When is your Tax Freedom Day?

This is the day each year (often in late April or early May) when taxpayers finally earn enough to pay all their local, state and federal taxes and begin to work for themselves and their families.

In the state Capitol, most legislators and many groups who back them believe you’re not working long enough for government. And they have a lot of very expensive ideas of how to keep your nose to the government’s grindstone.

What’s the kryptonite stopping them in their tracks?

TABOR: the 1992 state constitutional Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

TABOR limits how much of your money state government can spend. Beyond that cap, the state must refund excess dollars to taxpayers unless Coloradans agree, in a vote, to let government spend it. And they can’t raise your taxes without your permission.

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Tax spenders hate it and have worked nonstop for more than three decades to neuter, defang or kill it. But TABOR remains extremely popular among voters across the political spectrum because it is the thin green line that prevents us from taking the final, fateful step to become California East.

The past week has seen numerous proposals with big price tags, including massive environmental and energy regulatory proposals, various tax credit plans and expansions of Colorado’s welfare state — including expanded benefits for illegal immigrants — to be stymied by TABOR’s cap on available revenue to spend.

TABOR turns the spending fire hose into a garden hose.

This tension between desires and available revenue is what every family on a budget experiences monthly. Yet it causes liberals to stomp their feet and turn red with ideological rage that they do not have an unlimited supply of other people’s money with which to pursue their hobby-horse projects.

Seldom discussed is how TABOR provides a guaranteed, reasonable increase in the revenue cap each year, pegged to the growth in inflation and population. This year, TABOR provided nearly 6% in revenue growth, down just a bit from 8% last year. As conservative legislators have pointed out, many Coloradans weren’t guaranteed a 6% or 8% salary increase.

And yet, the refrain from many at the Capitol, legislators and lobbyists, is reasonable limits are straining government programs and without more money the Four Horses of the Apocalypse will surely gallop down Colfax Avenue.

They predicted Dickensian dystopia of despair before TABOR was enacted. 

It was all alarmist hogwash. And it still is.

Get ready for a rerun of this scary rhetoric for the remainder of the session and into the fall as the issue of Colorado’s property tax crisis again takes center stage.

We will once again see a huge disconnect between the Capitol and the rest of Colorado.

Tax spenders at the Capitol sincerely believe Coloradans are undertaxed — even with your 40% property tax increase. Legislators living in their liberal bubble may think so. Real people who got sticker shock in their tax bill or escrow statement likely don’t share that view.

This week, state Sen. Chris Hansen, who has become the legislature’s primary evangelist for state government with a lot more taxes and spending and a lot less citizen transparency and accountability, unveiled his latest effort to avoid lasting local property tax relief.

An energetic apologist for the dishonest, tax-raising Proposition HH that went down in flames in November, Hansen is back with a proposal that does a lot of things — except provide you with permanent property tax relief or put a solid cap on local government revenue.

A key goal of the bill is to take a chunk of your TABOR refund and apply it to backfilling lost local government revenue. So, just like with Prop HH, you pull a Benjamin out of your right pocket and put it in your left pocket, and Chris Hansen wants you to think you just got $100 in tax relief.

As Michael Fields of Advance Colorado (a group I advise) said: It doesn’t take an 83-page bill to fix the problem. Roll back taxes, cap revenue and reasonably address the effects on local revenues. Ballot measures to do just that are in the works.

This is the divide. Should government have more power to raise your taxes to spend with abandon, or should the people who fund government be able to put a reasonable brake on taxing and spending?

Get ready for a rough-and-tumble fight on this exact question all the way to November.

Sean Duffy, a former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Bill Owens, is a communications and media relations strategist and ghostwriter based in the Denver area.