Charlie Brown and Phyllis Resnick have been traveling around Colorado trying to get 8-year-olds to eat their Brussels sprouts.

Just kidding. What Brown and Resnick are really trying to do is raise awareness about a state budget crisis that will occur in the next several years. Brown and Resnick, of the University of Denver-based Center for Colorado’s Economic Future, are sharing the results of a study they did at the request of the Colorado Legislature.

Tuesday night the budget road show stopped at the Penrose House.

Times are tough, government revenues are down.

But Resnick said, “Even though it’s been the worst recession we’ve had in 70 years, we don’t think it’s our worst problem. The problem, we think, is structural.”

Simplified, the message is: Colorado’s budget will be buried by Medicaid and K-12 education spending unless big changes are not made, and even then, tax increases will be needed. The study concluded that without big changes there would be a $3.5 billion budget shortfall in 2025.

Added to the current tax structure and spending is the fact that “we are getting older,” Resnick observed. “We tax things that hurt if you drop them on your foot. When you get older you’ve already bought all that stuff.”

To raise more revenue, the study concluded, the state should consider two changes that would be really unpopular: switching to a graduated income tax and taxing services.

Some conservatives contend that budget cuts are all that is needed, but Resnick says they’re wrong.

“There’s not a sustainable way for us to cut our way out of this problem,” she said.

Can’t tax our way out of it, either.

Don’t celebrate, Democrats. When you controlled both houses of the Legislature and the governor’s office, you did nothing about any of this. Truth is, Colorado’s budget tangle is the result of a bipartisan conspiracy of benign neglect, as one session of the Legislature has kicked the can down the road to the next.

The GOP loves the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, the Dems love Amendment 23, which mandates a level of school funding we can’t afford. Nobody seems to like the property tax quagmire of the Gallagher Amendment, but it is killing us just as much.

We’d be better off without all three provisions. Officials in both parties realize this but they have let us down. It is not a good re-election strategy to place Brussels sprouts on the menu.

It’s great that Colorado has never had a budget deficit, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a serious problem. We need a combination of spending cuts and tax increases to fix this and we need to do it pretty soon.

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