Freedom Unaffiliated

“Youth is wasted on all the wrong people.”That’s one of my favorite lines from “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The older I get, the less it sounds like a joke.Every generation inherits victories it did not win. Young Americans never experienced the Cold War, the draft or stagflation. Double-digit inflation is something grandpa now mentions in one of his rambling monologues about how good we have it.The young don’t remember bracket creep because why would they? They never, ever experienced it. A previous generation defeated it for them.The yearly tax hikeThough it sounds like a medical condition, bracket creep was one of government’s most sinister ways of raising taxes without voting to raise taxes.Inflation pushed wages upward — even when purchasing power went down. Because federal tax brackets remained fixed, workers were steadily pushed into higher tax rates without actually becoming any richer.Your paycheck got bigger but so did your grocery, utility, insurance and every other bill. Your standard of living stayed put at best. Washington congratulated you on becoming “richer” and sent a larger tax bill.It was a yearly tax increase. Was.In the early 1980s, Colorado U.S. Sen. Bill Armstrong, then on the Senate Finance Committee, led the fight to end it. Federal income tax brackets became indexed to inflation.Now when your income rises with the cost of living, you’re not pushed into a higher tax bracket.Government no longer profits by confusing more dollars with more wealth.Colorado attacked it another way. In 1987, Democratic Gov. Roy Romer signed legislation replacing the state’s graduated income tax with a flat rate and put the state into economic overdrive.This year’s Amendment 87 would put the transmission in reverse.The measure would replace Colorado’s flat income tax with six progressive tax brackets. Its sales pitch is politically irresistible: You get a modest tax cut, and somebody richer pays for it.Under the proposal, if you make less than $100,000 a year you get a tiny tax cut (for now). From $100,000 to $500,000 nothing really changes. But when you make more than that your tax rate skyrockets to almost double.Higher tax brackets awaitThe most dangerous defect is what Amendment 87 leaves out: Its tax brackets are not indexed to inflation. It truly takes you back in time, back when inflation pushed you into higher brackets while your buying power went down.What proponents are counting on is you won’t understand at some point you will be in the “tax them more” brackets. Not that you’ll actually be richer. It’s just what inflation does. Making $25,000 in 1980 is the same as making $100,000 today.Put differently (drumroll, please), SOONER OR LATER EVERYONE IN COLORADO WILL BE PAYING AN 8.4% INCOME TAX. It’s only a matter of when.In the Marvel movies Thanos was “inevitable.” This proposal is Thanos. It is inevitable everyone will be paying the top rate as inflation pushes people’s salaries higher.Fewer and fewer people every year will be in the lower, “tax cut” brackets. Because it’s not indexed to inflation, eventually we will all creep into the higher tax brackets.No legislator must introduce a bill. No governor must sign one. No campaign committee must explain it. Inflation does the dirty work while politicians pose for pictures with schoolchildren.That is bracket creep. We got rid of it federally because Americans learned the lesson the expensive way when inflation ravaged the 1970s. Amendment 87 asks you to forget it.Tax escalatorLet me spell it out as clearly as I can: Amendment 87 only temporarily replaces a flat income tax rate with a graduated one. Ultimately, we all creep into the 8.4% tax bracket. And we’ll effectively have a flat tax again.Like Thanos, it is inevitable.Supporters say taxing the wealthy is only fair. Take a moment to consider how not indexing it for inflation makes that argument a lie.If proponents believe their brackets are fair today, in 2026, why are they unwilling to keep those brackets fair tomorrow by indexing those brackets to inflation?They know damn well that over time every Coloradan will be in higher and higher tax brackets. What they claim is fair today must, by their own reasoning, become unfair tomorrow.Colorado once understood that tax systems should not punish people for inflation.Now Amendment 87 invites us to trade that hard-fought inheritance for a tiny check today and an automatic tax escalator tomorrow.Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

Who’d have believed that Bernie Sanders, a ranting disheveled old man could rise to become the modern-day reincarnation of Vladimir Lenin, with a Brooklyn accent, evangelizing for socialism in the USA and building a legion of useful idiots? (Clue: Bernie and his wife honeymooned in the Soviet Union.) He’s certainly not charismatic. So, he shrewdly recruited AOC as his partner, a weird May-December relationship, for a road show last winter called the “Fighting Oligarchy Tour.”Bernie’s schtick is throwing around a barrage of angry, demagogic, simplistic, exaggerated, inflammatory slogans to rile up gullible malcontents. The slogan for this tour was that America has become an “oligarchy.” Let’s start with the definition of that term. Oligarchy: noun, a form of government in which the ruling power belongs to a small wealthy group that controls the economy and makes laws and political decisions to preserve its own power.Myth of the oligarchyReally? Who are the members of this oligarchy of wizards that possess the superpower to run our government, our military, our foreign policy, and our intricate economy with literally millions of businesses large and small? No such thing exists. This is a contrived fantasy to fuel Bernie’s socialist crusade. Ironically, such an oligarchy is more likely to be found in totalitarian socialist states where opposition political parties are banned and the only names on ballots in their mock elections are members of the official Communist party. Such states control every facet of your life with an iron grip like the former Union of Soviet “Socialist” Republics, Cuba, North Korea, China — or Iran’s theocracy of ayatollahs. The American republic’s system of government with its separation of powers, checks and balances, and its highly competitive free market economy is too complex and independent to be ruled by a small cabal of evil billionaires.If this imaginary oligarchy controls the federal government, why did it bounce back and forth through a procession of presidents with wildly different political agendas from 2000 – 2024: Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump (again)? Or did the “oligarchy” only emerge in 2024 with Trump’s reelection? And what secret power does it have over him, the Republican majority in Congress, and conservative justices on the Supreme Court? How do the oligarchs manipulate state governments with big cities nominally run by Democrats? And what power does it have over rural America that favors Republicans?Bernie used to attack millionaires. Now that he’s one himself, he’s shifted his wrath to billionaires (adjusting for inflation, they were called millionaires in the 19th century). But today’s billionaires can’t be an all-powerful oligarchy because they’re not monolithic and have differing beliefs and political agendas. Elon Musk is a conservative who sides with Donald Trump (they’ve hugged and made up). George Soros funds countless causes on the radical left (so he’s immune to criticism form Bernie and AOC). The Koch brothers are libertarian. A host of billionaires that favor Democrats and lean left includes Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffet, and Laurene Powell Jobs (yeah, the widow of Steve, the guy who created Apple).All these folks can’t be on the same team. By definition, oligarchs are unified.Capitalism benefits allBillionaires have a lot of influence but they don’t have a monopoly on that. So do people with low or no income that are the Democrats’ core voting constituency. Other powerful influencers include labor unions (especially the teacher unions), academia, public education, the press and TV broadcast media (mostly leftist), social media and podcasters.Bernie claims “capitalism in the U.S. benefits only a few.” A “few?” Like what, 3 or four people out of 340 million? Be serious. Americans enjoy the highest standard of living in the world directly derived from our capitalist economy. Those who excel, like successful entrepreneurs and CEOs, professional athletes, inventors, actors and Taylor Swift make a fortune, generously donate to causes and foundations, and pay a lot in taxes. Most Americans are somewhere in the middle, and those on the bottom are supported by countless social welfare programs at the federal, state and local level.Capitalism has certainly benefited Bernie, a man with little marketable talent who somehow became a millionaire. But wait; he’s never had a real job in the capitalist private sector. It’s all been in politics and government office at taxpayer expense derived from our capitalist economy.Bernie claims, “A handful of billionaires have more wealth than they could spend in a thousand years.” If he had any understanding of economics, which he doesn’t, he’d know that most of it is invested. Capital formation is the lifeblood of any economic system.What they spend is none of his business, they earned it.

On TABOR Talk we discuss how Colorado Legislators are trying to get you to give up your TABOR refunds forever. Will you let them have it?

Mayor Mike Johnston proclaimed, “It is past time Big Tobacco cleaned up the big mess it’s created.”Yep. Denver is suing tobacco companies for the cigarette butts littering the city.Because Denver’s Big Mess couldn’t possibly be the fault of the mayor, the city council or the people actually dropping garbage on the ground. It must be the fault of — let me check the Progressive Wheel of Blame here — Big Tobacco.Ignore the graffitiWhen you drive through Denver, the first thing you notice is obviously the cigarette-butt epidemic. Not the graffiti. Not the passed-out junkies. Not the ridiculous plastic bollards guarding bike lanes emptier than a city council meeting on fiscal restraint. Not even the shirtless guy wandering down the middle of a four-lane street, screaming obscenities at himself.Nope. Cigarette butts. That’s what has Denverites lying awake at night.Come on, Michael. You know full well Big Tobacco didn’t create any mess at all. Philip Morris executives are not prowling Capitol Hill after midnight, flicking Marlboro filters onto the sidewalk and cackling.Inconsiderate smokers littered. That’s right, Denverites, your constituents did it.Is the progressive mind constitutionally incapable of comprehending personal responsibility?Drunk driver? Sue the automaker and the distillery. Someone stabbed to death? Clearly Big Knife has been buying off politicians. Hateful letter? Institute a three-day cooling-off period before purchasing a pen. Or the current plan, don’t teach kids how to write.Your colorblind co-worker shows up dressed like a 1977 game-show host? Blame JCPenney for enabling his fashion decisions.Denver’s real big messI deal daily with the litter created by Denverites — particularly Denver’s army of drug-fueled vagrants. Excuse me: “The drug-fueled vagrants currently experiencing un-housed-ness.”I have only one logical response: “No mayor, it is past time Big Government cleaned up the big mess it has created by refusing to enforce our laws.”Every day I pick up the debris left by Denver’s finest fentanyl fans around the headquarters of Independence Institute near the State Capitol. Fast-food wrappers. Liquor bottles in every size from “bad decision” to “lost weekend.” Potato chip bags. Syringes. Condoms. And far too often, human feces. (Usually not mine, if you’re wondering.)Dogs relieve themselves on our grass, but their owners almost always clean it up with plastic bags. Denver’s homeless population also has an endless supply of plastic bags. I know because I pick those up too.But why use one when the sidewalk is calling your name?What I rarely —hardly ever — pick up is a cigarette butt.The other day, beneath our office windows, we cleaned up another pile of abandoned belongings, including a backpack. Inside were a crowbar, a club, pliers, screwdrivers and a tire iron.It was less a backpack than a burglar’s Swiss Army knife. I now eagerly await Denver’s lawsuits against Black+Decker and REI for causing this particular outbreak of litter.Suing cigarette companies for their customers’ bad behavior is a sad, pathetic money grab not worthy of the shoddiest ambulance-chasing lawyer.When virtue signaling rulesBut it underscores the hypocrisy that is the new leftist evangelical way of virtue signaling — salvation through litigation, endless public displays of anti-capitalist moral purity at taxpayer expense.Where is the lawsuit against McDonald’s for all the wrappers? Or Starbucks for abandoned cups? Or Fireball for those tiny bottles scattered across the city like alcoholic Easter eggs? Well, those companies are not currently fashionable to hate … yet.It’s the lack of simple consistency that blows my mind. We ban shopping bags but not the bags we put our produce in, not to mention the plastic that everything inside the supermarket is wrapped in.Because somehow some plastic is more evil than other plastic. And only our elite can divine.How do their little brains not implode by the roaring contradictions?We outlaw plastic straws to protect sea life, even though a straw discarded in Colorado would have to pull off a prison break from multiple water-treatment systems, navigate half the continent and hitchhike to the Pacific before it could menace a sea turtle.Meanwhile, plastic tampon applicators escape scrutiny, even though cardboard versions exist.We all know why. Tampon applicators are used by women, a protected political constituency. Cigarette smokers are a small, unfashionable minority.So raising the cost of cigarettes by shaking down manufacturers isn’t intolerance. It isn’t bigotry. It’s, um, public health.And now, “public health” means making the law-abiding pay for the behavior of people government won’t hold responsible.Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

