Colorado tax data complicates the “fair share” argument

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

High Income Coloradans pay an outsized share of income taxes

As a follow-up to an earlier newsletter on Colorado’s income tax distribution (the graph headlining this post is from that newsletter), I did a summary op ed for Complete Colorado.

That op ed delves into why a progressive income tax in this state would be foolhardy policy.

More, including a link to my earlier newsletter with more context and detail, in the link below.

https://completecolorado.com/2026/05/21/high-income-coloradans-outsized-share-income-taxes/

A different take on easing the tax burden for low income earners

In the first post today, I shared an op ed I wrote which outlines why a progressive income tax (making the rich “pay their fair share”) is a foolhardy idea.

In between the writing of that op ed (based on research in an earlier newsletter) and now posting it here, I was doing research for an upcoming newsletter.

Part of that research involved poking around in the state’s 2024 Tax Profile and Expenditure report. That is the link below.**

I point you to screenshot 1 attached which comes from p 249 in the report.

This graph is a list of taxes paid (as a percentage of the total) broken down by type and into three income groups — low, middle, and high. This is for the year 2020 due to lags in data, but I doubt the large-scale patterns have changed much since then.

Let’s look at the top row to orient ourselves to what we see. This row shows that low-income earners pay about 7% of their total taxes as income taxes, middle about 31%, and high-income earners about 48%. In my op ed I discussed how, by far and away, the largest tax revenues come from high-income earners. This is clearly echoed here.

If one set out to help low-income earners, the stated goal of the supporters of a progressive income tax, one would do well to give this chart a look with an eye toward what categories of tax most low-income earners pay. Relieving the greatest tax burdens on low-income earners would be of the most help to that group.

Low-income earners pay relatively little of their total tax burden as income tax. They pay a lot of their total burden as property tax (41.6%), state and local sales and use tax (13.4% and 21.9% respectively), and as specific ownership tax (think the tax you’d pay on your car every year, 5.8%).

If someone had a broken leg and an itch on their back, would you help them by scratching their back?

You take the biggest and most threatening problems in order; helping low-income Coloradans with their tax burden ought necessarily start with the descending order of tax burdens they face: property first, followed by local sales and use taxes, and so on. I propose no solution other than to say that it is in these areas that we ought to look first.

What’s curious to me is that this report is public and not at all hard to find. Why supporters of a progressive income tax chose to look in that direction is beyond me. Perhaps it’s an issue of public familiarity. Perhaps it’s an area where they feel they’ll have political success, if not as much success in helping those they say they want to help.

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

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