If you want to know about the impact of spending caps, just travel to Colorado.

Atrios is right: the idea that someone can be “serious” about the deficit while wanting to extend historically low tax rates is ridiculous. But that’s only true if you think yesterday’s Bowles-Simpson recommendations for deficit reduction had anything to do with deficit reduction. Clearly they don’t.

There is a tendency in political arguments to take things to their logical, yet absurd conclusion and then argue about that being a bad idea. This is called reductio ad absurdum. It tends to be a bad way to argue, since most of the time things do not get to their absurd and logical conclusion in real life. However, in Colorado Springs we have a real life example of things going to the level of the absurd.

For those who don’t live in Colorado or don’t follow the whole “Tax Payers Bill of Rights” (TABOR) movement I need to set the stage a little bit. There is a this very conservative fellow by the name of Douglas Bruce. Old Dougie is more than a bit of a nutter about taxes. He and Grover Norquist have the same idea,namely, that the government never spends money well and should always be starved of all the money possible, at every turn

TABOR being passed, first in Colorado Springs, then state-wide in Colorado. One of the provisions of TABOR is that tax revenue cannot be increased except by the popular vote of the people, beyond the rate of inflation plus the rate of population growth. Beyond that limit the State or the City has to return any revenue they have collected.

That would be bad enough, but TABOR is based on the previous year, so if we have a recession like the one we are in, and revenues fall, then the next year the City or the State has to start from that lower limit. They can’t stay where they were the previous year and to raise anymore revenue requires a popular vote.