Hey, Colorado Democrats! All the fun you’ve had watching Republican dysfunction in Colorado for the last 20 years was just a preview of what is about to happen to you.The Colorado Republican Party no longer exists as a competitive institution.Republicans did it to themselves. They built a culture around purity tests, with no curiosity about winning elections. Anyone suggesting an appeal to unaffiliated voters was identified as a Republican in Name Only and bounced from the building.Deep-pocketed conservatives kept funding candidates while neglecting the boring, unsatisfying work of winning future elections: community organizing, door knocking, recruitment and ballot chasing. They wanted crops without planting seeds.The result? Colorado’s political press will document every embarrassment of Victor Marx’s doomed campaign, following his clown car while letting the left’s armored truck drive off with the state.A 29-year-old socialist defeated Rep. Diana DeGette. She defended calls for eliminating Israel and declined to call the Boulder firebombing of pro-Israel demonstrators antisemitic.That deserves more scrutiny than whatever Marx said to his dog between breakfast and Kyle Clark’s deadline.So does the growing socialist faction in our legislature. So does Phil Weiser, a progressive law professor and activist. Nobody makes government simpler than law professors.When Republicans tried putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms, Colorado’s media understood people wielding government power deserved scrutiny.Now Democrats have elevated misgendering to legal discrimination. School employees must use a student’s chosen name regardless of parental approval, while some policies permit social transition without informing parents.Moses entering a classroom is a constitutional crisis, but keeping parents in the dark is mandatory compassion.The coming Democratic Party meltdown? Quite simply, too many factions inside the party are at odds with their own stated goals.Consider the gay-rights community. It became a juggernaut winning marriage equality. But, like the French Revolution, its victory produced a movement out of control.The LGB part of the LGBT team is at odds with the T part because they want fundamentally different things.The LGB part wants to make it easier for gay kids to come out as — now get this — gay.The T faction has built an apparatus to tell gay kids they’re the wrong gender — eerily similar to what anti-gay bigots once told homosexuals.So kids need social transition, puberty blockers, hormones and lopping off healthy body parts.A growing number of gays and lesbians privately fear this system can take children who might become comfortable gay adults and place them on a path of lifelong medicalization. Privately is the operative word. Nothing says “pride” quite like being terrified to say what you believe.The old Christian-right message was that a gay child should become straight. The new Democrat message is a gay child should change bodies.Different pitch. Same refusal to let a gay child simply be gay.Today’s Democrat party is anti-gay.Hey, Colorado Democrats! All the fun you’ve had watching Republican dysfunction in Colorado for the last 20 years was just a preview of what is about to happen to you.The Colorado Republican Party no longer exists as a competitive institution.Republicans did it to themselves. They built a culture around purity tests, with no curiosity about winning elections. Anyone suggesting an appeal to unaffiliated voters was identified as a Republican in Name Only and bounced from the building.Deep-pocketed conservatives kept funding candidates while neglecting the boring, unsatisfying work of winning future elections: community organizing, door knocking, recruitment and ballot chasing. They wanted crops without planting seeds.The result? Colorado’s political press will document every embarrassment of Victor Marx’s doomed campaign, following his clown car while letting the left’s armored truck drive off with the state.A 29-year-old socialist defeated Rep. Diana DeGette. She defended calls for eliminating Israel and declined to call the Boulder firebombing of pro-Israel demonstrators antisemitic.That deserves more scrutiny than whatever Marx said to his dog between breakfast and Kyle Clark’s deadline.So does the growing socialist faction in our legislature. So does Phil Weiser, a progressive law professor and activist. Nobody makes government simpler than law professors.When Republicans tried putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms, Colorado’s media understood people wielding government power deserved scrutiny.Democratic congressional candidate Melat Kiros speaks after winning the Democratic nomination during a primary election night watch party at The Broadway on Tuesday, June 30, 2026, in Denver. (AP Photo/Rebecca Slezak)Now Democrats have elevated misgendering to legal discrimination. School employees must use a student’s chosen name regardless of parental approval, while some policies permit social transition without informing parents.Moses entering a classroom is a constitutional crisis, but keeping parents in the dark is mandatory compassion.The coming Democratic Party meltdown? Quite simply, too many factions inside the party are at odds with their own stated goals.Consider the gay-rights community. It became a juggernaut winning marriage equality. But, like the French Revolution, its victory produced a movement out of control.The LGB part of the LGBT team is at odds with the T part because they want fundamentally different things.The LGB part wants to make it easier for gay kids to come out as — now get this — gay.The T faction has built an apparatus to tell gay kids they’re the wrong gender — eerily similar to what anti-gay bigots once told homosexuals.So kids need social transition, puberty blockers, hormones and lopping off healthy body parts.A growing number of gays and lesbians privately fear this system can take children who might become comfortable gay adults and place them on a path of lifelong medicalization. Privately is the operative word. Nothing says “pride” quite like being terrified to say what you believe.The old Christian-right message was that a gay child should become straight. The new Democrat message is a gay child should change bodies.Different pitch. Same refusal to let a gay child simply be gay.Today’s Democrat party is anti-gay.The same contradiction is consuming women’s equality, one of the strongest pillars of the old left. It is why the left fought so hard for Title IX, so girls would have an opportunity to play sports.Now that same left must welcome boys onto the girls’ court and into their locker room. Again, it is working against its own stated goals.Today’s Democrat party is anti-female.Environmentalists face a similar split. Colorado is increasing electrical demand through electric vehicles, data centers and forced building electrification while eliminating reliable fossil-fuel generation.Colorado’s war on natural gas is equally backward. More than 2.3 billion people still cook with wood, charcoal, crop waste or dung — you know, the stuff that is the most greenhouse-gas emitting.If Democrats really cared about reducing emissions, they would use American natural gas to help poorer countries replace smoky fires with clean burning stoves.“Transition Colorado to nuclear! Send our natural gas to Africa!” is a bumper sticker you’ll never see on a Boulder Subaru.Today’s Democrat party is anti-clean energy.Fights between Colorado Democrats over these issues along with fights over their anti-business agenda will begin to break out in a way the press cannot ignore.None of this means Colorado Republicans will return to power anytime soon.It means Democrats will experience the ravenous and public factionalism Republicans enjoyed for 20 years.Just watch.Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute in Denver and hosts “The Devil’s Advocate with Jon Caldara” on Colorado Public Television Channel 12. His column appears Sundays in Colorado Politics.If the goal is reliable, carbon-free electricity, nuclear power is the obvious answer — no emissions and it works when the wind stops and the sun sets.

Ethical historians condemn the practice, known as “presentism,” of judging historical events, people or cultures, through the lens of today’s moral standards, political beliefs or social norms, rather than understanding them within their own time frame. This is an element of the strategy of the radical left to undermine our pride in America by magnifying our faults and downplaying our virtues and achievements. It’s roots are in higher education where leftist academics dominate faculties and indoctrinate students. It seeps down into public schools controlled by leftist teacher unions, is amplified by the dominant liberal media and echoed in entertainment channels and social media. America is singled out and damned for practicing slavery in our early years, although it was common worldwide for millennia long before the USA was born (and still disgracefully exists in other places). In 1787, after the Revolutionary War when our nation’s founders were crafting the Constitution, the southern colonies would not have joined the union if slavery were abolished. It took 78 years and a Civil War to right that wrong in 1865. The Brits like to brag they outlawed slavery in 1833 before we did. True, but England, founded in 925, took 900 years to get around to that. Long before White Europeans came to these shores, American Indians enslaved other Indians they captured in battle. Blacks in Africa enslaved other Blacks and sold them to slave traders who brought them to America. Ironically, centuries later the descendants of those slaves have the good fortune to live in America rather than in so many suffering countries of Africa today. When America expanded westward, the Indian Wars were predictably won by the more populous and technologically advanced civilization, overwhelming the more primitive one. I’m not celebrating that, just observing the inevitable outcome. War is a constant of human history, with worldwide borders repeatedly changing by right of conquest. No one living today bears any responsibility nor guilt for what has happened in the distant past. The expiration date for “reparations” has long since passed. To borrow a biblical phrase, “let that nation who is without sin cast the first stone.” I’m not suggesting we throw anything down the memory hole to rewrite history and conceal past transgressions. I’m saying we shouldn’t forever obsess on the bad stuff, and that we balance the scales by acknowledging the good stuff. In other words, that was then, this is now; let’s move on. In its criticism of Western civilization in general, the radical left is also obsessed with the sin of “colonization.” This goes back thousands of years practiced by ancient civilizations like the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Persians and Chinese. More recently in the 1500s, modern European colonization surged applying its advanced seagoing technology to intercontinental colonization and ushering in the era of worldwide trade. Some colonial powers were exploitative and brutal; others were better behaved. British rule over India, for example, was initially harsh but later softened to allow the “passive resistance” of Mahatma Ghandi and eventually granting independence. The political roots the Brits left behind led to India ultimately becoming the world’s most populous democracy. Ethical historians condemn the practice, known as “presentism,” of judging historical events, people or cultures, through the lens of today’s moral standards, political beliefs or social norms, rather than understanding them within their own time frame. This is an element of the strategy of the radical left to undermine our pride in America by magnifying our faults and downplaying our virtues and achievements. It’s roots are in higher education where leftist academics dominate faculties and indoctrinate students. It seeps down into public schools controlled by leftist teacher unions, is amplified by the dominant liberal media and echoed in entertainment channels and social media. America is singled out and damned for practicing slavery in our early years, although it was common worldwide for millennia long before the USA was born (and still disgracefully exists in other places). In 1787, after the Revolutionary War when our nation’s founders were crafting the Constitution, the southern colonies would not have joined the union if slavery were abolished. It took 78 years and a Civil War to right that wrong in 1865. The Brits like to brag they outlawed slavery in 1833 before we did. True, but England, founded in 925, took 900 years to get around to that. GETTY IMAGES The Old Slave Mart Museum, building originally used as slave market in South Carolina, Charleston.Long before White Europeans came to these shores, American Indians enslaved other Indians they captured in battle. Blacks in Africa enslaved other Blacks and sold them to slave traders who brought them to America. Ironically, centuries later the descendants of those slaves have the good fortune to live in America rather than in so many suffering countries of Africa today. When America expanded westward, the Indian Wars were predictably won by the more populous and technologically advanced civilization, overwhelming the more primitive one. I’m not celebrating that, just observing the inevitable outcome. War is a constant of human history, with worldwide borders repeatedly changing by right of conquest. No one living today bears any responsibility nor guilt for what has happened in the distant past. The expiration date for “reparations” has long since passed. To borrow a biblical phrase, “let that nation who is without sin cast the first stone.” I’m not suggesting we throw anything down the memory hole to rewrite history and conceal past transgressions. I’m saying we shouldn’t forever obsess on the bad stuff, and that we balance the scales by acknowledging the good stuff. In other words, that was then, this is now; let’s move on. In its criticism of Western civilization in general, the radical left is also obsessed with the sin of “colonization.” This goes back thousands of years practiced by ancient civilizations like the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Persians and Chinese. More recently in the 1500s, modern European colonization surged applying its advanced seagoing technology to intercontinental colonization and ushering in the era of worldwide trade. Some colonial powers were exploitative and brutal; others were better behaved. British rule over India, for example, was initially harsh but later softened to allow the “passive resistance” of Mahatma Ghandi and eventually granting independence. The political roots the Brits left behind led to India ultimately becoming the world’s most populous democracy. America was actually a victim of colonization imposed by the British Empire. But after an admittedly rocky start and a few wars, we ultimately became best friends and allies. This is another case of “that was then, this is now.” Outside of eleven uninhabited small islands sprinkled around the world, America’s colonization is principally our five foreign “territories,” the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands, whose people generally like the relationship and aren’t asking for independence. So, what’s the problem? Like any nation America has had its faults. But any fair assessment that weighs our faults against our virtues far favors the virtues. One in particular immediately comes to mind. The overwhelming contribution of American military might and industrial war-fighting capacity that turned the tide in World War II, leading our allies to victory and saving the free world from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. That, alone, neutralizes any and all of our sins. As the victor, not only didn’t America colonize German and Japan, it helped rebuild both of those countries, reform its governments and stationed 300,000 American NATO troops (including me) in Germany during the Cold War to protect that nation and the rest of Europe from the Soviet Union. Isn’t it ironic that Germany and Japan are, today, among our most steadfast friends and allies. Yet another example of that was then, this is now. Mike Rosen is a Denver-based American radio personality and political commentator.

