No on Springs 2C, a $46M tax hike

Colorado Springs councilwoman Jan Martin says you're rich and that you don’t mind paying a lot more in taxes. If she's right about you, and you have plenty of money for the city bureaucrats to burn, then ignore this message and vote for Issue 2C when you get your mail ballot on October 15th. Editor: So writes former Senate Minority Leader Andy McElhany in a letter and mass email last week. His appeal goes on:

However, if you want to help us fight one of the most massive tax increases in Colorado Springs history, then we urge you to make a contribution to CCEG (Citizens for Cost-Effective Government) today at http://www.voteno2c.com/donation

Every dime of your contribution will be used to defeat this business-crippling and economy-shrinking tax. None of your contribution will go to campaign workers or political consultants. We are all working hard as unpaid volunteers because the defeat of Issue 2C is so important to the economic future of our community!

In fact, your contribution will be used exclusively for voter education mailings and e-mails, yard signs, and as many web site, print and radio ads that your contribution makes possible.

What are we going to tell the voters?

As any small business owner knows, Colorado Springs business property owners already pay four times the amount of taxes that residential property owners pay.

If 2C passes, the average homeowner will be soaked for another $200 per year. The average small business owner will pay $1,000 more per year. For large businesses that employ many Colorado Springs residents, that bill could easily reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is hundreds of thousands of dollars going to government instead of into wages and benefits for workers.

Now, if you've read the tax-hiker's website on the issue, they stand by their story that we'll still have one of the lowest property tax rates in Colorado. But the Gazette looked into the issue and found out that was not true!

The truth is if Issue 2C passes, Colorado Springs taxpayers will pay one of the highest property taxes in all of Colorado! Higher even than Boulder.

When asked about the city's bogus claims, Jan Martin said "I'm trying to remember where we got those numbers."

She can't remember, because they made them up!!!

But facts never get in the way of our Jan Martin and the tax-and-spend city council members. They claim the condition of city finances is "dire" and that there will be catastrophic cuts should voters fail to pass 2C.

What she forgets is that business owners across Colorado Springs have already made "catastrophic" cutbacks -- in budgets and staff -- just to keep their doors open.

Any tax increase -- not just 2C -- right now would kill those same businesses.

But the City Council still keeps its hand out asking for more and more of our tax dollars. Because they don’t have the political courage it takes to make the kinds of cuts that business owners have to make every time the economy goes south.

And it's not like they've gone without more tax dollars.

During the past few years, the voters have swallowed their demands for more revenue. And when the voters say "no," the city council dreams up schemes to seize the dollars they want.

Do you remember the .01-cent sales tax increase to pay for the purchase of additional open space? That raised $5.2 million dollars this year alone.

Or how about the public safety tax of .04 cents to pay for additional police and fire? That raised $23.5 million dollars this year.

Then there was the countywide transportation tax (RTA) of 1 cent, which has allowed Colorado Springs to significantly reduce its contribution to road maintenance and throw that entire burden on the Regional Transportation Authority. That also gave them the room to divert the money they once spent on infrastructure to hiring more bureaucrats.

That transportation tax raised $70 million dollars this year, from which the city of Colorado Springs received 78% or $54.6 million dollars.

And of course, there’s everybody’s favorite, the stormwater tax. (Oops, excuse us, we mean stormwater “fee.”) That generated $20 million dollars this year alone!

That is $103.3 million every year in additional taxes and fees created in just the last few years! And, they still want more!

While we’re on the subject of “fees,” we are still facing a several hundred percent increase in our water rates, and Council says it’s still not enough.

Now Jan Martin and her tax-and-spend council cronies want to boost your property taxes by 200% in the middle of a recession. (And never forget the one truism about taxes: they may go up, but they almost never come down.)

That kind of thinking will kill the very businesses we depend upon to take the risks, generate the profits and hire the workers that keep our tax base and our city strong.

That’s why we're turning to you to help us fight this outrage now, and help save Colorado Springs businesses and our struggling economy.

