School lunch tax shows why Amendment 87’s brackets should worry every Colorado voter

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

Taxpayer-funded lunches teach us a lesson, one we’re wise to remember for our ballots this November.

Sold a bill of goods on taxpayer-subsidized lunches for all Colorado students, it took almost no time for the “free” school lunch program in Colorado to need more money. 

Voters then doubled down on another tax increase not too long after voting in the original one to rescue the program. The change was not to put any sort of income qualification on the lunch program, rather it was to simply tax those earning more than $300K per year more to get more revenue into the program. This is likely the reason it passed. Colorado voters, unfortunately, have a history of passing taxes on others.**

Hiding in this tax increase is an important lesson for us all as we fill out our ballots this November: it’s called bracket creep. 

When you put a tax on people making more than a certain income per year, you have the choice of tying the cutoff to inflation or not. The “free” school lunch program voters approved did not. This has big implications for everyone, including those currently earning under $300K who think they’re immune to paying this new tax. 

As time passes, as inflation works its magic, not only do you pay more for the same items, you also earn more. Yes, that Hershey bar doesn’t cost a dime anymore, but you also make more than 5 cents per hour. 

The point is, for any new tax that is income-dependent but not indexed to inflation, a vote to put a tax on someone else now might turn around and become a tax on you in the future. 

This is bracket creep. It’s something that taxpayers in NJ have unfortunate experience with. The second link below is to an article by Nash Herman of the Independence Institute and it details NJ taxpayers’ experience with it.

Quoting with links intact:

“But don’t just take my word for it; look at how New Jersey’s bracket creep is hurting the state economy and the working class. As John Reitmeyer describes in NJ Spotlight News, the state has no bracket-adjustment policy, which means people are being hurt by inflation-driven tax increases. Reitmeyer cites Janelle Fritts, senior policy analyst at Tax Foundation: ‘The years when peoples’ taxes are going to go up the most because of a lack of inflation indexing are also the years when they’re stretched the tightest,’ Fritts said. ‘That’s when it’s going to hit the most, and the timing is terrible.’”

Thing is, you needn’t go all the way to NJ to see this in action. We have all the bracket creep we need right here in Colorado. From what I can tell, people are already moving up into the bracket that makes them eligible to have to fund taxpayer-subsidized lunches right now.

For a number of reasons, it’s difficult to measure movement of taxpayers in and among various taxable income levels. When I went to see about Colorado’s own bracket creep, the best I can offer is an approximation, a trend, but not dependable numbers.

The third link below is from the Colorado Department of Revenue. It’s their compilation of tax data by year. In order to get rough numbers of taxpayers by different income brackets, I scrolled down to state return data and pulled a copy of their “Table 1” for 2018 up to the most recent year available, 2023.

Screenshot 1 attached shows you the report I pulled for 2023 and earlier years, though the picture is just of the link for 2023. If you want to see the 2023 spreadsheet I got in full, it’s the fourth link below.

Unfortunately, none of the data is broken down fine enough to get taxable incomes strictly $300K and above, so I chose to sum incomes from $200K and up. This is highlighted in screenshot 2 attached.

Care is needed here. There are other reasons besides bracket creep that the taxpayers in the $200K and above group could be rising. For example, a lot of people earning incomes in that range could be moving to Colorado. If they were, they’d show up in new tax data making it look like existing Coloradans had raised their income when that wasn’t what happened.

As a way to try and check how much movement is from people coming to Colorado, as opposed to Coloradans earning more, I went to the state demographer’s webpage to get information on net migration.

Net migration is defined as people moving to Colorado minus those moving out. If it’s positive, we’re gaining people. If it’s negative, we’re losing them.

The fifth link below is to the annual report prepared by the state demographer, and I point you to the graph a little ways down on the front page. This shows net migration estimates from 1992 to 2024. I attached a copy of the graph as screenshot 3.

Aside from noting that people coming here from international destinations spiked in 2021–thank you President Biden–you’ll note that from about 2021 on, Colorado’s had quite a slump. We are still gaining population (net migration is positive), but it’s way down.

I took my sums of upper income taxpayers for 2018 through 2023 and graphed them alongside estimates of the net migration for those same years (read off the demographer’s graph) to screenshot 4.

This is a graph of taxpayers who earned taxable income $200K and above alongside net migration by year. The data is in the upper left if you want to see my estimates for net migration.

I will not vouch for any specific numbers (remember I’m not able to parse out the $300K and above specifically, and even the demographer admits that some of their numbers are estimated), but I want you to note what I would vouch for: the two lines are diverging.

More people are moving into higher-income tax brackets than are moving into Colorado.

This leads to the following conclusion. There are more and more people each year whose higher incomes have made them eligible to fund taxpayer-subsidized lunches than previously.

If you voted for the school lunch measure thinking that the tax was only going to be on the wealthy, give it time. It’ll probably be on you too if you wait long enough and give inflation enough time.

The same can be said for the progressive income tax measure on this November’s ballot. Amid all the talking points about how almost everyone (except the wealthy, of course) will pay less taxes, you need to remember that the income brackets are not indexed to inflation.

Wealthy today might be you in the future. That’s the lesson “free” school lunches can teach us.

**The Complete Colorado story link first below has within it a bunch of links for more context on the “free” lunch program along with the following (quoting):

“Beyond the tax dollars spent, the two [hosts in the video linked there] ask if students actually get meals they want to eat? If substantial amounts of food is discarded or families keep packing lunches because students dislike school offerings, the hosts argue policymakers should look at whether the program is actually accomplishing its intended purpose.”

In addition to how much we spend, it’s always valid to ask of any government program: what are we getting for our money?

https://completecolorado.com/2026/09/01/fiscal-future-colorado-free-school-lunch-program/

https://completecolorado.com/2026/09/15/new-jersey-fair-warning-colorado-amendment-87/

https://cdor.colorado.gov/data-and-reports/income-tax-data/individual-statistics-of-income-reports

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fm6u7CFAisZotKJrMz-dooRcQ9jE8SQB/edit?gid=168101233#gid=168101233

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/3aa6968ec7a34ff8b0f172ad6ae6d23e

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.