We are finally getting a clearer picture of what happened during COVID. Not because the people who locked us up, masked our faces and forced unproven chemicals into our bodies have suddenly become transparent, but because Anthony Fauci’s COVID-era diary is coming into public view.This long document makes one thing painfully clear: the people who forced us to surrender our lives to their expertise did not have the expertise they claimed.At best, they were guessing.And when their guesses failed, they did not retreat. They didn’t come clean. They doubled down.Arrogance unbridledOur health, our freedoms, our bodies, our economy, our children’s education were all less important than their unchallenged status as the infallible elite.Yes, Fauci’s diary shows his arrogance. Yes, he seems incapable of admitting error. Yes, he was willing to make “majestic leaps” ahead of the evidence while insisting the rest of us follow his orders.But Fauci is merely a symptom of something more dangerous.Government is at its most powerful and dictatorial precisely when it knows the least.An unknown crisis arrives — and crisis always involves the unknown — and politicians panic. Bureaucrats come up with “answers.” They tell us foundational rules — individual liberty, open debate, fiscal restraint, bodily autonomy and just plain sense — must be suspended.Then they spend money they do not have to keep the whole madness alive.And with the media as cheerleader, they scare the hell out of people to make sure nobody asks uncomfortable questions.Colorado piles onColorado did not merely watch this happen from the sidelines. We did it to ourselves.Gov. Jared Polis and our local governments put you under house arrest. They closed businesses. They restricted worship. They suspended your right to peaceably assemble. They turned neighbors into hall monitors. They treated people trying to earn a living as dangers to society.With the press as their enforcers, they canceled people who refused to mask or take their jab as “murderers,” costing many their livelihoods and personal relationships.Workers were told their jobs were nonessential. You are nonessential!Families were separated as they had to view their loved ones behind glass windows outside nursing homes.Kids were told their smiles, their speech and their ability to see other people were somehow less important than obeying unseen adults in centers of governmental power who did not know what they were doing.And in the cruelest act of all, they robbed children of school.As the Fauci diaries prove, they knew young people were the least at risk of COVID, yet they injured our young the most.“Remote learning” was no learning. It was cruel isolation.For special-needs children like my son who has Down syndrome, it was punishment for a crime they didn’t commit. This crime wasn’t done by Fauci, but by feckless Colorado leaders.These kids who learn through personal contact, social interaction, speech therapy, occupational therapy and the daily structure of being around other human beings were abandoned.That lost time cannot be made back in a government program. This theft compounds over a lifetime.The people who shut down our schools, our world, will say they were following the science. Fauci’s diary ought to make us ask: What science? Whose science?Media enablersWhy isn’t the press doing with COVID what they did to Nixon after Watergate, ruthlessly asking what did you know and when did you know it?Because this wasn’t just a mass injustice of government. It was a mass failure of the Fourth Estate.If the nation’s top COVID bureaucrat was privately acknowledging uncertainty, failure and a lack of meaningful evidence, why did Colorado officials act as if disagreement itself was immoral?They also used money we did not have.The Colorado COVID response exploded government spending and pushed more people into government dependence. Medicaid enrollment in Colorado skyrocketed, and now the state faces the bill.The inflation that followed the federal printing of money was not an act of God. The budget crisis coming to Colorado is not a mystery.The next unknown crisis will come. And when it does, politicians will again tell us fear requires obedience.They will again promise safety in exchange for freedom.They will again insist there is no time for debate, evidence or restraint.Colorado must remember what happened when we believed them.Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

Colorado wants taxpayers to spend another $4.73 billion on passenger rail.Don’t worry. They have a plan.Which is a little like your brother-in-law announcing he’s launching another exciting restaurant venture after his last three restaurants ended in bankruptcy.Please. Tell me where to send the check.The money trainThis week the Front Range Passenger Rail District released its “plan” for their choo-choo, laughingly branded “CoCo,” a desire named streetcar stretching from Fort Collins to Pueblo.According to Independence Institute transportation analyst Randall O’Toole, the project will cost at least $4.73 billion. At least.If that number sounds familiar, it should. It’s nearly a billion dollars more than Denver’s Regional Transportation District promised FasTracks would cost.As the former chairman of RTD, I’ve seen firsthand how these numbers are invented for political marketing. Keep the estimate low enough to win the tax increase. Worry about reality later.We were promised FasTracks would relieve congestion, transform transportation, and be completed by 2017 for $3.8 billion.Instead, taxpayers have already spent about $5.5 billion. RTD says it still needs another $1.6 billion to finish what it promised. Congestion is worse. Ridership is down. And Longmont is still waiting for its train.Passenger rail is Colorado’s abusive boyfriend. It lies. It takes your money. It promises it’ll change this time. And somehow, we keep taking it back.So here we are again.The choo-choo undead never stay dead. Like any good horror movie, they just keep coming back. Every failed rail proposal depends on one thing: taxpayer Alzheimer’s.Forget the promises. Forget the cost overruns, the delays, the unfinished projects. Then buy the next glossy brochure.RTD’s original sales tax increase proposal in the 1970s promised 118 miles of rail by 1980, after which the tax would be reduced.Voters approved the tax. Not one inch of rail was built. The tax was never lowered.Then came FasTracks in 2004, complete with another sales tax increase and another set of promises. The ending wasn’t much different.And now it’s time for a train named after a cross-dressing stripper. On stage number one: Give it up for CoCo!Selling the ‘plan’O’Toole points out something that should embarrass every elected official promoting this proposal. The document isn’t really a plan at all, even though it proudly calls itself A Plan That Works.A real plan asks uncomfortable questions. What if ridership falls short? What if construction costs explode, if changing technology makes the project obsolete, if another transportation investment produces greater benefits?This document asks none of them. Instead, it simply says we’ll spend $332 million in Phase One. Then another $1.7 billion. Then another $2.7 billion.Apparently, recessions never happen. Construction costs never rise. Ridership never disappoints. Politicians never overpromise. Reality simply isn’t modeled.Private businesses don’t operate this way. You open a restaurant and nobody comes, your response isn’t, “Excellent. Let’s immediately open three more locations.”Otherwise, you’d be RTD.One of my favorite CoCo selling points is that people can ride the train to Broncos games. Adorable.CoCo carries roughly 500 passengers. Empower Field holds around 76,000 fans. Congratulations. You’ve solved approximately one bathroom line.Then there are the economic claims. The report insists every taxpayer dollar invested somehow creates five dollars in economic benefit.Awesome! Government planners have discovered a machine that turns one taxpayer dollar into five dollars. They should stop building trains and take over Wall Street.But here’s the question missing from every glossy brochure: What else could Colorado do with $4.7 billion? Economists call it opportunity cost.Opportunity costAccording to CDOT’s own 10-year transportation plan, that same amount of money would fund the state’s 23 most expensive transportation projects: Floyd Hill. Vail Pass. Eisenhower Tunnel repairs. Major reconstruction on I-25 north of Denver. Bridge replacements. Colorado Springs improvements. Grand Junction improvements. Twenty-three major transportation projects.Or — one train.If the goal is reducing traffic congestion with nearly $5 billion, it’s difficult to imagine a less effective investment than passenger rail.This isn’t rail versus nothing. It’s rail versus everything else.Colorado isn’t suffering from a shortage of transportation needs. It’s suffering from a shortage of priorities.FasTracks already taught us that rail mega-projects routinely cost more than promised, take longer than promised, and deliver less than promised.Before Colorado asks taxpayers to finance another multibillion-dollar railroad, perhaps government should finish paying for the last one.Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

On TABOR Talk we discuss how Colorado Legislators are trying to get you to give up your TABOR refunds forever. Will you let them have it?

It was no surprise that the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s executive order denying citizenship to children born in the U.S. to parents who were here illegally or were birthright tourists visiting the country on a temporary visa. The latter group is made up of foreigners who game the system by coming here for the sole purpose of birthing a child (or twins) to get the kid(s) U.S. citizenship, then returning home with their anchor baby for future use.While I agree with Trump’s intent, doing this with an executive order clearly overstepped his bounds and was easily nixed by the Supremes. An act of Congress is required which Democrats would certainly have blocked.Nonetheless, by taking the case, it gave SCOTUS, with a 6-3 majority of conservative justices, an opportunity to also make a judgment on the matter of birthright citizenship. This has been a debatable issue with laws and court precedents going back and forth for two centuries. There’s precedent in taking either side. Unfortunately, perhaps with misguided honorable intentions, Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett couldn’t bring themselves to take the decisive option and join their conservative colleagues to resolve the issue and voted with the three leftist, “living-Constitution” justices who favor open borders and have little allegiance to original intent.Roberts and Coney ignored other valid arguments and centered their case on a controversial interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment and a claim that the nation’s founders adopted British common law basing citizenship on the “soil,” jus soli, the place where a child was born. Some founders agreed, some didn’t, but virtually all rejected the British form of government which led to the Revolutionary War. The majority ruling leaned on the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark in which the court asserted U.S. citizenship for a man born to Chinese resident aliens in the U.S. who were lawfully here but not U.S citizens and were subjects of the Emperor of China.So, the Wong ruling shouldn’t pertain to the issue of citizenship for children of illegal aliens.Four of the six conservative justices, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Thomas, dissented. They believe citizenship is based on the “blood,” jus sanguinis, the nationality, roots and creed of a child’s parent, which is the dominant global rule for determining nationality at birth. Clarence Thomas’s 91-page dissent argued that some jurists have historically misapplied the Fourteenth Amendment which was specifically designed to secure equal rights for freed blacks after the Civil War.Thomas declared, “The Court has repurposed the Fourteenth Amendment to protect its own set of preferred rights that the Reconstruction Congress never contemplated and that cannot find support in its text. Today, the Court does so again by recognizing a constitutional right to citizenship for the children of all foreign birth tourists and illegal aliens.”Its “Citizenship Clause” reads: “All persons naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside.” As it applies to foreigners that key phrase, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” doesn’t just mean subject to our laws. The framers of the amendment intended that allegiance to the U.S. be exclusive and to no other country. Foreign tourists legally or illegally in the U.S. are subject to our laws but not our political jurisdiction. They owe no allegiance to the U.S. and their children born here should have no automatic right to American citizenship.The same Congress that crafted the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866 also passed a civil rights law in 1868 restricting American citizenship to those born here and “not subject to any foreign power.” In that law, Rep. John Bingham of Ohio (who also authored the Fourteenth Amendment) confirmed that “Every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen.” That right was not granted to foreign visitors legally or illegally present in our country.Unlike the millions of foreigners who have entered our country illegally in recent years, unlawfully overstayed their visas, or failed to show up for their mandated asylum hearing, the flood of immigrants who came to these shores during our nation’s founding weren’t here illegally. For today’s foreigners, U.S. citizenship is a privilege that may be earned but is not a right. This latest SCOTUS ruling was wrong again but may not be the last word.In his dissent, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that Congress has the latitude to add new exceptions that respond to modern problems like illegal immigration. We’ll see.Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for Complete Colorado.

