Spring 1999
Calculating a Colorado Give Back
While the New Hampshire legislature is exploring ways to collect new taxes, Colorado lawmakers are looking for ways to give back a $3.1 billion surplus expected to fill state coffers over the next five years.
Emboldened by New Hampshire’s Tax Calculator, The Gazette in Colorado Springs has created its own on-line tax calculator to empower voters with the information they need to participate in the debate.
When statehouse reporter Genevieve Anton heard about the New Hampshire experiment from the Pew Center, she realized the same thing might help Colorado voters.
The result is: “It’s Your Money: The Colorado Tax Debate,” a special Web site and calculator put on-line in early March. (www.gazette.com/yourmoney/)Like the New Hampshire site, it allows people to figure how each of the major tax reduction measures might change their own tax bill. It also allows visitors to read the full text of each proposal and track its progress. And it answers common questions, archives past Gazette stories, tells how to contact state lawmakers and generates public feedback.
The goal, says Anton, is to give people the tools they needs to be players in a debate that, until now, has been limited to lobbyists and lawmakers. She discovered that journalists, too, had just scratched the surface.To program the calculator, Anton and her colleagues had to understand the tax proposals inside and out, a process that took two of them a week of intensive study.
As a result, they began to see not only what the various proposals did, but the implications of each. For instance, a widely held assumption was that a measure to refund a state tax on telephones would benefit everyone equally since most everyone has a phone. Anton discovered, however, that some big businesses would reap huge benefits ($33,000 a year for one company) compared to the average homeowner, who would get about $10 annually.
Such information could change the nature of the debate from strictly a political argument about who gets what to a discussion of values and fairness, observes Anton. With so much at stake, she and her editors believe the Colorado tax debate needs to be viewed as more than just a political feeding frenzy.
Both the New Hampshire and Colorado tax calculators are an example of how Internet technology can be used to empower voters and improve journalism. And they could be just the beginning. With the deregulation of utilities, many citizens will be asked to make decisions about purchasing electricity and natural gas. What would happen if plans for a new highway or office building were put on-line so citizens could see for themselves where the road would go or how the building would look? The possibilities are endless.
Jon Greenberg of New Hampshire Public Radio notes that journalists have tended to look at the Internet as a way to deliver radio, television and print on the screen. “Let’s not forget,” he says, “that what people have on their desk is a computer. Let’s make use of it.”