Jon Caldara

10/02/2026

10 good reasons Coco is cuckoo.

CoCo gives voters a choice between blowing billions on a train few will ride and keeping that money in their own pockets.

09/30/2026

Mike Rosen weighs on on Colorado's 14 statewide ballot measures.

Columnist Mike Rosen weighs in on Colorado's fourteen statewide ballot questions.

09/19/2026

Do you want the Broncos to win the Super Bowl?

Then you’d better hope Amendment 87 — which brings back Colorado’s economy-strangling “graduated” income tax — loses at the ballot box this fall. Seriously.

Forget Republicans and Democrats. Forget tax policy. This is about Xs and Os — and whether Denver can afford the players who execute them and win a Super Bowl.

The Manning effect
Every successful business has star employees: rare talents without whom the enterprise simply doesn’t work. Same goes for an NFL franchise.

Every business has star employees the whole operation is built around. Sometimes that star is the chief executive. No Henry Ford, no assembly line, no affordable car. No Steve Jobs, no iPhone — foldable or otherwise. No Elon, and Teslas are just golf carts with better marketing.

But more often, the star isn’t the person running the place — it’s the person the CEO had the sense to hire. A smart CEO understands paying extraordinary people extraordinary salaries is sometimes the price of success.

Competent employees may be plentiful. Franchise-changing talent is not.

The chemist in the lab who sees the molecule nobody else does. The closer on the sales team. The reporter whose byline wins the Pulitzer. The performer who actually fills the arena.

Any company can hire a receptionist. Few can hire star employees. A smart CEO knows you pay that person absurdly well, because the alternative is watching him walk across the street or across the state border to your competitor.

Football works exactly the same way. A head coach’s most consequential decisions aren’t play calls — they’re personnel calls.

In 2012, the Broncos handed Peyton Manning roughly $20 million a year to be their star employee (adjusted for inflation, that’s pushing $40 million today). Did it work out? Ask the Lombardi Trophy sitting in the team’s front office.

Manning was worth every nickel.

The Amendment 87 pay cut
But like any CEO, a head coach doesn’t have infinite money. He’s stuck with a salary cap, competing against 31 other teams for the same shrinking pool of ridiculously overpaid talent.

Enter Amendment 87, which offers most of us a token tax cut while nearly doubling the rate on those evil, hated rich people we call Denver Broncos. If it passes this fall, every Bronco currently taxed at Colorado’s flat 4.4% starts paying 8.4%.

Football players take a lot of hits to the head, but their accountants don’t — and unlike our legislators, accountants (and even concussed football players) can do arithmetic. All else equal, a player has to earn 8.4% more to play in Denver than to play somewhere with no state income tax at all.

Any player who plays for the Miami Dolphins, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Jacksonville Jaguars, Las Vegas Raiders, Tennessee Titans, Dallas Cowboys, Houston Texans or the Seattle Seahawks gets an instant 8.4% raise compared to playing for Denver under Amendment 87.

Run Peyton Manning’s numbers again: at $20 million a year, that 8.4% is $1.68 million a year — $8.4 million over a five-year deal. Double those figures to adjust for inflation, and you’re talking real money even by NFL standards.

Sure, plenty of things factor into where a star chemist, programmer, performer or quarterback decides to live and work. But an 8.4% pay cut isn’t a rounding error. It’s the kind of number that ends up circled on a napkin in some agent’s office come free agency.

Not that it matters, but it’s not just football teams competing for star talent. Every Colorado business is as well.

The relocation incentive
If Colorado wants to be a tech magnet for the upcoming quantum revolution, companies will be competing for quantum specialists. I don’t know how many of those you know, I don’t know any.

What goes for the quantum tech field and the football field goes for every industry.

A company can give those superstar employees an immediate 8.5% pay increase by relocating to a no-income-tax state. That’s why so many companies are relocating out of California, Illinois, New York and now Colorado for places like Florida and Texas. Just ask the well-paid people who used to work at Palantir in Denver.

Amendment 87 makes the Denver Broncos’ problem every business’s problem.

But let’s keep it to football.

The ballot language for Amendment 87 should actually read: “Shall the Denver Broncos have 8.4% less money to spend on player talent than other teams in the NFL?”

If Amendment 87 passes, every Bronco currently taxed at Colorado’s flat 4.4% starts paying 8.4%.

09/18/2026

Independence Institute voter guide is LIVE!

2026 VOTER GUIDE AMENDMENT 81 This amendment to the Colorado Constitution will require state and local law enforcement agencies to notify federal immigration authorities if they cannot determine the immigration status of a violent criminal or a repeat criminal offender. As a general rule, we oppose....

09/14/2026

09/07/2026

I go to a lot of conferences, often in beautiful cities I never actually see.