Why is it that Victor Marx is going to become a superb governor? Because he’s the self-proclaimed world’s fastest at disarming someone holding a gun to his head. Seriously, watch the videos. It’s pretty impressive.How could I not vote for him?Think that’s ridiculous? During negotiations over the Colorado River Compact, things will get heated. A governor who can snatch a pistol away with his bare hands might just save Colorado’s water supply.If Attorney General Phil Weiser could disarm an armed attacker just a little faster, he’d probably get my vote instead. I’m a single-issue voter.You may value other qualifications. You might be looking for a governor who “may” have killed people, or launched missile attacks, or led some 150 successful paramilitary rescues of women and children.Agreed, these are all needed skills to be a successful governor, but snatching guns with your hands is definitely the most important.Sadly, I have to admit there is the slightest possibility Victor Marx won’t become Colorado’s next governor, because of, um, voter fraud.So, after the stolen election what will Colorado look like a year from now?Pretty ugly.Democrats gone wildThe national media is focused on the anti-Semitic socialist who won the Democratic primary to replace Diana DeGette. More important to Colorado’s future, though, is what happened in the legislative primaries.Several Democratic lawmakers lost to candidates even further to the left. Even if Democrats don’t gain a single legislative seat this fall, the legislature itself is going to become more progressive.Given the anti-president environment that usually accompanies a midterm election, and the hefty anti-Trump hate in Colorado, don’t be surprised if Democrats expand their legislative seats to a veto-proof majority.We’ll likely have a progressive academic as governor paired with the most left-leaning legislature in Colorado history.And you’ll find yourself casually browsing real estate listings in Texas.The first target will almost certainly be the Labor Peace Act.For nearly 80 years, it has been Colorado’s uneasy compromise between organized labor and employers. It has prevented Colorado from becoming either a Right-to-Work state, as business groups prefer, or a forced-union-dues state, as many unions would like.Twice in the past two years Gov. Jared Polis vetoed legislation that would have dismantled that compromise. Phil Weiser almost certainly signs it.Then comes technology.Several of Polis’ most controversial vetoes involved legislation that many in Colorado’s growing tech sector warned would make the state a hostile place to innovate.One bill restricted companies from using pricing algorithms to recommend prices for products and services. Another prohibited software and data companies from recommending rental rates to landlords.Whether you agree with those policies isn’t really the point. Companies deciding where to invest will increasingly view Colorado as a state eager to regulate first and compete later.If it moves, regulate itExpect more regulation elsewhere as well.Rideshare companies will likely face additional reporting and operational mandates, which usually means higher costs that eventually find their way into your Uber receipt.Social media companies could be required to provide more information to government regulators while facing new restrictions on content moderation.Along with high energy prices and intermittent power, the dream of Colorado being a tech hub will dwindle.Government itself may become even less transparent. Polis vetoed legislation that would have made Colorado’s open-records process slower, more expensive and more opaque. Under a new administration, that bill could easily become law.Gun owners should also brace themselves.During his eight years in office, Polis repeatedly insisted he opposed an outright ban on so-called assault weapons. He signed enough gun-control legislation to make Colorado the most gun-regulated state in the nation, but he drew the line there. No ban on “assault weapons” (guns that function the same as every other gun, but look meaner).Gov. Weiser will gleefully sign the ban.No one has ever confused Jared Polis with Barry Goldwater.But after a year of a Weiser administration working alongside an even more progressive legislature, Colorado working families, business owners and gun owners may discover something they never imagined possible. We’ll miss the days when Polis was governor.By this time next year those of us who have been watching the regulatory elite turn Colorado into the lethargic, unaffordable, overpriced state it is might regret Victor Marx isn’t performing exorcisms in the governor’s mansion.Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

Happy 250th Birthday, America! You look fabulous. As all the cool countries are saying, “250 is the new 230.”The Declaration of Independence wasn’t merely an announcement of war against a tyrant. It was the most revolutionary political document ever written.The Declaration was a landmark in human development, perhaps the landmark of all human history.For the first time government was no longer affirmed sovereign. The individual was.That simple idea changed the world.You rule yourself. Your life belongs to you. Your liberty belongs to you. Your happiness is yours to pursue as you define it. Your property belongs to you.Government exists not to rule over you, but to secure your rights, to protect you from, well, government.The grievancesThe part of the Declaration rarely quoted during patriotic speeches isn’t the soaring language about liberty. It’s Jefferson’s long list of grievances against King George, the “causes which impel them to the separation.”Those grievances are worth study. Because they’re back.Reading them today, I can’t help wondering what our Founders would think of our government today, Colorado’s in particular.Would they find today’s overlords less oppressive? I doubt it.Jefferson wrote of the king, “He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.”Colorado lawmakers and governor just dissolved two-thirds of the elected RTD Board of Directors, replacing them with hand-picked lackeys.They dissolved a Representative House. The representatives of the people can be troublesome, might be an obstacle to their plans of statewide trolleys. Best to install yes-men.Swarms of officersJefferson complained the king had “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”New offices since Polis became guv alone include the Energy and Carbon Management Commission — created just after voters shot down restriction on oil and gas and on a mission to end drilling (as you might notice in your energy bills). There’s also the Behavioral Health Administration, the Department of Early Childhood, the Prescription Drug Affordability Board, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and the Just Transition Office.I could fill the page with new offices.In the last decade alone, the state has added more than 11,500 more employees, growing 21%.Swarms of Officers? Indeed.To “eat out our substance” in the same period the state needed to hire 28% more tax collectors at the Department of Revenue and 25% more form-checkers at the Department of Regulations. You will comply.Consent of the governedJefferson also listed the top grievance: “For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.”Really? Do I need to spell this one out?In Colorado, consent is spelled T-A-B-O-R.Today, lawmakers simply rename taxes as “fees” so they can avoid consent.To collect those “fees,” they’ve created bureaucracies with names that sound like they were generated by George Orwell’s artificial intelligence:Clean Screen Authority. Capitol Parking Authority. Statewide Tolling Authority. Statewide Transportation Enterprise, Statewide Bridge and Tunnel Enterprise.Then there’s the Healthcare Affordability and Sustainability Enterprise to collect hospital bed taxes “fees.” How about the Clean Transit Enterprise? Or the Community Access Enterprise? Lest we forget the Nonattainment Area Pollution Mitigation Enterprise, to tax every delivery you get and raise your gas tax.If it sounds confusing enough, maybe you won’t notice it’s taking your money without permission.By 2023, these fees extract $23 billion a year from Coloradans without voter approval.Since TABOR became law, state government has collected well more than a quarter-trillion dollars outside its voter-approved tax structure.Think about that.Without your consent, government has taken nearly $42,000 for every man, woman and child in Colorado.For a family of four, that’s almost $170,000. Two-hundred-fifty years ago, taxation without consent like this prompted Americans to dump tea into Boston Harbor and take to arms.Government fatigueJefferson wrote of the king, “He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.”Colorado has well more than 5,000 governments and special districts.There is physically no way a citizen could keep up with the legislature, school boards, city councils, county commissions, water districts, transit districts, and the like. Each have their own taxing and regulatory powers to which you must comply.Hell, the wait at the DMV has fatigued us enough.What would Jefferson write for a modern Colorado Declaration of Independence?Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

On June 23, 2026, the federal U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas sentenced eight violent protestors convicted of assaulting the Prairieland Detention Center, an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, in an anti-Independence Day attack on July 4, 2025. Their stiff punishments rangedfrom 30 to 70 years in prison for rioting and providing material support to terrorists, among other charges. An exception was made for Benjamin Song, the group’s leader, who got a total of 100 years with an additional conviction piled on for attempted murder.Texas is a Republican red state that isn’t soft on these kinds of criminals. A court in Minnesota, California, Seattle, Oregon, Illinois, New York or other Democrat-controlled blue states might have let them off with community service or even found them not guilty. Don’t be surprised if some left-wing legal organization pays for legal fees to appeal the verdict and the sentencing all the way to SCOTUS. Several other protestors were scheduled to be sentenced on July 1.Prosecutors said the protestors vandalized vehicles, launched fireworks at the ICE facility, wounded an Alvarado police officer with a firearm and shot at unarmed corrections officers. The thugs were identified as a cell of radical ANTIFA left-wing anarchists who claim to be anti-fascist although they resort to standard fascist tactics in their violent protests.A preposterous defenseThe defense presented by lawyers who represented this bunch was preposterous. As was expected, none of the defendants took to the stand to testify at the trial. Meagan Morris’s attorney, D. Miles Brisette, claimed Meagan went to Alvarado that night expecting a peaceful demonstration and “felt deceived by what unfolded.” Likewise, Zachary Evetts was portrayed by his attorney, Patrick McLain, as a pacifist who also expected a peaceful protest claiming the fireworks were only intended to gain the attention of the (illegal alien) detainees so that they could hear the protestors’ (screamed) words of support. Apparently, this was the collective script of the group’s defense who should be treated like misguided juvies deserving nothing harsher than being grounded for a week or, at worst, sent to a reform school. This innocent-lambs defense is especially incredulous when the perps are ANTIFA thugs who proudly love to bust heads. A department of Homeland Security spokeswoman applauded the stiff sentences as “a win for the rule of law.”Given its customary liberal bias, the spin in an Associated Press story was sympathetic to the protestors, including quotes from Phillip Hayes, the attorney representing the aforementioned Benjamin Song who was found guilty of attempted murder. Hayes described the protestors as just “a bunch of kids and young adults who really have a big heart and really wanted their voice to be heard. It was never intended that anybody get hurt. It was never intended that any shots would be fired.”Following the Marxist playbookReally? So, why did they bring guns? Their real intent was clearly to obstruct the DHS and ICE from doing their jobs which is also the intent of violent mobs that interfere with ICE officers all over the country, especially in Minnesota, under the pretense of social justice and compassion for their wonderful neighbors who just happen to be illegally present in the United States. Baloney! The leaders of this movement and its paid-provocateurs by financiers like George Soros is to “resist” the governance of the Trump administration and advance the open borders and progressive Democrat socialist agenda.Civil violence is right out of the Marxist handbook of permanent revolution.The DFW (for Dallas-Fort Worth) Support Committee, providing financial support for the legal defense of the protestors, said the defendants were wrongly being “thrown away for the rest of their lives.” It added, “The egregious sentencing is to send a message to anyone with the same beliefs.” No. These sentences weren’t punishment for the “beliefs” of these criminals. It was for their unlawful “behavior.” And I certainly hope this sends a message discouraging violent criminal action by radical activists and the useful idiots who are duped into following them. The message: “If you commit a crime, you’ll do the time.”I greatly doubt that any of these criminals will spend the rest of their lives in prison. It’s more than likely that their stiff sentences will be reduced during the appeals process, especially if they come in front of liberal judges. Failing that, the next Democrat in the White House, maybe President AOC, will commute their terms or, even worse, pardon them and throw in the Presidential Medal of Freedom as a bonus.Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for Complete Colorado.

