Your property taxes will be going sky high after Governor Polis and a bi-partisan majority in legislature convinced us voters in 2020 to do away with the Gallagher Amendment which limited property tax hikes for homeowners. The Gallagher Amendment saved homeowners $82 billion in taxes since its adoption in 1982. But no more.
Having suckered voters so successfully last time, Governor Polis has come up with another POLIS con job, Proposition HH. This will go before the voters in the fall. This time it is being done without Republican connivance, but Republican opposition may no longer matter. Rushed through at the end of the session, the Democrats in the legislature closed all debate, causing Republicans to walk out.
Proposition HH appears to have drawn inspiration from the old confidence man’s three-card monte card trick. In that card game you are supposed to pick out the black ace from three cards. Trick of hand makes sure you never do. In Proposition HH the voters are supposed to pick out the tax relief but by sleight-of-hand language you are voting yourself a “tax raise.”
If you vote “Yes” on Proposition HH you may think you are getting property tax relief from the effects of the revocation of the Gallagher Amendment, but you have not followed the cards closely enough. While your property tax will be slightly reduced for 10 years you would allow the state to keep more of your Tabor refunds permanently with a portion going to favored entities to backfill what they would lose from the slight reduction in property tax rates over the 10 years. Without going into all the byzantine meandering of the proposition, you are, in effect, voting yourself a tax raise under the guise of “tax relief.”
The governor has always been something of a flimflam man, but he has proven it works. His real name was Jared Shutz, but he changed it before going into public life to hide some of the more unsavory parts of his past, in particular, an assault on a female employee. He pushed the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission idea as an effort to promote confidence in our government institutions when it is perhaps the greatest bureaucratic con job in all of Colorado government.
He has promoted himself nationally as a Democrat who is also something of a small “l” libertarian, which is comical, but the national press is dutifully calling him by that description. Reason Magazine recently wrote an article on him titled “Jared Polis: The Most Libertarian Governor in America?” He is considered by some as the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. President should Joe Biden pull out for some reason.
Will his three-card monte trick called Proposition HH fool the voters? If the past is any indication, don’t bet against Polis as the dealer.
— Editorial Board