Thank you for your friendship and support. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards, Andy McElhany

PS- The Colorado Springs city council has promised to repeal the business personal property tax. It is a drop in the tax bucket. They are promising to give up $2 million if they can pass Issue 2C taxing our homes and businesses an additional $46 million on top of the $103.3 million a year in new taxes and fees they have taken from us in the last few years. Help us defeat Issue 2C by donating at our website, or mail your check to Citizens for Cost-Effective Government (CCEG), P.O. Box 6711, Colorado Springs, CO • 80934-6711

Europe's Nobel peaceniks handcuff Obama

The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a reflection of the political inclinations of the Norwegian Nobel Committee – a group of five former lawmakers and politicians from one of Europe’s most liberal countries. The list of winners over the past two decades include Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Anan and Yasser Arafat, and reads more like a political commitment to left-wing causes than a sober award for promoting real peace in the world. This year’s award to Barack Obama is all that – and more. In fact, for the first time the Nobel Committee has managed a twofer: it has rewarded someone who shares its goal of diplomacy “first, last and always”, while at the same time placing a substantial set of symbolic handcuffs around the U.S. president’s ability to use force in the defense of American interests – including the war in Afghanistan. In bestowing the Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said this about Barack Obama:

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.

For Europe, Obama thus represents a real breakthrough: an American president who fancies himself as a “citizen of the world”, who has spent his first nine months rejecting the notion of “American exceptionalism”, and who seems to truly believe in the transformative potential for talking through even the most intractable problems. After eight years of a Bush Administration that was committed body and soul to American interests and security, Barack Obama represents a leader more interested in compromise than conflict, and who believes that American national interests are largely indistinguishable from those of the international community.

It would be a mistake, however, to view the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama as simply a rejection of the Bush years – or as just a pat on the back to America for electing such a cosmopolitan “man of the world”. The decision of the Nobel Committee to make award Obama was influenced heavily by the President’s commitment to a core value of the European peacenik movement – nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. The elimination of all nuclear weapons is an idealism based on the utility of diplomacy – even with rogue states such as North Korea and Iran – and is the logical extension of Europe’s multilateral engagement strategy. As Agot Valle, a Norwegian politician and member of the Nobel Committee said in a phone interview with the Wall Street Journal after the announcement,"…this was primarily an award on his work on, and commitment to, nuclear disarmament -- and his dialogue.”

But it is really more than just about Obama’s willingness to talk. Rather, there is something more strategic involved: an attempt to restrict Obama’s range of decisions in the critical reassessment of the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan. According to Valle, the Nobel Committee reached its decision on the Obama award at their final meeting on October 5. It was thus no secret that the Obama Administration was in the midst of a full scale review of General Stanley McChrystal’s request for 40,000 additional U.S. soldiers in an expansion of the U.S. mission. Nor was it a secret that Vice President Joe Biden and others in the Administration were openly lobbying for a change in U.S. strategy that would dramatically reduce the American footprint in Afghanistan in favor of a targeted “offshore” force that would be used for surgical strikes against terrorist targets. The Nobel Committee clearly also knows that in the wake of an all-out focus on health care reform, the Obama Administration has let public support for the Afghan war drift; the latest polling shows that less than half of America supports the war that Obama himself once called “necessary” for America’s long-term security. The Norwegians know that Obama is wavering on Afghanistan, and that the Peace Prize could be an effective leverage point in convincing him to radically reduce – or even end – the U.S. war there.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee understands that awarding Obama the Peace Prize will appeal to the President’s own image as a transformational figure, and will serve to heighten the already stratospheric confidence he has in his ability to alter the status quo ante. Obama’s own belief in the power of his words is well known. Now, with the Nobel Prize in hand, he has a validation that Europe also sees him as The One. The net effect of this will put Obama in a tough position as he addresses America’s security concerns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere. With little more than a press release, the Nobel Committee has achieved what Europe has been trying to do for a generation: it has handcuffed the American president with the imprimatur of “Peacemaker”, narrowing the options for unilateral action in the process. For the peaceniks of Europe, awarding Obama the Nobel was a true masterstroke of preventive medicine.

The Nobel Committee has thus given the world's most prestigious award for peace to the American commander-in-chief in a time of war. Can the Nobel Peace Prize winner really escalate the war in Afghanistan? Or, for that matter, order a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the event that the current round of diplomacy fails? Even before the Prize, there was obviously much doubt as to whether Obama would make such tough choices. Now, it seems even more unlikely.