If you’ve been reading my columns, you’ve noticed I’m basically illiterate. I blame my dyslexia and public education, but my Olympic-level laziness could be the driving factor.Anyway, I basically can’t read (and, still, I graduated from CU Boulder, so another endorsement of public higher education).So, for me to recommend a book is like a nun recommending sexy lingerie. How can you take it seriously? But how can it not get you thinking?As we celebrate Colorado’s 150th birthday, may I strongly suggest you read, or re-read, James Michener’s classic novel “Centennial,” which arguably presents one of the most accurate portraits of the Colorado character.A Colorado storyI understand this is a sizable ask. The book is massive. Now that phonebooks are extinct, parents put “Centennial” on chairs for their little kids to reach the table.I listen to books on tape. So, when I saw this book took 50 hours, I almost went back to my comic book (which we now call “graphic novels,” like that is somehow going to impress women).It’s not that “Centennial” gives an accurate accounting of Colorado’s history, it doesn’t. It’s that it colors a painting of the true Colorado spirit and the bravery of those who built this beautiful, once rugged state.Michener masterfully shows our dry high-plains as a stage for life and death struggles. He describes the personalities that would say goodbye to all they knew to chance a survival in an untamed, savage and mysterious territory.If there was one word that encapsulated his story, it’s the same word that encapsulates what made Colorado the destination state for hundreds of years: risk.To modern generations “risk” is seen as “danger” or synonymous with gambling, a roll of the dice. But that’s not risk.“Risk” is the quest to manifest a goal over calculated odds. Risk is to employ one’s talents and resources to obtain a potentially unreachable outcome.Every entrepreneur understands risk, knowing even when you do everything right, failure is still an easy outcome.Michener’s book captures a Colorado now lost. It’s a Colorado where courageous people risk writing their own biography. To build. To create. To do it their way, or not do it at all.Mitchner’s book became a sensation about the time the nation was celebrating it’s bicentennial. It’s story, the Colorado story, was a proxy for the American story.As we look at 150 years of Colorado statehood, we also get to examine how Colorado has changed since “Centennial” was first published in 1974. Growing up in the 1970s in Colorado, I saw that spirit of risk and self-direction.The state was still drawing oil-and-gas wildcatters, artists of all stripes and even a new tech entrepreneur that dealt in one and zeros, not rocks and cattle.Mountains remain, culture changesNow 50 years later, it’s hard to recognize many of the Colorado qualities Michener celebrated.Colorado no longer beckons people to be left alone. It beckons people who want someone else to manage things. The frontier mentality has given way to the HOA mentality.Risk has become something government promises to protect us from instead of something free people willingly embrace.Every new regulation is sold as safety. Every permit is justified as protection. Every entrepreneurial gamble is treated with suspicion until a bureaucrat approves it.We still have mountains, rivers and those impossible sunsets that make even lifelong Coloradans stop for a moment. The scenery survived.But scenery alone isn’t the magic.The magic was always the people willing to bet everything on themselves — men and women who crossed plains, climbed passes, dug mines, started businesses, built ranches and towns, and accepted failure was the price of having the freedom to try.Michener understood Colorado wasn’t merely a place. It was a state of mind.Reading “Centennial” today feels less like reading historical fiction and more like opening a time capsule from a state that’s slipping away. It reminds us this state wasn’t made extraordinary by government. It was made extraordinary by people.It was made extraordinary by people who demanded to be free enough to fail spectacularly or succeed beyond imagination.As Colorado turns 150, I hope we remember the spirit that created it. Because mountains are forever. A culture isn’t.And once that spirit is gone, no amount of preservation can bring back the Colorado that Michener knew.Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

The simultaneous NBA and NFL playoffs, known as the second season, can be almost as exhausting and frustrating for the fans as it is for the players. For Avs and Nuggets fans, this year was especially disappointing, even though we knew that 15 of the 16 teams in the playoff bracket are fated to lose their last game.It’s an alleged truism that the NBA and NHL playoffs require a different kind of play than in the regular season. I think that’s a falseism. The leagues don’t change the rules for the playoffs, they change the way refs officiate. Openly changing the rules invites public controversy and requires negotiation with the players’ union on the CBA. I’m biased because the Avs and Nuggets are skill teams more than overly physical and dirty ones. The Avs won the Presidents’ Trophy having the best regular season record in the NHL over 82 games. It’s senseless to make teams play under one set of rules in the first six months of the season and different unwritten ones in the last two.Blowing the whistleThe NBA has the bigger problem. Officiating is more difficult than in other sports. Play is so fast and congested in the paint and under the rim that officials routinely make an educated guess as whether a foul was committed and by whom. That’s unavoidable but hedging the rules isn’t. The playoffs should be the highest-quality version of the sport, not one over emphasizing defense creating inconsistent calls by different refs with subjective judgment on “marginal contact.” There used to be the “one arm, bent elbow” rule allowing a defensive player to place one hand with a bent elbow on an offensive player’s back or place one forearm on his back, maintaining contact only as long as the defender isn’t pushing or dislodging the player. Today, you see a defender bear-hugging an offensive player or wrapping himself around Nikola Jokic in a pretzel hold. That’s wrestling not basketball. In the NHL, the unofficial playoff rules overly tolerate interference penalties, cross-checking, and holding.In both leagues, management wants more physicality, fewer whistles and more drama. Teams short on superstars exploit that with brute force, putting a target on the superstars’ backs. Serious injuries contributed to both the Avs and Nuggets eliminations in the playoffs. The skating-wounded included Avs superstars Makar and McKinnon. Their 4-0 loss to Vegas in the third round wasn’t the same team that beat the Kings 4-0 and the Wild 4-1.I’m no pacifist when it comes to rough physical play in the NHL. The fans thrive on that. Fighting is condoned in the rules. For anything short of homicide, you just get two or five minutes in the penalty box. (In other sports you get ejected.) Hit a guy in the head with your stick and you get 2 minutes in the box or a few more if it draws blood. Hockey and football are true contact sports. Basketball isn’t and ought not to be. Compared to the padding and helmets worn by players in the NHL and NFL, NBA players suit up in their underwear.What’s with the spooning?It really annoys me to watch the OKC Thunder Alex Caruso’s defensive malpractice spooning Jamal Murray. He’s virtually in Murray’s shorts. It’s a foul as well as obscene. Or the low-skill Isaia Hartenstein blatantly pulling on Jokic’s jersey while holding his arm in a hammer lock. On offense, SGA habitually initiates contact going to the basket then sharply veering sideways into a defender who’s gets unjustly called for blocking. (SGA learned that move form James Harden.) This is a travesty and everyone knows it. Why does the NBA let them and others get away with this stuff? Most fans don’t like it.The NBA has a flopping penalty but won’t enforce it, leery of the nightly controversy. The NHL, likewise, has an “embellishment” penalty but rarely calls it because its players’ culture disapproves of flopping.One final note. During the playoffs, networks like ESPN and TNT displaced Altitude’s cable coverage of Avs and Nuggets games. I much prefer Altitude’s local broadcasters. The network guys often prattle on ignoring what’s going on in the game. The courtside interviews with players, conducted by a token female commentator, are worthless with stock questions like, ”How are you going to close the gap in the second half.” With stock answers like, “We need to be more aggressive, play better defense, and hit more 3’s.” Then the networks distractingly run the recorded interview on split screen while play has already started at the beginning of a quarter. Ugh!Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for Complete Colorado.

There are few things more satisfying to watch than socialists getting mugged by reality.The Sundance Film Festival is invading my hometown of Boulder early next year. Sundance drew 85,000 attendees last year in Park City, Utah. Boulder’s hotel room inventory is about 2,900.If you’ve ever wondered what happens when Hollywood’s anti-capitalist elite collide with basic supply and demand, we’re about to find out.When things don’t go as planned, the planner-class doubles down on its religion: more planning. When restrictions, rules, permits and fees don’t produce the desired outcome, more restrictions, rules, permits and fees are needed.Sundance is an event for and by well-heeled, artsy, socialist elites. So, Boulder is perfect. Colorado progressives can role-play a modern-day Gertrude Stein offering finger sandwiches at a salon of the country’s professional virtue signalers.But where will the elite stay?No room at the innI’m guessing Robert DeNiro’s concern for the downtrodden won’t tempt him to bunk at the homeless shelter. Jane Fonda won’t crash with the Women Studies majors in some CU dorm room.Looking online, I see rooms at the Hotel Boulderado during the film festival list for $10,357 a night, then drop to $279 a night after Sundance.Fortunately, Hollywood’s A-list can always retreat to Boulder’s luxury accommodations: the Comfort Inn at the very edge of town, with a few beds at over $800 a night. Better hurry. George Clooney and entourage are rumored to be eyeing them.This is not a problem if attendees who preach the forced sharing of wealth are willing to share a hotel room with 28 other people (yes, that math is correct).Keep in mind, many hotel rooms have two beds, so that’s fewer than 15 people per bed. You could get that number down even more if lesser celebrities sleep on the floor.The most enjoyable line from a recent Gazette story: “Boulder’s hotels, meanwhile, have committed to making 70% of their room inventory available during the festival at affordable rates, according to Visit Boulder…. The organization is promoting a ‘host with heart’ approach and has published a guide with suggested prices for property owners.”Is there anything more precious than the NPR gentry ignoring reality and arbitrarily “suggesting” prices between private parties?There is something delightfully progressive about believing supply and demand can be defeated with positive thinking and a price guide.‘Hosts with hearts’Anyway, the most they suggest the owner of a four-bedroom house rent it for is $15,000 for 11 nights. Making all the homes I found on Airbnb renting for up to $175,000 for 11 nights, well, not exactly “hosts with hearts.”Might surprise you, but you just can’t rent out your home or even a room on sites like Airbnb in leftist cities without government paperwork. You need a stranger’s permission to have people you choose stay in your own damn house.Invite your friend to stay for the week? Perfectly legal.Let him hand you $100 to help cover groceries and utilities? Government paperwork.Have him buy you dinner every night or give you a Picasso? Back to no problem.It’s said the city has issued about 600 short-term rental licenses. Not nearly enough for the Sundance rush.What’s the solution? A new and different permitting scheme, of course.Enter the fresh-and-improved Festival Lodging Rental License for your place, but only when the city authorizes a “Special Festival Event.” To be a “host with a heart,” the city’s privileged must officially sanction the party your guest might attend.In the endless meetings of planners poring over spreadsheets and debating how to accommodate Hollywood, did anyone raise a hand and ask, “Maybe we should just end the rental-license requirements and let people do what they want with their homes?”Mugged by realityThe poetry of all this is when Tinseltown’s “capitalism is evil” crowd comes together to fawn all over each other, it will be in a town that’s overflowing in black-market housing.When 85,000 festivalgoers arrive looking for 2,900 hotel rooms and some 1,000 legal home rentals, the market will do what markets always do: find a way.The irony is delicious. A festival filled with people who spend their lives warning us about the evils of capitalism may only function because of an underground economy.Nothing says “capitalism is evil” quite like desperately searching Craigslist for a place to sleep.Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

On TABOR Talk we discuss how Colorado Legislators are trying to get you to give up your TABOR refunds forever. Will you let them have it?

