Perhaps Ol' Grover would be happier if he moved.

Feudal France, circa 1300, would fill the bill. . .

California and Colorado are poster-states for why putting caps on taxation doesn't work. Colorado got rid of their problem, but California is still crippled, and essentially bankrupt, because of theirs.

TABOR sounds a lot like California's Prop 13 with a fresh coat of paint.

Tim Eyman who ran the campaign in Washington State runs some sort of anti-tax initiative every year. He really doesn't care if it passes. He gets paid handsome fees anyway. Indeed it's better for him if the initiative gets shot down angering his supporters and allowing him to come back with a new initiative the next cycle and make even more money.

A few years back when he started this scam he was caught out lying tio his supporters about how much money he was scaring off. He did the required mea culpa and returned to profiting off his supporters. He's had a couple small successes that have hurt the state but nothing on the scale of the disaster this the passing of this initiative would have been for the state.

"Tenet" not "tenant" in the article. That copyeditor needs to be sacked.

TABOR in Colorado has not been repealed and continues to wreak havoc with the Colorado state budget.

True, some municipalities, school districts, and special districts have voted to de-Taborize.

Ballot measures are being considered for 2o10, I believe, to deal with the mess.

Douglas Bruce, the government-hater who put Tabor on the ballot years ago, is coming back too with several more initiatives to cripple the State government's revenue stream.

The effects of TABOR are still alive and well in Colorado. In Tuesday's elections, numerous cities and special districts had referenda attempting to "de-Bruce" (an expression in "honor" of Norquist accolyte and general wingnut Douglas Bruce)the taxing strictures imposed by TABOR. TABOR ratchets down tax revenues to the lowest point possible and does not allow governments to keep excess taxes when the economy picks up again. It's the whole shrinking essential public services to the point where they can be drowned in the bathtub strategy. Apparently creating a society with public services at the level of Haiti's is the goal.

As noted, California is probably the poster child for how destructive this impulse is.

The no-government conservative delusion that you can kill the beast of government by starving it of revenue has done nothing to reduce the size of government and just increased overall state and national government debt.

This mix-up of "tenant" and "tenet" has been creeping into a lot of blogs lately. A tenant is someone who pays you rent; what the quoted passage refers to is not a tenant, but a tenet.

As said by petorado and John Thullen, TABOR is still in Colorado. I continue to hope that Douglas Bruce's behavior in the Colorado State House (no, not the "Big House" unfortunately) may have revealed his hatefulness/craziness to the state at large and may help prevent any further damage or acceptance of further TABOR style iniatives or of him and Grover Norquist.

Taxpayer's do have rights, actually. One is not to pay more for their earned income than speculators do for trading. Another very IMHO is not to subsidize other people's children (beyond the direct services such as school) with e.g. child tax credits for families up to around 100k. We are subsidizing not only school - that's fine - but direct payments to people in families earning more that most of us.

Seriously, don't mock "the concept." Instead, turn TP rights to our advantage where possible.

If it were possible to recruit a Shaker community as the magical administrator , you may have a chance to see a decline in school spending issues , and others related to sundries .
The spirit of Tolstoy is alive and well , if grossly misinterpreted .
The trouble with magical thinking is with the thinkers , not the magic .

You beat me to it, TR. Agree 100% on sacking the copy editor.

Will someone please explain to me why Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff's cabana boy, is still swanning about in political circles as though he were a reputable citizen fit for decent society.

I read an interview with Grover Norquist in “Politico,” in which Grover mentioned that he doesn’t like music. It made me think of those great lines from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.

Forgive me for noticing this so late, but WA and ME are also the two gay-rights election states.

Which was the driver, here, or was this just a fortunate "synergy"?

I mean, in the past anti-gay issues were used to drive Republicans to the polls for less-sexy / "urgent" issues (ex, Bush/Cheney 2000/04 and the mid-year elections in key states). I wonder if the TABOR futile flailings were an attempt to bolster the anti-gay measures, rather than the other way around.

For what it's worth, all this talk about TABOR only having been passed once, in Colorado, ignores the poster child for not passing TABOR: California. The proto-TABOR Prop 13 rightly takes at least 90% of the blame for this state's decline into bankruptcy. Those of us who don't believe the TABOR delusional thinking should be highlighting that fact, not hiding it away just because Prop 13 wasn't emblazoned with the TABOR trademark language!

It looks like our pathetic Governor Pawlenty, trying as hard as always to burnish his "conservative" credentials for his POTUS run, is trying the same shenanigans in Minnesota.

http://www.startribune.com/politics/state/69289307.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUnciaec8O7EyUsl

Funny, he didn't think this was an important issue during his first 7 years in office, when he wasn't eyeing a run for president. Could this loser be any more transparent?