Friends hear where I’ve been and ask depressing questions like, “Did you visit the famous museum?”

No. I saw Ballroom C, the lobby bar and took out a loan to buy a Caesar salad.

Having experienced some of the world’s finest windowless conference rooms in the planet’s most exotic locales, I can report not one stood out from the others. Barcelona or Baltimore — makes no difference.

So if you must spend days sealed inside a hotel-conference center, you at least want it near the airport. A two-hour drive to be locked in a windowless room is cruel, though not unusual.

Room at the Corporate Welfare Inn
And thus was born the brilliant idea of the Ga***rd hotel.

The Ga***rd is essentially a massive Dave & Buster’s with hotel rooms, built near an airport so conventioneers can parachute in, buy a branded polo shirt, drink three expense-account bourbons and escape without accidentally encountering the city they supposedly visited.

It is a sealed corporate biosphere where conference goers are housed, fed, entertained, lubricated and sold commemorative fleece — all without the danger of experiencing local culture.

It’s genius. Soulless, sterile and carrying the faint aftertaste of callous corporate evil. But genius nonetheless.

And honestly, good for Ga***rd. If people want to pay for luxurious captivity, America remains a free country.

The problem is Ga***rd wants people who never checked in to pay the bill.

Tax subsidies are wonderful when taxpayers are buying things for you. But most of the time, you are the taxpayer buying things for somebody with better lobbyists.

The behemoth Ga***rd Rockies near Denver International Airport has already persuaded politicians to extract hundreds of millions of your tax dollars. It doesn’t matter you’ve never slept there.

Now Ga***rd wants still more public assistance to expand.

Big developers have discovered a marvelous construction material: other people’s money.

Government favoritism
They call it a “public-private partnership.” The public supplies the money. The private part keeps it.

In the process, government does something it should never do: favor one business over its competitors.

Consider Ikea, the giant blue-and-yellow box alongside Interstate 25 in Centennial. The city rolled out the taxpayer-financed Swedish carpet, complete with a generous tax increment financing (TIF) package.

A few miles down the road, Jake Jabs built American Furniture Warehouse the old-fashioned way: by selling furniture to people who wanted furniture. The small neighborhood furniture store received the same economic development package it usually gets: a tax bill.

The defense is always the same: subsidies will create jobs, attract visitors and generate enormous economic benefits for “the community.”

This argument lives in the same gated neighborhood as “it’s for the kids.”

Some economic-development corporation will produce a glossy study showing every dollar handed to a favored company will magically generate $10 in prosperity. Apparently, government has discovered an investment that would make Warren Buffett look like a man scratching lottery tickets at a gas station.

Socialized risk, privatized profit
More than $81 million in state “incentives” went toward the Ga***rd Rockies. That means taxpayers across Colorado subsidized it. Are taxpayers across Colorado sharing proportionately in the promised windfall?

Ga***rd customers fly into DIA, ride to the hotel, spend several days eating, drinking and sleeping in the biodome, just to immediately fly home.

They don’t drop much money in Colorado Springs or Pueblo. Most won’t make it to downtown Denver.

So what return did the rest of Colorado receive?

Aurora taxpayers have an even larger stake, having poured more than $300 million in incentives to Ga***rd. Aurora is filled with extraordinary locally owned ethnic restaurants Ga***rd customers never visit.

The same captive-resort design that makes the hotel profitable undermines the claim its customers will shower money across the surrounding community.

Of course, the Ga***rd creates economic activity. The question is whether it creates enough genuinely new activity to justify forcing taxpayers to subsidize one company while its competitors pay their own bills — and help pay Ga***rd’s.

For a state perpetually screaming it is broke, this seems like a particularly strange time to throw more public money at a profitable private development.

If Ga***rd wants to add another wing to its luxurious corporate detention center, wonderful. Let Ga***rd build it.

Colorado taxpayers have already paid admission to a hotel most of them will never enter.

Big developers have discovered a marvelous construction material: other people’s money.

08/27/2026

The board will vote on the sales tax and bond debt package at it's Friday, August 28 meeting.

The ballot question would authorize a 0.333% sales and use tax, estimated to raise $295 million annually.

08/18/2026

Let me see if I get this. A state representative gets state taxpayer money for her not-for-profit, that pays her a $133k salary. (And this is legal?) Then her nonprofit gives our taxpayer money to buy signatures to raise our taxes?

Rep. Garcia’s nonprofit has been very gracious to the Initiative 195 effort.

Campaign finance reports show Rep. Garcia’s nonprofit has been very gracious to the Initiative 195 effort.

08/18/2026

Campaign finance reports show Rep. Lorena Garcia’s non-profit has been very gracious to the Initiative 195 effort.

Campaign finance reports show Rep. Garcia’s nonprofit has been very gracious to the Initiative 195 effort.