It makes no sense to be a Republican in Colorado. Or a Democrat for that matter.On the day I turned 18, even before I bought my first legal 3.2 beer (remember 3.2 beer?), I went to the courthouse and registered to vote (remember registering to vote?). I joined the Republican Party.Even at 18, I knew not affiliating with a party diluted the power of my vote.Sure, everyone gets to vote in November. But one vote among millions isn’t nearly as powerful as a vote in a primary.Back then, unaffiliated voters were locked out of primaries. Republicans voted in Republican primaries, Democrats in Democratic primaries.The smaller the electorate, the more your vote mattered.As a Republican primary voter, my ballot was one of only a couple hundred thousand. As a delegate to the Republican state assembly, my vote was one of only a few thousand. At the county assembly it was one of hundreds. At my neighborhood caucus, I was one of fewer than 10.At one point, my vote represented more than 10% of all votes cast. That’s leverage.Rise of the unaffiliatedsThen came Proposition 108 in 2016, which I voted against.Now those smug, sanctimonious “independents” get both a Republican and Democratic primary ballot and can choose which one to return.Yet my desire to leverage my vote never changed. So I became unaffiliated.And like most Colorado voters, I never looked back.We unaffiliateds get to vote in either primary. This year I’ve decided to return a Democratic ballot.To my fellow independents, isn’t it nice having choices? Those poor schmucks still clinging to the romance of party affiliation, shackled to organizations that long ago wandered past the hey-guys-let’s-not-get-crazy zone, don’t have the freedom we do.The still-affiliated can enjoy the purity of party membership while checking voicemail on their flip-phone, insulting Democrats by fax and waiting for next week’s TV Guide to arrive.To those still registered with a party, investing in Beanie Babies while wondering where the local Radio Shack moved, let me explain why I left.First, I live in the People’s Republic of Boulder.If I were still a Republican, I’d have almost no choices in the primary election. Only three of the 15 races on my Republican ballot are contested. Eight races have no candidate at all.No Republicans in Boulder has finally trickled down to no Republicans running for office.And unless you’re in complete denial, which has become a permanent condition among many Colorado Republicans, you know absolutely none of the Republican candidates on my Boulder ballot are going to win in November.That includes, sadly, Barbara Kirkmeyer, the only sane Republican running for governor.Now, if you live in a conservative part of the state where there are meaningful local races and candidates who can actually win, maybe returning a Republican ballot makes sense.But here’s the point: you don’t have to be a Republican to do that anymore.The only temptation I have to return a Republican ballot is to help Kirkmeyer win the nomination.Yes, she’ll lose to the Democratic nominee in November. Those in denial don’t need to flood my inbox explaining how me saying so will somehow cause that loss — message already received.But Barbara won’t embarrass the party. She won’t frighten suburban voters. And marginally speaking, she’d help Gabe Evans and a handful of legislative candidates who actually have a shot.Primaries decide electionsI’ve weighed that consideration against another reality.The winners of the Democratic primaries for governor and attorney general will almost certainly be the winners in November.The primary is the election.Democrats should probably leave their party, too. Why voluntarily surrender half your primary choices?Why chain yourself to a party label when Colorado law now lets you shop both aisles?The only remaining reason to stay registered with a party is if you actively participate in caucuses and assemblies and want to help place candidates on the primary ballot without petitioning on.If you’re registered with a party but never attend caucuses, you’re simply limiting your options under the current rules.Me, I’m returning a Democratic ballot. Not because I’m a Democrat. But because that’s where my vote has the most influence.And the prospect of a Colorado run by Democratic Socialists Phil Weiser and Jena Griswold is terrifying enough to make me spend it there.Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

I am personally responsible for helping overpay socialists to make Colorado unaffordable, overregulated and one windstorm away from a power blackout. I failed you.Colorado legislators already get automatic inflation raises. You know, just like your job (I’m assuming the sarcasm bled through that one).No private-sector worker has that kind of protection forever. Even union jobs eventually meet reality. Ask Spirit Airlines employees.And that’s the problem.What happens when lawmakers no longer depend on the private sector for most of their livelihood? They stop understanding the people they supposedly represent. They get disconnected.And has Colorado ever had more of a disconnected team of politicians?Part-timersIt wasn’t that long ago legislators made around $17,000 for their 120 days of meddling under the Gold Dome. The idea was simple: take a few months away from your regular job to represent your community.Back then, lawmakers lived in the same economy as the rest of us because they worked in it.Today legislators make more than $50,000 for their 120-day session, plus a hefty per diem ranging from $99 to $193 a day. That means many are pulling in at least $500 a day to pass laws making Colorado steadily less affordable.But can you really put a price on outlawing ketchup packets after giving illegal immigrants Medicaid during a budget crisis?And when legislators say they work year-round, understand the translation. They call it citizen “engagement.” The rest of us call it campaigning. Paying them our tax dollars to do so is the ultimate pro-incumbent scam.Naturally, all people want more money. Politicians are no different. They just have more power than you do.Now, they couldn’t just openly vote themselves a raise. That looks bad. Elections, optics — all that nonsense. Also, that would be direct, transparent and honest. They wouldn’t know how to do it.The commissionSo they did what politicians always do when they want a predetermined outcome without their fingerprints. They created a commission.I know. I served on it. The then House minority leader is a friend and pressured me to be on it. Then she quit the legislature to save her own sanity (I’ll get even with you, Rose Pugliese! Payback is a b****, lady).The Independent State Elected Official Compensation Commission — how Soviet sounding can you get? Along with the Senate minority appointee, we were basically the only two members who thought maybe performance should factor into compensation.Tiny detail: the commission was supposedly making “recommendations.” Except they really weren’t recommendations at all.Recommendations are given to people who later decide how to act on something. But the law creating our little salary-washing operation was designed so if the legislature did absolutely nothing, our “recommendations” automatically became law.That’s the game — no “action” required.Create a commission. Fill it with people who will give you what you want; in this case to recommend raises. Structure the law so lawmakers don’t have to vote for the raises. Then let “taking no action” become the action.If you’re getting flashbacks to “The Sting,” that’s understandable.My idea was we recommend the legislature cut their legislative session from 120 days to 90 days, but keep their salary the same. That would be a huge raise per day worked and free up another month a year to make money in the real, like their constituents.Lots of states have 90-day sessions or less, and some, like Texas, have 90-day every other year.The commission dismissed my idea.Another member proposed tying some portion of compensation to state performance. Not exactly commission sales, but at least some accountability for affordability, economic growth, or fiscal stability. Not quite working on commission, but definitely a bonus structure.That idea didn’t fly either.Back-door pay raiseInstead, the commission embraced government’s oldest salary justification: “Other governments are doing it.”So beyond their automatic inflation increases, legislators now get another 6% raise they never had to publicly approve.The next governor gets an 11% bump.The state treasurer gets 28% more.And the attorney general gets a staggering 45% increase.While we sit in a budget shortfall of their own “hey let’s put everyone including illegals on Medicaid” making, they get rewarded for it. So if you were giving them your annual employee review based on performance, would they get this raise?Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

DENVER–Gov. Jared Polis last week rejected another handful of bills passed by the Democrat-controlled Colorado legislature, bringing his veto total for the recently adjourned session to an even dozen. Modest sounding enough given the more than 400 bills passed, but still a personal record for the term-limited Polis over his eight years in office.As reported by Complete Colorado, the prior week saw Polis take his veto pen to a half-dozen other bills, including a highly contentious effort by his fellow Democrats to unwind Colorado’s longstanding two-vote process for private sector unionization.The latest batch of vetoed bills ranged from limiting what small businesses pay in “swipe fees,” to whether your Pad Thai comes with an unsolicited plastic fork, to suing federal immigration agents in state court, among other issues.Latest vetoesStart with Senate Bill 134, which among other things barred credit card companies from charging transaction fees on the amount of sales taxes charged. House Majority Leader Monica Duran called it a fight against Wall Street banks lining their pockets at the expense of Colorado’s small businesses. Polis called it legally risky, potentially unimplementable, and probably a job better left to the federal government. The Electronic Payments Coalition, representing the banks and credit card networks, unsurprisingly called the veto a prudent and responsible decision.Then there was Senate Bill 184, which would have expanded the types of cancer covered under workers’ compensation for firefighters. Fire chiefs and local governments asked Polis to kill it, arguing it would strain the Colorado Firefighter Trust. the bill also excluded several hundred state-employed firefighters, which bill sponsors essentially admitted was intended to avoid a fiscal note in a belt-tightening budget year.On the surveillance pricing front, House Bill 1210 would have stopped companies from using personal data gleaned from online activity to set individualized prices and wages. Polis said he agreed with the concept, but found the bill too broad, adding that an Artificial Intelligence disclosure bill he recently signed already handles the problem.House Bill 1236, an arbitration reform bill, would have given consumers more recourse when the fine print of a terms-of-service agreement signs away their right to go to court over disputes, but which Polis determined was too vague and potentially expensive. “Making it harder to use arbitration will push more cases into litigation, raising costs, adding delays, and increasing uncertainty for Colorado consumers, workers, and businesses alike,” Polis wrote in his veto letter. He encouraged the sponsors to try again next year, which would push the issue off into the hands of Colorado’s next governor.Senate Bill 146 would have required restaurants to stop automatically handing out plastic utensils and condiment packets unless a customer asks. Denver and Breckenridge already have similar rules, which Polis noted is exactly the point — local governments can handle it, and the state shouldn’t be in the business of mandating what goes in your takeout bag.And finally, Senate Bill 005, which would have let Coloradans sue Immigration and Customs Adminsitration (ICE) agents in state court for civil rights violations. Polis said he liked the idea in theory but found the bill too narrow, as it only covered civil immigration enforcement. “This bill doesn’t apply to any other context besides civil immigration enforcement – including rights violations in protests, elections, prisons, or the workplace,” said Polis. “For example, even in the narrow context of immigration, the bill doesn’t cover violations of constitutional rights during criminal investigations in immigration.”A broader version, Senate Bill 176, was floated in the legislature but died when several Democrats joined Republicans to kill it before it ever reached the governor’s desk.The deadline for Gov. Polis to sign or veto legislation from the 2026 session passed on June 2.

