taxman.cpr.orgThe Taxman: How Douglas Bruce And The Taxpayer's Bill Of Rights Conquered Colorado

The Taxman Read Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III TABOR, Annotated The Timeline Podcast Podcast RSS iTunes Podcast Google Podcast Listen: Episode 1 Listen: Episode 2 Listen: Episode 3 Share Twitter Facebook Donate The Taxman How Douglas Bruce And The Taxpayer’s Bill Of Rights Conquered Colorado Chapter I - Chapter II - Chapter III Chapter II - Chapter III By Nathaniel Minor Rachel Estabrook Ben Markus The revolution wasn’t supposed to happen. Colorado voters had shot down crusades for smaller government three times before, in 1986, 1988 and 1990. As the first Tuesday of November 1992 drew near, public support for Douglas Bruce’s political baby, the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, was waning. But a quarter century ago, on election night, the landlord from Colorado Springs stood at a podium in Denver ready to declare victory. Under red, white and blue balloons and streamers, he held a two-day-old copy of The Denver Post above his head. The broadsheet’s above-the-fold headline blared that his ballot measure was behind in the polls. With a wide grin on his face, he crumpled it into a ball and threw it down with gusto. The liars lost,” Bruce told the ballroom full of cheering supporters. The people won.” Douglas Bruce is the father of Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. Nathaniel Minor/CPR News Bruce, a political outsider, won too. He and his group of anti-tax activists turned aside a who’s who coalition of Democrats, business leaders and even some Republicans. Those politicians had forecast doomsday if the voters embraced Bruce’s proposal to put tighter limits on government taxing and spending. Schools would close, they said. Businesses would leave the state. One opponent even wondered if police would be able to protect Pope John Paul II, who was coming to Denver the very next year. Doomsday hasn’t come. But Bruce’s victory — or, as he would describe it, the people’s victory — changed Colorado in ways no one saw coming. No one, maybe, except for Douglas Bruce. The crowd went wild.” Twenty-five years later, Bruce flashes a smile and even chokes up a bit remembering that night. Now 68, Bruce still lives in Colorado Springs. You might catch sight of him on the roads, behind the wheel of an aging Honda Accord sporting a license plate that reads Mr TABOR” — the acronym for his most consequential achievement. I know I did something good to help people,” Bruce said. Even if they’re not grateful. Even if they want to call me names.” His enemies — and he has many of them — have called him plenty of names just in interviews in the past year: Zealot. Slum lord. Biggest a**hole in the room. Those same critics also acknowledge two key components of Bruce’s character: intellectual brilliance and dogged determination. Both critics and supporters say TABOR would never have passed without Bruce and his unique character. The sweeping measure took away legislators’ ability to raise taxes without approval from a majority of voters, and it limits how quickly government revenues can grow. Experts declared it the most restrictive tax and expenditure limitation in the country. Since voters added TABOR to the Colorado Constitution 25 years ago, it’s become a boogeyman that politicians blame fiscal problems on. Colorado today has one of the five best economies in the United States,” said former Gov. Roy Romer, who fought Bruce tooth and nail during the campaigns for TABOR. Then Romer drops the other shoe. We have one of the five worst education systems.” The Democrat pins that disparity on a lack of funding partially caused by the procedural machinations of TABOR. You can’t say you’re free if the government can take away everything you have without your permission.” — Douglas Bruce While tax limitation measures in other states are merely speed bumps, Bruce designed TABOR to be more like a faulty cruise control. It slowed government growth, making sure it would never be able to grow as fast as the economy. It wasn’t immediately obvious, when you looked at the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights as it was written. And many opponents of the law say it wasn’t obvious at all to voters who passed it in 1992. It’s replete with little side angles and nuances,” Henry Sobanet, Gov. John Hickenlooper’s budget director, said of Bruce’s nearly 1,800-word document . It’s more like a three-dimensional understanding of taxes and an ability to interact with it with language. That’s what you see with his work.” Douglas Bruce, a man dedicated to disrupting government growth, was once a Democrat. He grew up in Southern California in the 1960s and graduated from Hollywood High School. His mother and grandfather were both Democrats; Bruce said he still has his grandfather’s portraits of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his basement. Eventually though, his compass would turn in a different direction than the New Dealer who greatly expanded the scope of the federal government. He was taken with California’s then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, and anti-tax godfather Howard Jarvis, who in 1978 convinced the Golden State to limit property taxes through Proposition 13. Douglas Bruce in 1988. Courtesy Denver Public Library/Rocky Mountain News Bruce traces his conservative ideals back to the Bill of Rights and its stated goal of limiting government. He carries a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his shirt pocket, ever ready to talk about its protections of press, petition, religion, guns, quartering soldiers, search and seizure. You can’t say you’re free if the government can take away everything you have without your permission,” Bruce said, summing up his view of the document. After earning his law degree at the University of Southern California, he started his career in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office as an assistant prosecutor. By the late 1970s, he was ready to leave. He attacked the question of where to live in the same meticulous way he later observed the levers of taxation. He researched cities’ demographics, water, climate, taxes and even bugs to figure out where to go. He took long road trips for more research. Finally, his third trip took him to Colorado. It was at dusk when I got to Pueblo,” Bruce said. And I looked at that from the interstate and said, ‘Nah, no way.’ ” Farther north up Interstate 25, he hit Colorado Springs after dark. I woke up in the morning and got out, opened the door of the motel, and bam! There was Pikes Peak,” Bruce said of the mountain that inspired America the Beautiful.” He liked the city’s architecture, history and even its commercial-free classical radio station. And he loved the politics. No place is going to be conservative enough for me, but it was on the right side of the spectrum — literally,” Bruce quipped. Who’s in charge? We, the people, who earn the money, or the politicians who want to spend it?” — Douglas Bruce His newly adopted state had a long history of skepticism toward government that manifested in citizen-backed efforts to limit taxes. In 1936, Don C. Sowers, a University of Colorado Boulder professor, wrote that the Great Depression was the impetus for a property tax limitation effort on the ballot. The overall tax limitation movement is of comparatively recent development, and may be said to be an outgrowth of the Depression period,” Sowers wrote. He criticized the measure as a ploy by property owners to shift the tax burden to more regressive income channels, like the sales tax. The measure failed miserably. The tax limitation movement picked up steam through the 1970s, when four separate one-off measures appeared before Colorado’s voters. All lost decisively. Ballot initiatives are often used by idealogues as a check on government, said Daniel Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Florida who’s studied Douglas Bruce and the initiative process. It’s, however, very difficult to do without some type of financial backing or without some type of corporate interest or without some type of national support network,” Smith said. That was...