The Colorado Sun story on Proposition 123 reads like a panic memo from a subsidy ecosystem that just realized the taxpayer IV bag is running low.
This thing was sold to voters in 2022 as compassionate housing policy. The usual incense got burned. Affordable. Inclusive. Urgent. Smart. But what it really did was create a government-funded dependency machine for the approved housing class: developers, nonprofits, bureaucrats, consultants, and every other well-scrubbed grifter who appears the second public money gets waved around like a sacrament.
Now the budget is busted, and suddenly the miracle cure needs more miracles.
The Sun reports lawmakers are set to cut $130 million from Proposition 123, roughly 40% overall and about 75% of the money for affordable rental housing. Naturally, the people who built their deals around those dollars are warning of “ripple effects,” stalled pipelines, delayed projects, and years of disruption. Yes. That is what happens when you build an industry around government redistribution instead of a functioning market. The second the tap slows, everybody starts shrieking that civilization itself is in danger.
That is not resilience. That is addiction.
And look at the deeper joke here. These same people never want to dwell too long on why housing in Colorado needs so many public crutches in the first place. Why does every project require a “complicated cocktail” of funding sources just to pencil out? Because the political class spent years making housing harder, slower, pricier, and more insane to build. Zoning fights. Fees. mandates. delays. ideology. process. regulation piled on regulation, then a big taxpayer subsidy arrives wearing a cape and pretends to save the patient government helped stab.
This is the oldest racket in the book. Break a market. Subsidize the breakage. Call the subsidy justice. Then when the money gets tight, claim cutting the subsidy will worsen the crisis. Of course it will. That is how state-created dependence works. Government creates distortions, then hires an entire class of people to live off managing those distortions.
Proposition 123 was always a grift for the “affordable housing” machine. A bill of goods sold to voters on vibes, guilt, and fantasy economics. Now reality is here with a baseball bat, and the people who got fat on redistributed money are telling us the answer is more of the same.
When will voters learn? Government does not fix the housing market after breaking it. It just creates a new set of parasites who swear the wreckage is progress.
Source: The Colorado Sun
Just Stop It
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