Colorado’s budget crisis

I have been following Colorado politics since 2008. This budget crisis has been directly caused by the actions of our elected officials over the last 15 years. If we follow the timeline for Colorado’s decline, it began in 2009 when Barrack Obama was elected president. At the time, we thought he was a left-leaning Democrat. That’s an understatement.

Next, in Colorado, was the legalization of pot in 2012. With that came big promises of lots of tax revenue, which has since declined. In 2013, Colorado collected $3.3 billion in tax revenue. In 2023, the State collected $274 million in tax revenue, down $3 billion!

Pot has created huge physical, emotional and mental issues for the Colorado users including the kids. It has, in fact, increased medical costs to the taxpayers as well as lots of other problems, including more vehicle deaths. The homeless started flooding the City of Denver because of pot. In the meantime, John Hickenlooper’s Road Home plan failed miserably. The homeless population continued to grow as it does today.

Michael Hancock gets elected 2011-2023. Of course, another liberal progressive mayor. As the homeless population continued to get worse setting up homeless camps all over, it was apparent that nothing was going to happen with Hancock at the helm. He served three terms. In the last three years, Colorado has spent $3 billion on the homeless.

In 2019, Jared Polis was elected as Governor of Colorado. The elites Pat Stryker, Rutt Bridges, Tim Gill and Polis contributed huge sums of money to ensure the progressive liberal Polis was elected governor. ty Councils.

In 2020, COVID-19 hit, and the state received $3.5 billion from the federal government. That money was doled out to different entities, and eventually, it disappeared with little or no accountability at the governor’s discretion.

As the liberal progressives go to work dismantling everything good in Colorado, they destroy the oil and gas business. The vast business wisdom of the liberal progressive city councils and elected officials has literally destroyed a huge viable and dependable tax base, literally killing high-paying jobs in the oil and gas business.

Joe Biden’s open border policies and Colorado’s sanctuary state policies created a large bureaucratic spending bloat on illegals in our state to the tune of $350 million.

As a native-born Coloradan, I am embarrassed to tell people where I am from. I have traveled extensively around the country. I was asked by a woman in Branson Missouri where I was from, and I responded. She said we pray for the people of Colorado every day.

Trig Travis

Aurora

TikTok’s impact on business

TikTok made my business an overnight success. My name is Tyler Kanwai, and I own TK’s Surf and Turf Kitchen, the first Black-owned seafood restaurant in Colorado.

I started TK’s in 2020 after leaving my job to pursue my passion for cooking full-time. I’m grateful for my father and former chef, who taught me my cooking skills, and my stepfather, who helped me find and remodel the location for TK’s.

After “The Denver Food Scene” posted a video on TikTok highlighting one of my signature plates, my business took off. This video received over a million views in less than 24 hours. Since then, my business’s presence on TikTok has put us on the world map, so much so that members of the Denver Broncos, Denver Nuggets, visiting sports teams, musicians, and even NBA champion Kawhi Leonard have become customers at my restaurant. They all found it on TikTok. In fact, my business has grown by 300% in three years, with 90% of my traffic coming from TikTok.

This year, I had the privilege of meeting with Governor Jared Polis and Sen. James Coleman to share TikTok’s impact on TK’s, and I thank them for their continued support. To my state and federal lawmakers, Rep. Dianne DeGette, Senator Jeff Bridges, and Rep. Meg Froelich, I hope you will reconsider your support of a TikTok shutdown and continue to work towards a TikTok deal.

Tyler Kanwai

Denver

A dark era in history

In Hong Kong, Chinese activist Chow Hang-tung began a 36-hour hunger strike to commemorate the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, according to Agence France-Presse. Despite the dearth of news coverage of the event, the memories of that fateful day of June 4, 1989, still linger on 36 years later.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio denounced China’s deadly crackdown on peaceful protesters, saying that the world will “never forget” Tiananmen.

But neither will the people of China forget the millions who perished during Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a dark era in China’s long history that will be forever etched in the collective memory of its people.

Brian Stuckey

Denver