Joel Judd

Aurora wants to give the Gaylord hotel company a big subsidy to build a hotel next to Denver International Airport. On Monday, the State had a hearing to talk about it. This is how I used my five minutes.

I will address two points:

1. High Point development does not...

We can discuss the fate of CSP II -- Colorado's newest high-tech, state-of-the-art, solitary confinement (administrative segregation) prison. It cost several hundred million dollars. We've used a small part for one year and are about to mothball it. It will likely never again be used for...

The Colorado legislature will again consider a civil union bill this year.

In 1913 W.E.B. Du Bois editorialized against anti-miscegenation laws. He had no interest in marrying a white woman. The problem was with white men. A white man could seduce a black woman with no fear he could be...

There's a hole in the bucket.

You probably know a Colorado kid. You may even be one. In Colorado we have around 800,000 in the public schools. We'll spend about $5.2b this year to teach these kids reading, writing, arithmetic and some of the tools they'll need to operate the...

A friend asked me for a concrete example of what I've done to create jobs. My answer:

Government doesn't create jobs. The best it can do is fertilize the field and get out of the way. Entrepreneurial risk takers create new industries no one's ever thought about -- Andrew Carnegie...

School voucher bills are a hardy perennial at the legislature. The last few years they've appeared in the guise of income tax credits. Perhaps proponents have high incomes.

The income tax twist tends to route these bills thought the Finance Committee. I was moved to comment on fresh-scrubbed home school...

Many have asked my thoughts on SB 191 tying teacher retention and pay to the performance of their students on standardized tests. The goal is to improve our children's education. I embrace both that goal and the many paths that lead to it. I won't substitute a slogan for a...

Fundamentally, taxes must be fair.

No one should be paying less than their fair share. Even if you have lots of money for lobbyists and political consultants you ought to pay your fair share. I have written about this before, and am doing so again for the simple...

I have a philosophy of a government that works.

If a program works keep it.

If, a program doesn't work scrap it. Kind of naive, as even the most worthless of governmental ideas has passionate supporters. Passionate enough to hire a phalanx of articulate...

In October 2008 I was asked if I had ever seen the kind of excitement Barack Obama was generating.

Yes, I had; Federico Peña in 1983.

A progressive legal aid lawyer and the minority leader in the State House, Federico Peña had Denver energized as no politician before or...

Colorado has billions of dollars in corporate tax loopholes that we must close. They are welfare for corporations that cannot stand up to even the most cursory review:

• They produce few if any jobs
• They reward companies that are anti-union and do not provide decent benefits
• They don't work