There was a bumper sticker you used to see around here: Don’t Californicate Colorado. People laughed at it. It seemed like the kind of thing a grumpy old-timer puts on his truck.
The grumpy old-timer may have had a point.
A generation ago, you could fairly call Colorado a red state, or at least a purple one. It voted Republican for president as recently as 2004. It had a healthy suspicion of anyone who wanted to spend your money for you. It had something called TABOR, and people were proud of it.
Today it is blue. It has voted Democratic for president every time since 2008, and Democrats have held the governor’s office and both houses of the legislature since 2019.
That is not a crime. States change. People move, people vote, and that is how it is supposed to work. But it is worth looking at what has happened along the way.
People move here for a reason, and usually it is the same handful of reasons. Life back home got too expensive. The taxes got too high, the rules got too thick, the house got too far out of reach. They wanted mountains, room to breathe, a lower cost of living and a little more freedom. They were right. That is what Colorado had.
This is not about Californians, and it is worth saying plainly, because somebody will read it wrong. Plenty of people who left California left precisely because of how it is run. California is simply one of the two biggest sources of people moving here, along with Texas. It could be anybody.
The problem is not where people come from. It is the policies that get packed along with the furniture.
The pattern goes like this. People leave a place because it got expensive and over-governed. They arrive somewhere that is not. Then, within a few years, they vote for the same policies that made the old place expensive and over-governed.
It is like moving out of a house because it burned down, and bringing the matches with you.
Most people do not do it on purpose. People vote the way they always voted, the way their old neighbors voted, without connecting it to why they left. The effect is the same. The cost of living goes up. The rules get thicker. Slowly, the new place starts to look like the old one.
Not all of the rising cost is politics. Part of it is simple math: when a lot of people want to live in one place, the houses cost more. But stack higher taxes, new fees and more regulation on top of a housing squeeze, and you get what Colorado has now.
Then listen to who is complaining about it. The rent is too high. The fees keep climbing. There is a rule for everything. Colorado is not what it used to be.
A lot of the time, it is the very same people who voted for every one of those changes.
They are not wrong that it costs too much. They are not wrong that there is too much government. They just have not connected it to the ballots they have been filling out. It is like watching a man complain about the smoke while he is still holding the match.
Which brings us to TABOR.
In 1992, Colorado voters passed the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights and put it in the state constitution. The short version: the state cannot raise taxes without asking the voters first, and when government revenue grows faster than population and inflation, the extra goes back to the people.
That is a remarkable thing. Government has to ask permission.
And voters have mostly kept saying no when asked to loosen it. They did agree once, in 2005, to a five-year timeout. But this decade they have said no every time. In 2019 they turned down Proposition CC, which would have let the state keep the refunds. In 2023 they turned down Proposition HH, which paired a property-tax cut with raising the state’s revenue cap. The same voters who elected a Democratic legislature looked at TABOR and said: leave it alone.
And they are being asked again. This November’s ballot carries Proposition NN, which would raise TABOR’s cap so the state can keep money it would otherwise refund, and send much of it to K-12 schools. How much would actually reach schools is disputed. Supporters say it pays teachers without raising a single tax rate. Opponents say it cuts the refunds and loosens TABOR’s cap, and that once those protections are gone, they will be hard to get back. Whichever way it goes, notice that the legislature had to ask. That is TABOR working.
But the legislature had already found a side door.
TABOR covers taxes. It does not cover fees. So instead of a tax, you call it a fee, and you set up a state “enterprise” to collect it. The best-known example is the big 2021 transportation bill. It added a new road usage fee on every gallon of gas, and it created four new state enterprises collecting fees on things like retail deliveries, electric vehicles and rideshares. None of it went to a vote of the people.
The voters noticed. In 2020 they passed Proposition 117, which says any large new enterprise, one expected to bring in more than $100 million over its first five years, has to go to the voters. Since then, according to the Common Sense Institute, a conservative think tank that tracks this, the legislature has created ten new enterprises, and not one was sent to the voters. Most are small enough to stay under the line. Critics charged that the 2021 bill split its fees across several enterprises to keep each one below it. A state appeals court rejected that challenge in 2025, so legally, the line held.
Supporters of the fees have a real argument. Roads and services cost money, TABOR’s caps can starve them, and the people who use a service should help pay for it. That is fair as far as it goes. It still is not a vote.
Look at the sequence. The people said no to raising taxes. The legislature called it a fee. The people said big fees need a vote too. The legislature kept the enterprises small enough not to need one.
That is not governing in good faith. That is a lawyer finding the gap in his own client’s instructions.
None of this is a request for anyone to leave, or to stop moving here. It is a simple ask of everyone who came here for a better life, and everyone who was here first.
Before you vote, ask why you came. If it was the lower cost, the lighter hand, the freedom to keep a little more of what you earn, think hard before voting to build the same thing you left.
And to the legislature: if the voters keep telling you no, the answer is not a side door. The answer is to listen.
That old bumper sticker was never really about California. It was about a place that knew what it was and wanted to stay that way.
That place would still be worth living in.
