Volunteers collect signature petitions for a graduated income tax initiative on the November 2026 ballot at Del Mar Park in Aurora on July 27. (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun)
If Coloradans turn down Amendment 87 — which lowers the tax rate for 97% of state earners and 95% of businesses and raises $2.7 billion a year — I won’t be surprised at all.
Yes, it would be crazy to turn it down. As Sun reporter Brian Eason wrote in Friday’s Unaffiliated newsletter, the math actually works, according to nonpartisan legislative analysts. You get some needed money and the state gets a lot of needed money, and (nearly) everyone’s happy.
But there’s a catch.
The proposed amendment doesn’t simply lower tax rates for nearly all of us. It would also raise state taxes for people and businesses whose income is more than $500,000 a year, which is not nearly all of us. And, if that’s not scary enough, our current 4.4% flat tax rate would go as high as a graduated 8.4% for people and businesses clearing more than a million bucks annually.
And is that fair?
I mean, if there’s one thing that we know about our fellow Americans, it’s that many of them have a real aversion to taxing the rich.
Though I don’t quite understand it, I believe it. I’ve believed it since at least Ronald Reagan and the lure of trickle-down economics, which if memory serves, told us that if the rich get even richer, then everyone gets a piece. Which may not be exactly how it turned out.
Donald Trump’s enormous tax cut for the rich — known in some households (like mine) as the Big, Ugly, Contemptible Bill — didn’t offer much of a cut for most people. Trump’s main concern was to please his rich friends and make life easier for everyone in his corrupt family.
The rich got richer at the expense of the poor and many parts of the middle class. To help out, say, Elon Musk — who, remember, mostly dismantled USAID — you cut Medicaid and food stamps, for starters. Meanwhile, health insurance rates soar for nearly everyone except for those millions who dropped their insurance because they couldn’t afford to both pay for it and make the rent.
Plus, as a bonus, we shouldn’t forget that the bill will also raise the national debt by somewhere close to $4 trillion by the end of the decade. But what’s a couple of trillion among friends?
OK, I know I’m putting my thumb slightly — if just slightly — on the scale when saying that people don’t want to cut taxes for the rich. I get it.
We’re seeing many young people — especially those who don’t know if they’ll have a job when they graduate from school — who are so fed up with the unfairness of the wage and wealth gaps that they no longer think socialism is a dirty word. Several blue states, meanwhile, are voting this year on whether to create wealth taxes. The usual suspects in Congress — see: Sanders, Bernie and Warren, Elizabeth — are proposing federal wealth taxes.
You see, wages are stagnant for many people who don’t work in AI. The country’s wealth and income gaps are the largest today since the Gilded Age of J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller — which was something like Trump’s all-that-glitters-is-gold-plated age.
When the Gilded Age wealth gap grew too large, the people — remember them? — voted for a federal income tax and changes in antitrust laws and estate taxes. Soon enough, we got the New Deal and Social Security.
And yes, according to the polls, a majority of Americans didn’t want Trump’s bill. Still, it passed, if barely, because gutless Republicans control Congress and, of course, Trump controls the gutless Republicans.
But let’s see what happens in Colorado.
While Amendment 87 does raise taxes for people who make the kind of money that most of us will never make, it’s not strictly an eat-the-rich wealth tax, even if it looks like it.
The reason for the tax hike is that we’ve tangled with billion-dollar budget deficits in the Colorado legislature for the past few years, and there’s no reason to believe that those deficits — thank you, TABOR — are going anywhere.
You might not remember which programs were cut to fix the deficit, or maybe you do. Good old Medicaid again, for one. Ask yourself: Do all children really need all that much healthcare?
All right, they do, of course.
So, how could the tax proposal — raising tax rates for the rich while lowering them for millions and raising money for social programs — fail?
Its opponents resort to the usual weak arguments. The economy will suffer. Jobs will be lost. The cost of goods and services will rise (but, even if so, and I doubt it, not nearly as much as Trump’s tariffs have affected them).
And, in fact, there’s another tax proposal on the ballot this year — known as Proposition 136 — which would place a cap on individual and corporate income tax at 4.4% of a taxpayer’s federal taxable income, just like it is today. It’s basically on the ballot as a counter to Amendment 87. If both pass, either the one with more votes wins or — I don’t know if this is in the Constitution — all hell breaks loose.
What makes me worry about Amendment 87 is that either not enough people care enough about who gets hurt by the deficits or they just don’t believe the math.
I’m guessing that many of the math skeptics will, however, be waiting (vainly) by their mailboxes for Trump’s $5,000 check/bribe — does the envelope have to be coded correctly? — if Republicans hold on to Congress, which is a longshot. If they did believe in the math, they’d know that the checks to 245 million adults would cost more than a trillion dollars and would raise the deficit from its current annual $1.8 trillion to closer to $3 trillion. Meanwhile, inflation just keeps getting higher.
I know the bribe money is never coming. It’s just a thing for Trump to promise at his look-at-me midterm convention, which swing-district Republicans will now reluctantly be forced to defend.
But Amendment 87? I don’t know.
What’s certain is that, whatever the benefits, big money will do everything in its power to 86 it.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow.
The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy and submit columns, suggested writers and more to opinion@coloradosun.com.
