Lamborn calls for a national version of TABOR

Rep. Doug Lamborn, a longtime proponent of Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights, is promoting an American Taxpayer Bill of Rights.

The two documents are vastly different in their specifics. Where the state TABOR requires voter approval for any tax to be raised, the national TABOR does not touch that subject, as nationwide referenda on taxes are impossible.

But the national version, written by the conservative Republican Study Committee to which Lamborn belongs, does adopt the spirit of the 1992 Colorado law in pushing four principles, Lamborn said. It pledges to restore fiscal discipline in Congress, stop the spending of Social Security money on other things, balance the federal budget without raising taxes and replace the Internal Revenue Service tax code with something simpler.

“These principles are important because they restore fiscal responsibility,” the first-year Republican from Colorado Springs said. Under Democratic congressional leadership, he said, “just about every appropriations bill is loaded up with billions in extra spending.”

Lamborn is the first to admit that anything that comes out of this bill before the 2008 congressional elections is dead on arrival with Democrats in control of the House. The idea of an American TABOR is to get goals on record for when Republicans take over Congress again, he said.

Even if it has no chance of success, however, Democrats are quick to criticize the idea, which resembles a less specific and less publicized version of the GOP’s 1994 Contract with America.

State Democratic Party spokesman Matt Sugar said it appears American TABOR’s supporters are trying to “distract from the things we’re trying to concentrate on, like the war in Iraq.”

El Paso County Democratic Party Chairman John Morris said he finds it disingenuous that supporters of these fiscal cutback measures always add that they want the budget balanced outside of emergency military efforts like Iraq, which is the biggest hit on the budget. He added that Republicans had time to put such a measure in place when they controlled Congress from 1995 to 2006 but did not propose it until this spring, when they were out of power.

“It’s awfully easy to advocate things that won’t happen,” Morris said.

Lamborn said it’s likely that American TABOR will be presented as four different bills.

El Paso County Commissioner Douglas Bruce, author of Colorado’s TABOR, said that although the national version seems to be a “grab bag” of ideas, he is glad to see that it includes hints of replacing the tax code with some kind of “fair tax” proposal. That, he said, would be his ideal federal version of TABOR.

Lamborn has tried to insert a couple of small cost-cutting amendments into budget bills already this session, but he has yet to get as many as 100 of the 435 House members to back them.

One of the unsuccessful efforts would have cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, while the other would have cut the $420 million budget of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which includes PBS and National Public Radio.

“In both cases, those agencies do some constructive things, but they can easily be financed through the private sector,” said Lamborn.

CONTACT THE WRITER: (303)837-0613 or ed.sealover@gazette.com

DETAILS

The American Taxpayer Bill of Rights calls for fiscal discipline in Congress, an end to spending of Social Security money on other things, a balanced budget — without new taxes — and a new tax code.