Chris Hansen is crimson with rage — but it’s not clear whether it’s from embarrassment or frustration. 

It’s been a rough year for the Denver Democratic state senator, whose marquee proposals for a more-expensive, higher-taxing, less-accountable government were continually rejected, including by a lot of Democrats. 

Consider the recent history.   

Hansen was one of the primary advocates of the deeply dishonest Proposition HH, which invited you to pay for your own tax cut. Take your TABOR refund out of your left pocket and plunk it in your right pocket and you were supposed to believe you had more money. Once voters saw HH in the daylight, they crushed it. 

Lacking introspection in the wake of a massive defeat, Sen. Hansen this year decided to target one of Colorado’s lingering evils: Coloradans renting out a spare condo or a room for short-term rentals. 

Sen. Hansen’s bill would have quadrupled the taxes on these properties, and part of the sales pitch was property owners would, like lemmings, pony up higher taxes generating millions in new revenue for local government. 

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But in the real world, property owners said they would cut their available room nights below the tax threshold or just sell their property. Either way, government gets zero and Colorado families lose a way to build some extra income. 

Once this bit of fiscal malpractice was subject to intense public scrutiny, Sen. Hansen’s own party did him a favor and killed the bill.

The more public attention his ideas get, the worse they do.

So it’s easy to understand why he was so fond of a secret system that allowed legislators to rank spending bills, helping leadership separate good from bad without forcing members to opine, much less vote, in public. Advance Colorado (which I advise) sued, and the system got tossed by a judge. 

A guy can’t get a break.

First a wave of voters, including a lot of Democrats, shot him down. Then his own Democrat colleagues. Then a judge in Colorado’s liberal court system.   

This spring, Tax-Hiking Hansen chaired the state tax commission, which explored many solutions — except a simple one to permanently solve the property tax crisis. The commission’s final recommendations were predictably fiscally flaccid.  

It took Republicans to firm things up by bringing a taxpayer perspective to the table. The bill, which is far better than anything Sen. Hansen would have introduced on his own, is at best a first step toward the permanent solution the state really needs. 

Despite the senator trying to — finally — declare victory on something, anything, Sen. Hansen’s bill was exposed by mainstream media analysts as fiscal Swiss cheese. 

That darn public scrutiny — call it Hansen’s kryptonite. 

Looming over the discussions was Advance Colorado’s Citizens’ Tax Cut that would cut property taxes and then cap future increases, guaranteeing local government a 4% annual revenue increase. It has a very good chance of passing.

This latest debacle made Hansen very mad. Like a four-year-old who is told no, Sen. Hansen pitched a full-diaper tirade, just flinging whatever he could against the wall.

In a rant to a liberal advocacy news organization, Sen. Hansen said both Advance Colorado and Colorado Concern — the groups behind the cut-and-cap plan — reneged on a deal to support his plan. False — there was no deal.

Then he went off the rails to say if the Citizens’ Tax Cut passes, state and local government will basically cease to exist, right down to sewers failing. They said the same thing when TABOR was being considered, and you can still flush your toilet. 

Finally, he said people backing real tax relief “don’t send their kids to public schools.” Whoops — wrong. 

The guy is a full-employment act for fact checkers. 

Sen. Hansen’s problem isn’t his ideology, which is basic tax-and-spend liberalism. His problem is the isolation of elitism where people believe their ideas were divinely carved on clay tablets on a mountain top. And when real people scrutinize elitists’ ideas and show them up as damaging, unworkable, shambolic or simply silly, they get mean. Lies cascade down like acid rain. 

Anyone as ineffective and out of touch as Sen. Hansen should be mad. But instead of pointing fingers at others, he should point thumbs — right back at himself.

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.