Budgeting is about setting priorities.

In most states, K-12 education is the top priority and receives the lion’s share of funding.  Yet across the country, states are grappling with a budget monster that pits education funding against federal health care mandates.

In the last three years, total spending on K-12 education in Colorado has fallen by $389 million.  Spending on health care, however, has increased by $763 million during that same period.

The problem is that states no longer have the ability to set their own priorities. [Read more →]

When Gov. John Hickenlooper announced that the state will appeal a Denver court’s ruling that the state inadequately funds education, he acknowledged what Judge Sheila Rappaport — and previously the Colorado Supreme Court — would not: money is a finite resource, even when it’s spent on worthy causes and when it’s spent by government.

The state legislature allocates $4.3 billion to educate more than 800,000 students — just under $6,500 each — in K-12 public schools.  According to the Colorado Department of Education, other sources bring that total to a statewide average of nearly $13,000, as of 2009-10.

Over two years ago, the supreme court ruled, in a contentious 4-3 decision, that a lower court should entertain claims brought by a group of parents and school districts that the state constitution’s call for a “thorough and uniform” system of free public schools should be interpreted to require a specific funding amount.

That lawsuit, Lobato vs. Colorado, reverted back to Rappaport’s courtroom, albeit with instructions that “the trial court must give substantial deference to the legislature’s fiscal and policy judgments.”

Rappaport’s decision, however, offered no such deference. [Read more →]

Because those doggone Coloradans just won’t vote to increase taxes often
enough, a cadre of folks who just can’t bear to see state government spend
less is asking a federal judge to do something voters won’t – to strike
down voters’ constitutional right to approve tax increases.

Led by Democrat State Rep. Andy Kerr, plaintiffs contend that the
Taxpayers Bill of Rights (TABOR) in the Colorado constitution violates the
U.S. Constitution’s guarantee that all states have a “republican form of
government.”

Don’t think that the plaintiffs have become orthodox disciples of James
Madison.  They’re just sick and tired of state government being forced to
tighten its belt during a recession as ordinary Coloradans must do.
They’d rather raise our taxes and hope we’ll forgive or forget before the
next election. [Read more →]

Say this for President Barack Obama: he doesn’t lack for vision.

As a candidate, Obama spoke of “chang(ing) the trajectory of America” in a way that no president has since Ronald Reagan. Obama’s vision is, of course, antithetical to Reagan’s.

Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Obama believes that government spending can stimulate the economy and that government regulation will fix health care. [Read more →]

Gerrymandering — the conspicuous, irregular manipulating of electoral district boundaries to advantage one political party or candidate — is widely considered a distasteful, if not downright corrupt, practice.

Through gerrymandering, incumbent politicians seek to choose their voters rather than vice versa, packing their legislative or congressional districts with enough like-minded constituents to make re-election almost effortless.

Rather than conform to statutory or geographic boundaries (county lines, city limits, mountain ranges, watersheds), gerrymandering eviscerates those boundaries for the purpose of achieving a specific result on Election Day. [Read more →]

Since 1988, the federal government has spent $8 TRILLION on interest on debt! We are spending our children and grandchildren into a future of poverty. That’s what the 2012 election is about!

Click here to watch video from Government Gone Wild!

Here’s a great little video from Heritage Foundation explaining the national debt.

To hear trial lawyers and their anti-business enablers tell it, the only thing that prevents Colorado employers from literally chaining workers to their desks is the “right to sue” their dastardly bosses.  In this fantasy world, trial lawyers never bring frivolous lawsuits and fired employees never file dubious claims motivated but grudges against their former employers.

In fact, listening to testimony recently on Senate Bill 72 (sponsored by Sen. Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, and Rep. Claire Levy, D-Boulder), the uninitiated could be forgiven for wondering — given the obvious virtue presumed by the bills’ supporters — why the sponsors don’t propose a new law that simply accepts employees’ claims at face value, dispenses with the inconvenience of a trial, and orders those heartless employers to immediately deposit funds into plaintiffs’ bank accounts.

Maybe that’s on their agenda for next year. [Read more →]

The high-stakes battle to determine whether the people will serve government or government will serve the people is unfolding in state capitols.

Wisconsin is the tip of the iceberg.  Though not as fiscally imperiled as California or Illinois, Wisconsin is symbolic — the birthplace of government employee unions, once considered illegitimate even by liberal icons like FDR and the AFL-CIO.

“All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining . . . cannot be transplanted into public service,” Roosevelt said. [Read more →]

The next two years will almost certainly determine whether Americans possess the resolve and courage necessary to save our country from fiscal disaster.

If we do not, then the Americans will likely succumb to the European mindset that work is not a source of accomplishment or satisfaction but merely a way to bide time between vacations and weekends while relying on government for health care and retirement.

Most European young people recognize that their opportunity to pursue happiness is lost – squandered by unsustainable entitlements to which their parents and grandparents have become addicted. [Read more →]