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HB26-1240: Colorado Democrats Expand Tax Giveaways—and Eat Your TABOR Refund
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

HB26-1240: Colorado Democrats Expand Tax Giveaways—and Eat Your TABOR Refund

Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project HB26-1240 (linked first below) is a great example of tax policy which mimics a dynamic I have seen with other policy such as gun control. Rather than taking all in one big shot, something that would get all kinds of undue attention, you take in a piecewise manner. E.g. in year 1 you get red flag laws passed, but they’re limited so as to not cause too much heartburn. When that settles down, you can then spend subsequent years making additions to that first law. In the case of HB26-1240, you start by offering expanded tax credits to people and then you expand the credits further. In order to fully appreciate what I mean, we have to do some background first. Colorado’s Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is another ...
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Senate Bill 135 Raises New Questions About TABOR Limits And Taxpayer Protections
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Complete Colorado, Approved, Commentary, State

Senate Bill 135 Raises New Questions About TABOR Limits And Taxpayer Protections

By Nash Herman | Commentary, Complete Colorado Claims that Senate Bill 26-135 could permanently eliminate the refund of overcollected revenue under Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) amendment may at first blush sound hyperbolic, but they are not. Let me explain.  Beyond handing progressive legislators a blank check to cover up their own overspending, the new TABOR revenue limit creates a perverse incentive to limit both fiscal transparency and voter consent.  TABOR working just fine  TABOR’s existing formula limits annual growth of a portion of the state budget to a combination of population growth plus inflation.  This formula allows government to reasonably grow and accounts for factors not directly wit...
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The hidden impact of two Colorado bills: Privacy risks few are talking about
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Rocky Mountain Voice, Commentary, State, Top Stories

The hidden impact of two Colorado bills: Privacy risks few are talking about

By Maria Orms | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice When I heard about two bills recently proposed in the Colorado State Legislature, I don’t want to sound overly dramatic—but I felt a real chill. Right now, our Constitution and modern technology are on a collision course. We’re being forced to decide how to embrace powerful tools without sacrificing privacy and the rights those tools were never meant to undermine. Consider the debate over Flock cameras in Denver: 400 to 800 people showed up to a community meeting in November, and another 24,000 watched online. People are paying attention—and they’re concerned. Yet these new bills are moving forward with little fanfare and even less public scrutiny. Because they deal with technology, they’re easy to overlook—but their poten...
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What are biodiversity credits, and how are they being used in Colorado?
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

What are biodiversity credits, and how are they being used in Colorado?

Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project I watched something on Facebook recently, one of those "I'm going to tell you the truth" kinds of videos. I didn't copy the link. It's not worth referring back to anyway. The gist of the video is simple: the man in the video claims that part of the reason for species reintroduction (he is not from Colorado, nor talking about Colorado) is so that the landowners can make big money selling biodiversity credits. I asked every land conservation trust I could find an email for and, with one exception, could not find one that admitted to selling biodiversity credits. A lot of the ones that emailed me back said that no market for selling them exists as of yet in Colorado. This doesn't mean that the topic has no value; it...
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Wyoming Positions Itself As Energy Leader For The Mountain West Colorado Pushes Risky Bet
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Complete Colorado, Approved, Commentary, State

Wyoming Positions Itself As Energy Leader For The Mountain West Colorado Pushes Risky Bet

By Jon Caldara | Commentary, Complete Colorado Years ago, I interviewed a Canadian health-care broker whose job was helping his countrymen escape their own failing system. When their “free” health care turned into “free to wait until you die,” he’d save his clients by routing them to doctors in the U.S. who’d accept cash and rescue their lives. I asked him what advice he had for Americans. His answer terrified me. “I hope the U.S. won’t do what we’ve done with health care,” he said. I thought his reasoning was that he didn’t want to see Americans suffer and die because of medical socialism. But that wasn’t it. He said, “Because if you do, we’ll have nowhere to escape to.” That stuck with me. We are Canada’s health care lifeboat. Every bad sy...
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Colorado’s Ideological Regime Doubles Down
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FAIR Colorado, Approved, Commentary, State