We win the Ronnie

Yes, it's true. Trigger the ticker tape and get the confetti ready. Backbone Radio and John Andrews have been awarded the prestigious Ronald Reagan Prize for Radio Greatness. We're blushing with proud humility. Our audience may not be huge, our influence may not be vast, but we talk a good game, and for a talk show that's all it takes. (For harder work like the presidency or peacemaking, a bit more is needed.) Join us Sunday evening for an orgy of selfless self-congratulation over winning the Ronnie, as Matt Schmitz and I talk with guests including... 5pm Prize Ceremony & Pop Quiz 520 Douglas County School Board Reform Slate 530 Kail Padgett on Colorado Tax Trends 6pm George Gilder on "The Israel Test" 630 Joseph C. Phillips on the Race Card 7p Kent Holsinger on Endangered Species 730 David Harsanyi on Rampaging Government

Yours for feel-good prizes all around, JOHN ANDREWS

50 ways back at you

(Denver Post, Oct. 11) Attention, liberals. A new book urges that in order to help Obama improve our country, you should adopt a dog, quit smoking, and conciliate conservatives. But don't rush into it. So far the President himself has only accomplished the first of those. The inspiring ideas are from “50 Ways You Can Help Obama Change America,” brought out last month by Michael Huttner and Jason Salzman, two lefties in Denver with time on their hands. Huttner and his ProgressNow group wanted no part of change back when I was pushing it as Colorado Senate President, but that was then. He’s an author now, blurbed by the late Ted Kennedy and the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream guys. “50 Ways” is like a kitchen-sink sundae, a nutritional zero with ingredients from the obvious to the ludicrous. “Support political art” no doubt sounded hip when the authors were miming a Paul Simon song and grooving on Barack posters. It has an ugly Soviet ring since the failed propaganda coup at the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Find a town hall, y’all” strikes a plaintive note after the Alinskyites had their bell rung on health care during the August recess. “Get news that’s truly fair and balanced” has a whiny copycat sound as well. The green envy pays pathetic tribute to Fox News.

I come to praise Huttner and Salzman, however, not to bury them. As someone who loves lists, I take stimulus from theirs – the first good stimulus we’ve had from this crowd. Now those of us who don’t WANT to see the land of the free transformed can rise to the challenge with our own list. Here’s mine: “50 Ways You Can Help America Survive Obama.”

Cleave to the Constitution. Dust off the Declaration. Work harder. Save more. Borrow less. Repent, pray, get religion. Resist the divorce epidemic. Tithe to church and charities. Read the classics. Doubt judges and lawyers. Distrust the dinosaur media.

Assert our country’s goodness: America without apologies. Gird against radical Islam. Reject surrender in Afghanistan. Quarantine Iran. Defend Israel to the death. Revive NATO. Suspect Russia. Suspect China. Beware Chavez and Castro. See the United Nations for the dangerous fraud that it is. Secure the borders. Rearm urgently.

Work for a color-blind community. Reject the race card and white guilt. Support charter schools, tax credits, vouchers. Demand intellectual diversity on the campuses. Resist the mediocrity drug called multiculturalism. Encourage a stay-at-home mom. Give to a crisis pregnancy center. Support the shaming of abortionists and pornographers. Boycott Hollywood.

Get arrested dumping tea in the Tidal Basin. Dare Congress to put themselves on Social Security and Medicare. Demonstrate for a timeline when GM gets privatized. Rally for right-to-work. Picket for paycheck protection. Organize for offshore drilling. Sit in for nuclear power. Coalesce for coal. Demand a tax-favored, direct-pay option for your medical costs.

Ridicule the climate alarmists. Tell Biden jokes. Circulate ACORN soup recipes. Start a Palin Club. Launch a Messiah milk carton movement (“Savior of 2008, mysteriously missing in 2009”). Retire Pelosi and Reid in 2010. Draft Petraeus in 2012. Get active as a Democrat and elect more blue dogs. Or get active as a Republican – not because they’re so much better, but because opposition is liberty’s lifeblood.

Voila, just that quickly: 50 ways to help America survive Obama. Please list more if you can. The lengthening lists on both sides will make us a better nation, just for the involvement they stir.

Long after BHO is gone, the USA will endure. But in what form? As he revs the motor for change, someone has to hit the brakes for continuity. I don’t want our kids inheriting a country that a rookie wrecked. Not even Huttner and Salzman want that.

10/04/2009: Hillman and Dunn

7:30PM Guest: Guest Host Mark Hillman and Matt Dunn