It’s frustrating being an award-winning political columnist in Colorado. I carefully explain why certain policy changes are needed, I offer rock-solid arguments in favor of the reforms, and . . . the legislature mostly ignores me. I’ve made a few dents here and there, but overall my big ideas have made it nowhere. Meanwhile, wealthy people clutter the ballot with stupid measures.
Yet hope springs eternal, so I thought I’d take advantage of this election season by reminding people what’s not on the ballot but should be. Maybe some legislator out there will take an interest in something here for the next legislative session.
Here I’ll focus on two of my ideas: expand the size of the legislature and exempt low-level sellers from the sales tax. Republicans, Democrats, and everyone else should be able to get on board with these proposals.
I’ve also written extensively about separating party and state, which means not giving political parties any special government privileges, but I won’t review that matter here.
Yes, it would cost money to expand the size of the state legislature. But prudent conservatives do not just say cut government spending no matter what. They call on prudential spending for essential functions. Democratic representation is an essential function. The legislature is too small to effectively represent the people.
As I pointed out last year, the number of people represented by each house member has gone up from around 4,000 to over 90,000. I guess that most Coloradans have never met and could not name their state representative.
State representatives in Colorado represent more than double the number of people relative to the national median. In five states, including Wyoming, each lower-house legislator represents fewer than 10,000 people. Wyoming has 62 representatives for around 590,000 people.
Only nine states do worse than Colorado in terms of providing effective numerical representation, according to calculations provided by ChatGPT. California is by far the worst offender in this regard, with 80 members of the assembly representing over 39 million people.
A few years ago Daniel Christopher Bowen wrote a paper suggesting, unsurprisingly, that when a representative has fewer constituents, a constituent is more likely to know about and make contact with their representative.
I am not suggesting that the number of legislators should grow strictly with the population. If we still had the representation we had at the beginning of statehood, that would create a house of over a thousand members. Way too many! So what’s the right size today?
In 1972, Rein Taagepera suggested something like a cubed-root model for ideal legislative size. If we take the simple cubed root of Colorado’s population, that’s 182. I suggest an adaptation of the 1972 model. At every census, take the cubed root of the population, round that number up to the nearest number evenly divisible by four, and then make that the size of the total legislature. Then say the house is three times as large as the senate, and, importantly, nest three house districts within the geographic borders of one senate district.
So at this point, Colorado would have 184 legislators, with 138 representatives and 46 senators. This is an elegant plan to make Colorado’s legislature far more practically democratic.
Phil Weiser rails against monopoly power in some contexts, but to date to my knowledge he hasn’t lifted a finger to help solve a problem plaguing small-scale sellers in Colorado: the high costs of sales-tax compliance.
I’ve written four books, but I cannot practically sell my own books directly in Colorado because sales-tax compliance is so onerous. Therefore, I sell my books only through Amazon. (You can also read my books for free via my website.)
As state form DR 0154 makes clear, even someone “who makes an occasional or isolated sale of tangible personal property” must “remit sales tax on these isolated and occasional sales” come April. True, low-level sellers within these rules need not get a sales-tax license, which is a whole other level of bureaucracy, but they do have to file the tax paperwork, still a major hassle.
Most people just ignore the law here. Have you ever seen someone collect sales tax at a yard sale or for a CraigsList sale? I haven’t. Likewise, people often sell “merch” at events without collecting or remitting sales taxes. Keeping a widely applicable yet widely flouted law on the books is dangerous and wrong.
The reform is obvious and modest: Exempt people from collecting or remitting sales taxes at all levels of government if they sell less than, say, $5,000 in a calendar year worth of goods, indexed to inflation.
Notably, the legislature has addressed this problem for nonprofits. In 2019 the legislature passed, and the governor signed, House Bill 1323, which exempts $45,000 of sales from sales-tax compliance and eases the rules in other ways. That’s great. However, as the Department of Revenue points out, the exemptions do not extend to city and county sales taxes, unless those governments adopt the same rules.
The legislature also has made some headway in making sales-tax compliance slightly easier for sellers. But especially for small-scale sellers the compliance hassles remain enormous.
Also, especially because government now requires out-of-state sellers to collect and remit sales taxes, the legislature should just repeal the use-tax laws. The idea with use-tax laws is that, if sales taxes weren’t collected for some sale, the purchaser is supposed to pay the equivalent tax. Again, that law is widely ignored and a stupid hassle. Get rid of it.
There’s a lot we should do to reform our legal and political systems. But expanding the size of the legislature and giving sales-tax relief to small-time sellers would be great places to start.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
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