Colorado’s Ideological Regime Doubles Down

By Laureen Boll | Commentary, FAIR Colorado HB26-1322 is a weaponized end-run around the Constitution The Supreme Court’s October 2025 oral arguments in Chiles v. Salazar exposed Colorado’s conversion-therapy ban for what it is: raw viewpoint discrimination dressed up as “child protection.” Conservative justices grilled the state on why a licensed counselor could affirm a minor’s gender identity or homosexuality but face professional ruin for exploring the opposite — neutral talk therapy aligned with a family’s faith or biology. The writing is on the wall, as the majority seems ready to apply strict scrutiny and likely strike down the ban as unconstitutional professional speech regulation. Colorado’s Democrat-majority legislature refuses to accept the likely verdict of ...
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America’s debt reality: Interest payments now eating 15.5% of federal revenue
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ContraPloy, Approved, Commentary, National

America’s debt reality: Interest payments now eating 15.5% of federal revenue

By Jim Swift | Commentary, ContraPloy (Various & Sundry section) The federal debt is big. But how big is too big? At time of this writing, it’s $38 trillion and change. Is that too much? Who knows? The only practical way to understand it is to compare it with another number. A popular approach is to compare it with Gross Domestic Product (GDP). These days, the national debt is around 119% of GDP. That seems bad. Actually it’s worse, because it’s comparing the money the federal government borrowed with the goods and services everyone produces. If we compare the national debt to just the revenue the federal government collects, it’s more like 600%. But is it too much? Who knows? Another approach is to compare it with the population of the country, which is around 343 million sou...
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El Paso Co. clerk resigns leadership role and pulls county from clerks association over transparency concerns
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Ashe in America, Approved, Commentary, State

El Paso Co. clerk resigns leadership role and pulls county from clerks association over transparency concerns

By Ashe in America | Commentary, Ashe in America The CCCA is a Non-Governmental Organization that Generally Serves as the Authority on Colorado Elections El Paso County Clerk & Recorder Steve Schleiker has quietly resigned as Vice President of the Colorado County Clerks Association (CCCA), and he has withdrawn El Paso County from active membership in the non-governmental organization. Schleiker was candid about his decision in an email with a Colorado voter who reached out after noticing his name had been removed from the CCCA leadership list. “After careful consideration, I made the decision several weeks ago to resign as Vice President of the Colorado County Clerks Association and to withdraw El Paso County from active membership. This was not a decision I made li...
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Selective scrutiny: Are Colorado journalists choosing who gets held accountable?
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Complete Colorado, Approved, Commentary, State

Selective scrutiny: Are Colorado journalists choosing who gets held accountable?

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Complete Colorado In a recent LinkedIn post, local Colorado media mascot animal Kyle Clark proclaimed, “Journalists just repeating what the powerful say isn’t news. And it’s not Next [Clark’s news magazine Next on 9News]. Next holds power to account, offering context and clarity that cut through spin and misinformation. It’s time for truth.” Not too long after putting on his emphatic face and making his bold statement, Clark recorded a Next segment where I think it’s reasonable to say he didn’t quite hit his own mark.  In the segment, Clark amplified a piece written by Logan Davis of the Colorado Times Recorder (CTR) entitled  “EXCLUSIVE: Secret ICE Detention Facilities Exist Around Colorado, Data Shows.”  The N...
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After fire, a new rule: Why one Lakewood property can’t be rebuilt as before
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Lakewood Informer, Approved, Commentary, Local

After fire, a new rule: Why one Lakewood property can’t be rebuilt as before

By Lakewood Informer | Lakewood Informer Subtack When a Lakewood resident bought a burned-out single-family house to rehabilitate it, he had no idea Lakewood would say no. The house had been vacant and neglected, allowing homeless to move in and cause a fire. The result is an unusable, dangerous eyesore. But those considerations were not as important to Lakewood as changing the property to high-density. The new owner thought he would do the neighborhood a favor and fix it up. He had no desire to build high-density and no reason to think he could not replace one single-family home with another. Unfortunately for him, Lakewood has been eliminating single-family zoning for years. During the 2012 rezone, many properties were changed from single-family to multi-use without ...
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