The word “moderate” is a fashionable term these days as the remedy to the nation’s sharply divided politics, but it’s highly overrated and largely inaccurate. A stark example is Democrat Abibail Spanberger who was elected governor of Virginia in 2025 as a self-declared moderate, promising not to redistrict the state if elected, having branded gerrymandering as “detrimental to our democracy” as a Congresswoman in 2019. In her first year in office, she signed a bill that would gerrymander Virginia giving Democrats a 10-1 advantage in the U.S. House, from 6-5. (Her voting record in Congress was anything but moderate with a 100% rating form the ACLU and 3% from the American Conservative Union.)President John F. Kennedy was a moderate Democrat in 1961 when southern Democrats were conservative. Even Bill Clinton was a moderate Democrat president compared to the party’s liberals in Congress during his presidency. The few truly moderate Democrats that still survive in Congress these days are overwhelmed and cancelled by the legion of radical left-wingers that have taken over the party.One measure of that is the size and influence of the Democrats’ Progressive Caucus in the House that numbers 100 left-wing zealots like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, AOC, Pramila Jayapal, Maxine Waters and even Bernie Sanders (the lone Senator). It’s total membership accounts for 47% of the 212 Democrat members of the House. By contrast, the Republican Freedom Caucus has only 40 members that account for just 18% of the 219 Republican members in the House. They can stir the pot and block some measures but don’t dominate the party. True, the Freedom Caucus has a handful of strident right wingers like former members Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, but most are mainstream conservatives like Jim Jordan and former member Ron De Sanitis.In Colorado, radical Progressive Democrats dominate the Denver city council and the state legislature. Although unaffiliated voters outnumber registered Democrats and Republicans combined, most are not really ”independents” or moderates. If a close election turns on swing voters, most of Colorado’s unaffiliated don’t vote for Republicans; about two-thirds of them routinely vote for Democrats.Precisely where the political center resides is subjective. But using the JFK and Bill Clinton examples cited above, Democrats have obviously moved much farther to a radical leftist extreme than Republicans have on the right since the JFK and Clinton presidencies. Socialism, now the Democrats’ preferred economic model for our country, wasn’t even respectable for the American mainstream back then. And it still isn’t to anyone who understands political economics, Marxism, and world history.The word “moderate” is a multifaceted one, a term that modifies degrees of something tangible. As an adjective, you can be a moderate conservative rather than a staunch one. As an adverb, you can eat moderately rather than gorging yourself. As a noun, a moderator is a neutral party standing between two advocates in a debate. That’s fine in a debate but as a human being with the gift of reason, as C.S. Lewis observed, “You can’t be a good egg all your life. Sooner or later, you have to hatch or rot.” When a politician calls himself a moderate, it has no meaning in the realm of ideas. Moderation isn’t a personal philosophy or ideology. It’s not a belief, it’s a style. Moderates don’t innovate. They’re political brokers, attaching themselves to other people’s ideas.It’s good to know a politician’s stance on particular issues but I care more about his values and basic beliefs. Circumstances, details, and issues change. When they do, he’ll make decisions on the basis of his convictions. If he has none, he’ll act on other factors like opinion polls, getting reelected, or loyalty to special interests. How would a simply moderate politician resolve Iran’s goal of “death to America?” Split the difference and settle for the death of just half of America?”Edmond Burke told his constituents in Bristol, England, that on matters of great importance he’d act on his beliefs, not on their dictates. If they disapprove of his beliefs, they should vote him out. As a member of Parliament, he stood as their representative not their delegate, who’s a puppet on a string. It’s a vital distinction and the difference between a statesman and a politician.Donald Trump certainly isn’t moderate and defies any simple analysis of right or left. He’s a unicorn. I doubt he has a consistent ideology. He’s committed, instinctive, transactional, impulsive, and meteoric. But he has an agenda that I largely agree with and it’s far better than that of the Democrats.

The recent strike by unionized public school teachers in the Sheridan School District finally ended after 28 days, Colorado’s longest teacher strike in 45 years. Private sector unionized employees have a legal right to strike, but government employees have more restrictions.Members of our armed forces are forbidden to unionize, collectively bargain, or strike for obvious national security reasons. In 1981, President Reagan declared a strike of unionized air traffic controllers illegal, gave them 48 hours to return to work, fired 11,000 who didn’t, and decertified the union. In 1937, President Roosevelt informed the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees that strikes by government workers are unacceptable because their employer is “the whole people” and “a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent to prevent or obstruct the operations of government until their demands are met.”The Sheridan teachers did have a legal right to strike, but not a morally justifiable one seriously disrupting the lives of innocent schoolchildren and their parents, holding them hostage to the union’s demands. When a grocery union strikes, customers can do business elsewhere. However, teachers are government employees within a school district that has a monopoly on publicly-funded education. And unlike private sector employers, Colorado school boards can refuse to allow a union. In 2012, a new Republican majority on the Douglas County School Board decertified its teacher union when the collective-bargaining agreement expired. (A new Democrat majority on the DougCo school board will likely welcome the union back with open arms.) That’s too bad. The general quality of public education in the U.S., frankly, stinks. The proficiency of K-12 students in reading, writing, math, and basic academics is at disgracefully low levels. Instruction in history and social studies is overwhelmed by leftist indoctrination. Grade inflation deceives parents into imagining their underperforming kids are doing fine. The biggest obstacles to education reform are the National Education Association, the nation’s largest and most powerful labor union, and its lesser cousin, the American Federation of Teachers both joined at the hip with the Democrat party. The unions shower Democrats with campaign contributions and deliver the votes of their members to elect school boards and Democrat politicians at every level of government, all of whom return the favor by doing the bidding of the unions. This politically corrupt partnership assures us “it’s all for the kids.” Sure, it is. By their official names, the NEA masquerades as an “association” and the AFT as a “federation.” That’s semantical BS. They’re both ruthless labor unions with militant leadership, and their local affiliates, the CEA and AFT Colorado, are just as bad. Their overriding interest is the welfare of their members; students, parents, and taxpayers, be damned. Unions hate competition, especially within their membership. Which is why union collective bargaining agreements insist that all teachers be paid the same based on their years of service rather than individual merit. Consequently, the best teachers are underpaid and the worst ones overpaid. This treats teachers like unskilled workers on an assembly line, rather than professionals. Teacher unions abhor competition from private schools. That’s why they adamantly oppose school choice that lets parents transfer the funds allocated for their kids in public schools to the private school of their choice. The school choice movement is spreading like wildfire across the country. In the face of teacher union opposition, here, it’s going nowhere in Colorado’s Democrat-controlled legislature. Claims that teachers are impoverished are exaggerated and misleading. Aspiring teachers know this field isn’t the highest paying, but many have a calling for the profession, nonetheless. 75% of teachers are women, most get married and will likely live well on two incomes along with a bunch of non-monetary benefits: The school work-year is only 186 days compared to the typical private-sector work-year of 260 days with only two weeks of vacation and 10 days off for holidays. Teachers get the summer off plus spring break, winer break, fall break, mental health days, planning days, and more. Leisure has great value, as does job security; firing a teacher for poor performance is almost impossible. Starting salary in Denver Public Schools is $57,666; the maximum salary is $102,340 (with a master’s degree bonus), and these levels rise with each new union contract. Individual pay increases automatically on a 20-step schedule over one’s career and is supplemented with an annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). Instead of Social Security, teachers are on the government-worker PERA retirement system which is far better. A teacher retiring after 40 years gets about a $100,000 annual pension, also supplemented with a yearly COLA. Not too bad, huh?

Another week, another column about Colorado’s ruling class treating democracy like a state trooper treats the speed limit. It’s for other people.I swear, I want to write about literally anything else — aliens, sports, lab-grown meat, Bigfoot opening a vape shop in Pueblo.But Colorado’s legislature has never been more abusive to the citizenry, or hypocritical.The kings of ColoradoTo save time, I won’t rehash the endless “No Kings,” “Trump is destroying democracy,” “our sacred duty is protecting democracy, so be happy you have us” self-promotion constantly ejaculated by Colorado’s ruling class.But, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend every word of it is true. Let’s assume President Donald Trump wakes every morning and convenes a joint special-forces meeting to steal democracy in Colorado.If democracy is truly hanging by a thread, then surely Colorado’s Democrat majority is heroically defending it. I mean, they say that’s their job one, next to banning ketchup packets (Senate Bill 146, seriously).Which leaves me confused.Because from my tiny little “just-a-citizen” brain perspective, they seem to spend an awful lot of time removing voters’ power, hiding meetings, dodging taxpayer consent and nullifying ballot initiatives.Maybe I’m missing the advanced theory of democracy taught only in elite government seminars and overpriced Aspen retreats.Take Senate Bill 150. It strips away two-thirds of RTD’s publicly elected board seats and replaces them with appointees.Silly me. I thought democracy involved electing people.But apparently true democracy is when insiders choose insiders to protect the public from the dangerous unpredictability of… the public.Then there’s House Bill 1326, which exempts the all-powerful Public Utilities Commission from open meetings laws.Again, I’m sure there’s a sophisticated democracy-enhancing explanation for this.Perhaps democracy works best when the public cannot actually watch government decisions being made. Sort of a “trust us you peasants” model of self-government.House Bill 1418 puts a “fee” on games young people play online.Now, if it walks like a tax, quacks like a tax and drains your wallet like a tax, a normal person might call it a tax. But by labeling it a “fee,” lawmakers can dodge asking voters for permission.Which is convenient. Because asking permission from citizens can really slow down democracy.Even more amazing, this fee appears large enough that under existing law it should require voter approval anyway. Yet lawmakers are still trying to skip the vote.Apparently democracy is strongest when elections are treated as optional.Truth is optionalThen there’s Senate Bill 135, which takes your TABOR refunds. At least this one goes to the ballot. But the ballot language will say the money goes to education.In reality, only a small fraction actually does.Maybe I’m old fashioned, but using misleading ballot language to convince voters to surrender their money feels less like defending democracy and more like a used car salesman turning back the odometer on a lemon.Now comes the cherry on top, House Bill 1430, filed in the final chaotic moments of the session. Its purpose is beautifully simple: invalidate a citizen initiative that might appear on the ballot this fall. Kill what voters might vote for before they vote on it.I always believed democracy meant if voters approve something at the ballot box, government respects the outcome. Isn’t that what the anger against Trump and Tina Peters is all about?Here’s the backstory: Colorado used to dedicate sales tax revenue from automobile parts and accessories to roads. Which honestly seems reasonable, given roads are where cars generally go (Man, if I could still get away with a drunk driving joke, this would be a perfect spot).But the legislature ended that sensible funding stream. We don’t really do road funding anymore. I don’t need to convince you of that. Instead, we currently do incentives for front-end alignment shops.Now there’s a potential citizen initiative that might restore that road-funding mechanism. Maybe it makes the ballot. Maybe voters approve it. Maybe they don’t.That’s how democracy is supposed to work.But HB-1430 essentially says, “That’s cute. Your vote still won’t matter.”If voters approve returning the road funding, with 1430 lawmakers will reduce road funding by the exact same amount.Thankfully, Colorado is governed by people who understand democracy far better than voters do.Thank God Colorado’s one-party rulers are here to save democracy from the voters.Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

