The Denver Gazette piece is what fiscal hangover looks like when a one-party state finally has to check the receipts.
Colorado lawmakers are staring at another budget hole north of a billion dollars, after already patching a billion-dollar hole last year, and the excuses are getting thinner than the reserve fund they are now shaving down from 15% to 13%. Democrats want to talk about Congress, forecasts, federal changes, and other weather patterns. Fine. But the core scam is simpler: they used temporary COVID money and rosy assumptions to stand up ongoing programs, expanded benefits like the bill would never come due, and now act wounded that arithmetic has no empathy.
This is exactly what happens when a governing class mistakes one-time cash for permanent capacity. Never use temporary money to build permanent obligations. Every adult knows this. If you get a one-time bonus, you do not finance a second mortgage with it. Unless, apparently, you work under the Gold Dome and your religion is publicly funded virtue.
Now the chickens are home, flapping through the chamber.
Look at the menu of desperation. They are moving $130 million out of Proposition 123, the voter-approved housing initiative, into the general fund. That alone tells you everything. Voters were sold Prop. 123 as a sacred answer to affordable housing. Now Democrats are raiding it because their broader budget is a dumpster fire in a necktie. They are also capping Cover All Coloradans after costs exploded from an estimated $26 million to north of $100 million, debating cuts to dental benefits, trimming teacher pipeline programs, and squeezing reserves because the “compassionate investments” crowd has finally run into the vulgar bigotry of math.
And here is the part they never want to say plainly: they would rather raid designated funds, flirt with your TABOR surplus, and start hacking around the edges of public safety than seriously confront the ideology that built this mess. They never met a pet project, bureaucratic expansion, or performative benefit they did not want to baptize as moral necessity. Regular Coloradans get rising costs, slower services, and the pleasure of financing programs designed to impress activists, nonprofits, and consultants.
This is what one-party rule produces. Not enlightened administration. Not humane efficiency. Just a budget stuffed with virtue-signaling junk, patched together with gimmicks, raids, and tears. Jefferson had it right enough: people get the government they deserve. The problem is the rest of us get it too.
Source: Denver Gazette
Just Stop It
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