Hold up: the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, TABOR, can mean different things depending on the context. Why can’t lawmakers be more creative with names? Somebody send a carmaker over there.
Anywho, one of the TABORs is under the IRS. The IRS has a Taxpayer Bill of Rights, defining all of your rights as a U.S. taxpayer. You have the right to be informed about IRS decisions about your taxes, the right to dispute and appeal IRS decisions, the right for the IRS to not be a d*#% during audits...things like that. This TABOR was passed into law by Congress in the 1980s, and updated in 1996, so it’s the law...not just the IRS being nice.
The more controversial type of TABOR is the one that limits a government’s power to tax their people, oftentimes based on measures like inflation and population...a fan favorite of libertarians and conservatives.
This isn’t too common, but Colorado is known for taking the daring TABOR plunge. While Oregon, Nebraska, and Maine all toyed with a Taxpayer Bill of Rights to put a cap on the states’ ability to tax its people, none of them took the jump.
Colorado is the lone weirdo to this day. Advocates are happy they get to keep their money, and hope that the bureaucrats are being more efficient with what they have. Meanwhile, critics point out that Colorado is the 48th state for higher education spending and 44th in road repair spending, which means TABOR could be hurting the economy more than it’s helping.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What's the Difference Between F...145 Views
Finance, a la Shmoop. [title page] What's the difference between federal
and state taxes? All right, well, when the U.S. came together a quarter of a
millennium ago, it was the United States. See, right there in the title you get a [founding fathers pictured]
sense of the tension. We started out as just states. These things. Then, we came together [individual states on map]
and created a central government that kind of sort of had control over each of [government tries to control states]
the states, and well, you can imagine that not everyone agreed about every rule.
Some states wanted murder to be an offense punishable by death, while other [protesters picket]
states wanted it to be, you know, legal. Well, okay maybe not legal, but they
had different ideas about how you should deal with murderers... i.e., not all of them [person pushed into lion pit]
should be thrown into the lion pit. Anyway, this was all well and good when it just
involved local laws and customs. Local customs dictated local laws, and then
local taxes could be allocated accordingly. So they could pay for things [local laws and taxes diagram]
like a bouncy house for the mayor. But what happened when there was a threat of [mayor in bounce house]
military invasion? Well, what if Georgia wanted to fight
them commies, but North Carolina didn't? Yeah, that didn't work out so well. So [states argue over military]
for some things, there has to be a federal law that supersedes state law
and federal taxes that support those laws, like military spending. If only those [federal laws and taxes diagram]
pacifists in Maryland didn't want to spend money on guns, well, then what would
the rest of the country do? Yep, let Maryland start speaking Russian or [Maryland hippies hang out]
Chinese as the preferred language while the rest of the nation just watched [Maryland conquered]
while sipping their tea? Or in the United States' case, you know, eating doughnuts? Yeah. [Americans eat doughnuts]
So, military spending protects the entire country, and those expenses come out of [military budget chart]
federal taxes. National highways? Federal. Border Patrol? Federal. Space travel? [federal and local laws/taxes demonstrated]
Federal. Schools? State. Libraries? State. Little country roads? State... local.
You know... Or even smaller in the form of county
taxes as we get littler and littler... yeah. So federal taxes pay for all the big
stuff--the things that we share as unified Americans no matter what state
we live in, while state taxes pay for stuff particular interest to our little
local state, wherever it is. You know, like DC taxes aren't going to be used to
build a fire department in Minnesota. Stuff like that. [fire department in Minnesota]
Besides, Washington has their, you know, own fires to put out. [newscaster speaks]
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