Colorado is commonly regarded as a progressive state because so many California people move there; but a lot of the Californians that move there leave because California is a little too tax-heavy and culturally intolerant for them, not because they are spreading the progressive gospel to other states.
They are not left, nor right, they are a classic swing state – what they are is highly educated. And educated people do not accept that throwing more money at problems fixes them.
Proposition 103 was a ‘temporary’ tax to boost education coffers by $3 billion. In moderate Colorado, it was losing badly in voting despite spending far more (20X as much) than opponents – even Democrats who are always going to side with unions didn’t embrace it too strongly for fear of backlash. How bad was it? Personal income tax would have gone from 4.63% to 5% and the sales tax rate from 2.9% to 3%. In California, any family making $47,000 or more pays 10% state income tax and up and California a sales tax that hovers around 8%, so you can see why people move to Colorado. For a family making $125,000 the new taxes meant a paltry $300 in additional cost.
Not much, right? Do they not care about education? No, one third of the population has a college degree – but the recent grand experiment in Washington, D.C. has shown that if Keynesian economics is not dead, it should be. People are no longer buying that the government can fix a problem by redistributing money from taxpayers. The only ones who benefit are government employees, who now make more on average than the private sector, and certainly have better job security, pensions and health care.
Colorado has 8.3% unemployment, compared to California’s 12%. Like California, they already spend 40% of their state budget on education. If the bulk of that money were actually going to teachers and education, there would be no problem – but it doesn’t. It goes to administration and unions. If educators stopped listening to union leaders and pundits who frame any vote against more spending as being ‘anti-education’ they could be part of real reform. Instead they get to be embarrassed and be the public figures the public is voting against.
Math scores have gone up yet again – the highest math success ever – but the program that achieved that, No Child Left Behind, was vilified even though it was the biggest bipartisan effort of the last decade (clobbering even the Afghanistan war; 384–45 in the House and 91-8 in the Senate for NCLB versus 133 House and 23 Senate votes against war in Afghanistan even after the World Trade Center bombings ). If educators really want to have politicians competing for their vote, they need to stop making it clear they are in the bag for Democrats and instead are on the side of education. Republicans don’t bother to compete for the votes of teachers right now, which means they have to rely on the willingness of Democrats to risk their re-election raising taxes.