Colorado Election–Amendment U

This one is easy for me. Amendment U wants to remove the need to collect money from people using public land where the value of the use is < US$6,000. This is indexed to inflation over time (after 2 years).

Should we exempt people from taxes? The law and order people would say that this isn’t fair. Why should a rancher who gets $5,999 of value from grazing on public land be exempt from taxes.

In a hypothetical sense, they shouldn’t.

In the real world, this is a tiny amount of money in CO. We have about 7,000 possessory interests in CO (a crazy term), that net around $315mm in value. However, tax payments are about $7mm, which is nothing to sneeze at. However, the interests that are less than $6,000 are around 5,100 of these, netting about $125,000 in taxes. A tiny fraction, on average, $24 in taxes.

It cannot cost more to collect taxes than we get. In a practical sense, this doesn’t make any difference to us and it promotes not only efficiency, but also small businesses. This is precisely how I want tax and regulation to work. Less (or none) for small businesses, more for larger ones.

If you want to say this isn’t fair, remember that much of life isn’t fair. This is a fair decision to me based on the small values.

Maybe we can get a Paypal instant xfer of micropayments that make this feasible, but for now, I vote for this. To remove this tax and exempt small businesses.