September 18, 2010 07:34 PM UTC

Tilting at Windmills, Bull Semen Tax Exemption Edition

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• by: Colorado Pols

Plank #1 in the Colorado Senate Minority Office’s “Agenda for Economic Recovery”–the nicely alliterative “Platform for Prosperity” was taken, as you know–released Thursday:

Repeal anti-business tax increases of 2010

Over $100 million in new business taxes enacted by Ritter and the Democrats have put a damper on job creation in Colorado in the middle of the Obama recession. We believe increasing the tax burden on business is the wrong approach to balancing the state budget. Savings can be found through eliminating nonessential programs and streamlining state government…

The first thing you should notice is the marked absence of the rhetoric we’ve seen to characterize the state legislature’s move earlier this year to repeal certain tax exemptions, helping balance the budget as revenue dwindled during the recession. You’ll recall the gloom-and-doom forecasts of “thousands” of jobs being lost–including “5,000 Amazon jobs” later found to be absurdly trivial sources of income–and impassioned testimony to that effect by such figures as Rick Enstrom of the eponymous candy company and senior management at Evraz Rocky Mountain Steel.

The reason all that stuff is absent from this release is, back in August, Tim Hoover of the major Denver newspaper debunked those dire predictions: they never materialized. “It turned out it wasn’t that much of a deal for us,” Enstrom told Hoover, after having testified before the legislature of “huge impact” the exemption repeals would have on the candy business. Enstrom even told Hoover that he knew the repeals would not hurt his business at the time he testified before the legislature that they would–we suppose that’s not illegal, but it’s awfully embarrassing. Likewise, Pepsi and Evraz, who also warned of devastating job losses, admitted there haven’t been any.

Obviously, it would be better for the Senate Minority if you forgot about that, or preferably never saw this story to begin with. Not that it’s hard to miss, with literally hundreds of doom-and-gloom stories on these repeals, and one setting the record straight afterwards…