Colorado has a wonderful law called the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR. TABOR does two things:

a) it caps the state’s budget increases at the level of population growth plus inflation, and

b) if an economic downturn causes tax revenues to fall, then the budget allowance falls too.

So, for example, when sales tax revenue dropped during the recent recession, the state budget was obliged to drop as well - and it can’t increase again any faster than population + inflation, no matter what the economy does.

Democrats, redistributionists, state bureaucrats, and educators all hate TABOR. Some of these people are very nice people indeed, and when I worked with them I was always careful not to be disrespectful of their opinion that TABOR was an emanation from Hell.

People who pay more taxes than they get back from the state, however, love TABOR. I think we need something like it on the national stage. The eternal peril of the Federal budget process is that both parties are very happy to use tax revenues to buy votes. (A large part of the animosity towards President Bush is that he is spending money that the Democrats want to spend when they’re next in power.)

That, of course, is not what the Founding Fathers (angel choir) had in mind. The idea is that the Federal government be as small as possible. This represents my primary disagreement with the modern Republican party. The strategy (buy votes with Federal money, thus preventing the Democrats from being able to next time around the political cycle) is sound; it’s just alien to the role I think the government should play. Something like TABOR might level the playing field by making it impossible for either party to create expensive new entitlements without clearing the decks of old spending programs first.