Alexander Fraser Tytler was a judge, historian and professor of history in Scotland, born in 1747, who observed that, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship.”Tytler further observed, “The average of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependence back again to bondage.”Voting in largesseIn this, America’s 250th year, we’ve beaten the average, but this sequence has a spooky resemblance to our trajectory and offers a dire warning. Our founders had the wisdom and foresight to craft a constitution designed to protect individual liberty and limit government. Government is necessary, but government isn’t society. It’s a subset of society and subservient to the people, it’s not their master or their mother.The American Dream isn’t winning the Powerball lottery. That’s just a lucky windfall. It’s about the opportunity individuals have in this country to achieve success and even greatness through ingenuity, hard work, and personal responsibility. As government at all levels has expanded, the American dream has decayed into the American entitlement, with government assuming the role of supreme benefactor — “sharing the wealth,” as President Obama put it — with punitive income taxes on productive taxpayers redistributed to net tax receivers. When the number of net tax receivers exceeds that of taxpayers, we’re on the road to Tytler’s prophesy. Government policies should encourage the expansion of societal wealth, not discourage it in the name of compassion and “social justice” that rewards dependency and punishes effort and achievement.Total government spending at all levels in our welfare state is now 46% of GDP, the measure of our economy. Government compassion and charity are fine up to a point. It becomes counterproductive if there’s no limiting principle. The needs of net tax receivers are inevitably surpassed by their wants.What the federal government calls “payments for individuals” — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and a cornucopia of so-called welfare “entitlement” programs — now consumes more than 70% of all federal spending compared to 26% in 1960, leading to endless budget deficits and the current national debt of $39 trillion. The top one percent of taxpayers already pays 40% of total federal individual income taxes while the bottom 50% pays just 3%, which is greatly exceeded by the cost of government handouts they receive. Soaking the rich can’t balance the budget, even drowning them won’t do it.Yes, Americans have earned their Social Security benefits, but the system is on the brink of insolvency. It’s been an intergenerational transfer of income with taxes paid by current workers shifted to current recipients. But benefits have been expanded and increasing life expectancy and lower birth rates have dropped the ratio of workers per beneficiary from 16:1 in 1950 to barely 2:1 today.Democrats threaten democracyRepublicans in Congress are concerned about all this, but the public isn’t. Attempts to reform these programs are politically hazardous. Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s (R-Wisconsin) courageous but futile efforts at entitlement reform prematurely ended his political career in 2019, at the age of 48. Democrats aren’t concerned and have no limiting principle on government spending and taxation on the way to creating their socialist paradise.During the Covid pandemic the feds ran massive budget deficits to flood state governments with money. This is standard Keynesian economics to head off a recession by creating artificial monetary demand unattached to productivity that invariably leads to a future inflationary spike, as we saw.In Colorado, especially Denver, where progressive Democrats have total government control, they became addicted to that temporary binge and made it their new permanent spending level causing huge budget deficits they intend to fill by gutting TABOR and raising taxes. Of course, “soaking the rich” is a key ingredient. Common sense and economic reality dictate an obvious alternative remedy. Duh: prioritize spending and cut it back to a manageable level. Instead, Colorado Democrats are foolishly repeating the mistakes of California, New York, and Illinois, which have driven businesses and upper-income taxpayers to red states like Florida and Texas.Destructive progressive ideology reinforces Professor Tytler’s explanation of the death of democracies. Ironically, the true danger to democracy isn’t Donald Trump, it’s Democrats.Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for Complete Colorado.

We the people of Colorado no longer control our own state constitution. I found this out the hard way.In Colorado, a government for, by, and of the people is a fib.We lowly citizens no longer have much of a say in altering our own state constitution. Even though that seems to violate the whole meaning of our constitution in the first place.We the peopleLike the US Constitution, Colorado’s constitution contains a Bill of Rights making clear we are the ones who empower the state government, not the other way around.Check out the first two of these rights:First — All political power is vested in and derived from the people; all government, of right, originates from the people…Second — The people of this state have the sole and exclusive right of governing themselves, as a free, sovereign and independent state; and to alter and abolish their constitution…Did you catch that? We the people have the sole and exclusive right to alter our constitution. It used to be true, too.We used to alter our constitution through the initiative and referendum process.Without that process, we would not have limits on governmental power. Laws reining in the legislature could never pass a vote by those same politicians. They’d never vote for open meetings laws, term limits, the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, ethics laws, and so much more.Recently, when the legislature arrogantly exempted themselves from open meetings laws, it started a chain reaction I’ve never witnessed in all my decades in politics.Independence Institute, which I run, helped bring together nearly 50 highly diverse organizations that are usually at each other’s throats. We all shared a common concern: government in Colorado is turning opaque.Open records are getting harder to access, open meetings are closing. The “people’s” work is being hidden from the people.And when I say organizations from all over the political spectrum worked together, I’m not exaggerating: Independence Institute, the ACLU, Heidi Ganahl’s conservative Rocky Mountain Voice, the progressive Colorado Times Recorder, Colorado Public Radio, League of Women Voters, Colorado Press Association, Colorado Broadcasters Association, Common Cause, Colorado Black Women for Action, and many, many more.‘Right to Know’ deniedOver a year-and-a-half of work we crafted a constitutional reform based on what many other states already have, called “Right to Know.” It’s simple: a fundamental right for the people to access public records and government deliberations, with reasonable exceptions.But you won’t see this proposed amendment on your fall ballot.The normally sober state Title Board voted 2–1 to block it. The appointees of Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Attorney General Phil Weiser voted against you being able to vote on governmental transparency.Were they ordered to do so? I’ll let others speculate.Their argument was that your “right to know” the affairs of government isn’t a single subject, and only “single subjects” may go to the ballot.Legislators’ bills must also have a single subject. The difference is they get to decide for themselveswhether a bill qualifies. By contrast, we “the people” must get permission from an unelected board. A set of rules for them; a different set for us.The powerful Title Board said our amendment was too broad.I countered that the state constitution is supposed to contain broad amendments. That didn’t matter.Our team pointed to existing rights guaranteed by Colorado’s constitution, like freedom of speech, religion and the right to keep and bear arms. I asked if we were bringing one of those rights as a citizen initiative today, would it pass “single subject” muster as they now interpret it?They essentially said no.By their interpretation, such basic rights as freedom of speech or religion might be too broad and vague to be considered a single subject.We considered appealing the Title Board’s bizarre decision to the Colorado Supreme Court, but on the advice of lawyers from across the political spectrum, we decided not to.The high court has shown little interest in expanding the public’s right to know what’s going on in their judicial branch.So now, hiding behind the “single subject” rule, altering our constitution to include fundamental rights — like speech, religion, or even a right to know the affairs of government — can be denied to the very people who are supposed to be the government.Some things you can’t make up.Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

DENVER–A Democrat-sponsored Senate bill changing the boundaries of the Front Range Passenger Rail special taxing district passed through its first committee hearing on Monday. The bill excludes certain conservative-leaning communities from the district as a tax hike looms for the November ballot.As previously reported by Complete Colorado, the Front Range Passenger Rail, recently named CoCo, short for Colorado Connector, has been in the works since 2021. The plan is to have an up and running passenger rail system operating from Fort Collins to Pueblo by 2029.The current special taxing district is the largest in the state, comprised of 13 counties along the I-25 corridor. All of which are highly likely to be asked for 0.5% sales tax hike this November to fund the project.Senate Bill 26-172 dramatically changes these boundaries, dropping about 40% of the existing special district population. Rather than incorporating every county along I-25 between Wyoming and New Mexico, the proposed legislation includes taxing sweet spots along the rail line.“Of the scenarios that we explored, [this] has some of the highest, but not the highest, tax base, to be able to pay for what we’re proposing to pay for while keeping the tax rate relatively low,” Sal Pace, general manager of the taxing district, said to lawmakers.The new district would include 30 municipalities and would allow others to opt in upon voter approval. The bill also allows incorporated areas to create subdistricts to ask residents to further increase taxes as they see fit.Conservative communities excludedWhile sponsors claim the redrawing was centered around areas in which 20% or more of the population live within a five-mile radius of the planned stations, the bill notably cuts out more conservative communities including Greeley, Lonetree, Monument, and Castle Rock.“The railroad only has so many options as to where it can go south of the city, if that’s the case, why are you including Sterling Ranch and tiny places and not including large areas that’ll be served like Castle Rock and Lone Tree,” Joshua Sharf, senior fellow in fiscal policy with Independence Institute* told Complete Colorado. “If you’re going through the trouble of naming specific municipalities why are you leaving out large population centers?”SB-172 was approved by the Senate Transportation and Energy Committee on April 27. Three amendments were made to the bill, including the removal of Northglenn from the taxing district after Democrat Sen. Kyle Mullica requested the removal on behalf of the Northglenn city government.Randal O’Toole, director of transportation policy at Independence Institute, predicts this rail line, like many others, will end up needing yet more money while pushing its completion date.“Front Range Rail is not going to relieve traffic congestion. It is not going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is going to be a huge money sink, costing a lot more than projected, and it probably won’t operate until long after projected,” O’Toole told Complete Colorado, “Almost no rail passenger project in the last 60 years was done on time or under the originally projected cost; cost overruns of 50 to 100 percent are typical.”The bill was approved 8-1 with GOP Sen. Mark Baisley being the sole no vote. It will now go to the Senate Appropriations Committee in the coming weeks.* Independence Institute is publisher of Complete Colorado

DENVER—The Colorado Senate Agriculture Committee on April 22 rejected two of the three appointments made by Governor Polis to the Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) Commission.By state law, the CPW commission contains 13 members, 11 of which are appointed by the governor and approved by the Senate. The remaining two members include the executive director of the Department of Natural Resources, and the Colorado Agriculture Commissioner.Frances Blayney, co-owner of a fly-fishing business in Colorado Springs, was approved by the committee unanimously to represent outfitters on the commission, but two others were denied.Thumbs downChris Sichko, a Boulder resident and research economist who has worked with the Department of Agriculture, was shot down by the committee on a 3-4 vote.Tapped to represent sportsman on the commission, Sichko claims he actively participates in small game bow hunting and fishing, but had no support from any Colorado sportsman groups, and has no experience with big game hunting,“I just don’t think we should have somebody filling the sportsman’s seat that has not garnered any support from the sportsman community and doesn’t have the experience to recognize CPW’s funding source from the sportsman community,” Committee Chair Sen. Dylan Roberts said at the meeting.Hunting and fishing licenses make up 58% of CPW funding, and with 12 other applicants with big game hunting experience, the commission turned Sichko away.John Emerick received the most criticism from the committee, voted down 2-5. A retired environmental biology professor, Emerick has a background in environmental and anti-hunting activism and was appointed to the at-large seat in July 2025.Emerick was the Treasurer for Colorado Wild a wolf advocacy group who heavily supported the forced reintroduction measure. He also voted for Proposition 127, the mountain lion hunting ban, that ultimately failed at the ballot box.Emerick defended his positions, saying he was appointed to this seat based on his experience and passion. “I’m not an agriculturalist, I’m not a hunter, but I certainly use our parks. ”Colorado Wildlife Conservation Project wrote a letter the committee, which included 15 sportsman organizations and former CPW staff, urging the senators to “advance appointments that fully meet statutory requirements, avoid conflicts of interest, and rebuild trust with the diverse constituencies that depend on CPW.”“You have a history of very specific activism, which is absolutely your right, and you seem to have done a good job in that space,” Sen Roberts added. “But given the responsibility that the commission has, I do not think you are qualified or prepared or suited to serve in the at-large position.”Former commissioner weighs inRick Enstrom, a former CPW commissioner, says the wildlife agency has become more politicized as of late, due to outside influences.“Much like lobbyists in the legislature, there are NGOs that are feeding direct lines to these commissioners, and it’s muddied up the system.”Enstrom also notes the influence of First Gentleman Marlon Reis, an outspoken animal rights activist, over the decisions of his husband, Governor Polis.“The sportsmen were outraged, nobody could believe it, but once again this isn’t the Governor, these are Marlon Ries’ picks,” Enstrom told Complete Colorado. “Government agencies are not there to be politicized.”