This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 21st, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Taxpayers Bill of Rights, or Tabor, has a checkered past, but it's hard to doubt a strong tax

and spending limitation actually does limit state taxes and spending.

Colorado's limitation is back in effect, and in a world of tight budgets

Cato adjunct scholar Michael New believes it's time for states to again reconsider

a proven way to constrain government spending.

Tabor is Taxpayers Bill of Rights.

Taxpayers Bill of Rights is America's best and most effective fiscal limit that was actually enacted in 1992 in the great state of

Colorado and during the 90s it was a great success story that again it was a

most stringent fiscal limit that we had in place at the time.

And it had three features that made it effective.

Just some background, I mean, libertarians have tried in the past to enact a put effective

kind of fiscal limitations in place in many other states

and for the most part most researchers including me agree that most of these previous attempts

really didn't work well or really didn't work that well long term.

The Taxpayers Bill of Rights, however, three characteristics that made it unique.

The first characteristic was it set a low limit.

A lot of these 70s era limits just were set too high and didn't really constrain government much,

but the taxpayers' bill of rights said that revenue grow at inflation plus population.

That's a low limit, and that was one of the reasons why it was effective.

Another reason why it was effective is it was constitutional.

Many of the limits we have in place are statutory.

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