Palm Beach Needs a Taxpayer Bill of Rights

Good evening, my name is John Hallman and I live in Boca Raton. I am also the Florida Director for FreedomWorks. I would like to give a brief introduction of TABOR, which stands for Taxpayer Bill of Rights. TABOR is a name everybody will be hearing a lot about in the months to come. TABOR is a constitutional or charter amendment that limits the annual growth in government. Under TABOR, expenditures cannot grow faster than the rate of annual population growth plus inflation. Surplus revenue received above this amount is returned to the taxpayers. Also, TABOR requires that any tax increase must be approved by a vote of the people; this approval process brings public scrutiny and gives taxpayers a place at the table.

TABOR forces lawmakers to live under spending restraints in the same manner that families and businesses do by forcing lawmakers to set priorities and cut wasteful spending. One of the fundamental reasons to enact revenue and spending limits is to protect taxpayers from constantly rising demands on their pocketbooks. Government spending displaces private-sector activity. Every dollar that government spends means one less dollar in the productive sector of the economy. High or increasing taxes retard new business formation and expansion, thereby slowing job creation and wage growth.

Under TABOR, Government can still grow, and without drastic cuts in essential services, but government would grow at a slow and predictable rate. TABOR forces elected officials to make honest, conscious decisions about where to direct resources and without a spending mechanism like TABOR, elected officials have incentives to continually expand government when tax revenues are plentiful, and then are forced to increase taxes during an economic downturn.

With TABOR in place, the budget process is more predictable. California has learned this lesson painfully by increasing the size of state government by 90% during the prosperous 90’s only to find themselves 34 billion dollars in the hole when the boom times ended. On the other side is Colorado, which enacted TABOR in 1992. In next 10 years Colorado increased private sector jobs 9 times that of government jobs, personal income growth almost doubled and more than 3 billion dollars in surplus taxes were refunded to the people who had earned them. More than 20 states from Alaska to Florida are debating or creating TABOR measures as we speak.

In conclusion, the true spirit of TABOR is to protect taxpayers from the freewheeling spending practices of elected officials and the growing burden that government places on their pocketbooks.

Thank you