things Denverites are kind enough to pay for.