Colorado Progressive

UPDATE: This post reveals a little bit of ignorance on my part of the breaks and exemptions available to both large and small businesses in Colorado. Also, the baker example is not very good, since, at least in Denver, we don’t pay sales tax on flour, sugar, or eggs. I maybe got a little off track on the big business/small business thing.

That said, my complaint against the Post stands.

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The Denver Post Editorial Board got it right yesterday when they called to cut many of the state’s tax exemptions in an effort to get the budget back on track. Not only is this good sense, but the editorial did a good job enumerating the cuts to make and explaining why. But an about-face on House Bill 1190 leaves me wanting more.

[T]ax exemptions shouldn’t be off limits, as some have suggested. In balancing the budget, legislators have stripped hundreds of millions from higher education, K-12 education, Medicaid funding, and programs for the mentally ill and developmentally disabled.

Senior citizens have lost their property tax break, and state employees are getting unpaid furlough days.

Some are calling the proposed bills “job killers,” and unfortunately some jobs may be lost as a result. We do not relish the thought. Job losses in this economy translate into hardship, and the private sector already has shouldered its share of the burden. But cuts to the public sector result in job losses as well.

The argument should not be about the relative value of a public school cafeteria worker’s job versus that of, say, a cashier at a privately owned restaurant. It’s a matter of fairness, and we think it is appropriate that business interests share in the state’s budget woes.

Emphasis mine. It’s nice to see the Post call for fairness in sharing the burden of belt tightening during troubled times.

That said, it’s galling to see the newspaper turn around in the same column and argue against repealing tax exemptions on “manufacturing inputs” until mid-2012, as proposed in House Bill 1190.

The Post acknowledges that this will affect their printing industry. The paper goes on to cite the Colorado Association of Commerce & Industry (just a little lobbying team also known as The State Chamber of Commerce):

Representatives of the Colorado Association of Commerce & Industry contend it’s improper to tax a manufacturing input, which is used to create a retail product that is taxed again. They call it double taxation, and we find that argument persuasive.

Well, shoot. There goes any argument the Denver Post hoped to make about fairness. I’m sure there is some long and cherished history–engineered by big business–of businesses of a certain size in the state being exempted from paying the same sales tax on a product that any small business owner must pay to manufacture her product. Ostensibly, the newspaper gets a break on electricity used in the printing process. Perhaps, given the line espoused by CACI, this break also extends to raw materials such as the massive quantities of paper and ink required to produce a large-scale daily.

Does the independent baker enjoy such a tax exemption on her electric bill? Is it possible that she doesn’t pay sales tax on the immense quantities of flour, sugar, and eggs that comprise her retail products?

The Post should recognize as well as anybody–especially given the tone of the editorial–that if fairness is at issue in bearing down under tough times, then big businesses as well as small must be open to accepting responsible measures to restore equilibrium in Colorado’s accounts.