Zombies under the Gold Dome: They seem harmless at first

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A sales tax holiday? Hope it applies to crossbows.

By Ali Mickelson

CFI Director of Legislative and Tax Policy

The Colorado Capitol has been rumored to host a variety of undead characters, including a Victorian lady who presents herself outside the Senate gallery, invisible horses who amble up the marble staircase and the scorned mistress of a former legislator who frequents the golden dome.

But scarier than ghosts that haunt the Capitol’s halls are the zombie tax policies that awake from the dead and creep out from both chambers every session. These resurrected tax policies claw their way out of the graveyard of bad ideas, stumbling from committee to committee, searching for new brains to feed upon with faulty policy intentions and ghastly political goals.

For example, there’s the surprisingly appealing “school supply sales tax holiday” zombie that, despite its relatively harmless demeanor, is actually hollow and rotten underneath its dapper clothing. This proposal, which would create a temporary timeout from sales tax for those who purchase school supplies on a select weekend, is merely an opportunity for retailers to take advantage of consumers by increasing prices. It disproportionately benefits wealthier individuals and hasn’t been proven to create any savings for small businesses or struggling families. It is, in essence, a zombie in sheep’s clothing.

There’s another zombie that would eliminate the tax on business personal property. The business personal property tax is a tax on tangible property like computers, desks and equipment owned by businesses, that, while almost universally unpopular, is a major funding source for schools, especially those in rural Colorado. Each year the idea of eliminating the business personal property tax is revived from the dead, bringing with it a $1 billion hit to education funding. While this zombie is one of the easiest to kill, its persistence means you can’t ever put down the crossbow.

Finally, the most sophisticated of the zombie hierarchy, the “dynamic modeling zombie.” Dynamic modeling is a way to estimate the impact of tax and budget changes on the economy and revenue system. This arcane zombie is often popular with its haunted peers, the transparency apparitions, and will be often be resurrected multiple times in a session or even a hearing. In reality, dynamic modeling is an often misguided and inaccurate way to model economic policy. This zombie has been known to possess the alluring ability to allow anyone it meets to justify their conclusions. In fact, the dynamic modeling zombie may have even been supporting economic zombies from Kansas when they were revived in the state.

CFI combats many zombie tax ideas, like the three mentioned above, each year. We fight with our fiscal weapons — economic theory, budgeting considerations and strategic tax principles — attempting to take out the zombies before they can cause permanent damage to Colorado families and the overall economy.

Yet the frequency with which zombie tax policies claw their way out of the grave is terrifying. And they always have that telltale stench of decomposed ideas — ideas that are unproven, inequitable, ineffective and inefficient. They’re downright scary, and they want to devour efforts to create an economy that works for everyone.

We hope someday tax policy zombies will join the Capitol ghosts as only folklore, remembered only in scary stories we tell around a campfire as we enjoy the warmth of shared prosperity.