PUBLISHED in the Rocky Mountain News (9/15/05)
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_4081060,00.html

re: "Millions spent on welfare fix" (Rocky Mountain News, 9/3/05)
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4052769,00.html

To the Editors:

How typical of a bureaucrat for Dr. John Witwer to throw in a wholly unsupportable jab at TABOR while trying to explain the failure of the CBMS’s welfare computer system.

There has been no year since the implementation of TABOR, including during the recession, when the state budget did not grow. The problem here is not that TABOR caused programs to be cut (remember, politicians growth less than they wanted a “cut”), but that legislators could not find the same spending discipline that the real world must deal with when times are tough. The state budget grew even when our personal budgets shrank.

It’s equally typical of bureaucrats to use the passive “mistakes were made” implying that mistakes implement themselves. No, people made mistakes, and it cost us taxpayers $200 million plus the $20 million in overtime costs (so far) to deal with a failed computer system. This problem is due to incompetence, pure and simple.

Leave it to the government to say the problem was that we didn’t spend enough money. Leave it to the government to use their failures as an excuse to raise our taxes.

Ross Kaminsky is a Regional Coordinator for the Colorado Club for Growth