Lift up your voice and vote.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: On Colorado - Editorial

OCTOBER. A MONTH FOR STOCK MARKET CRASHES (LET'S HOPE NOT), FALLING leaves and a final consideration of candidates and issues that you will face as a voter in the Nov. 2 general election.

Colorado business owners and executives, along with other voters, will choose a president for the next four years; a new U.S. senator to represent the state; whether to continue funding the arts and sciences in metro Denver; and whether to finance a huge expansion of the Denver area's mass transit system.

If you did not see it already on page 7, you may want to go back to read ColoradoBiz Speaks, the first time in many years that our magazine has endorsed specific candidates and certain programs that are at issue in this November election.

Two themes underlying the positions the magazine takes on that page are a belief in growth for Colorado businesses and a belief in a free market to accommodate that growth.

Two reports that were released last month are indicative of why the magazine supports those principles. One, released by the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute, found that larger numbers of Coloradans were out of work during the aftermath of the 2001 recession than were out of work in the aftermath of the early '90s recession.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The other, commissioned by the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, said FasTracks, the expansion of light-rail mass transit, would produce 10,000 jobs over 12 years and pump $2.9 billion into the economy.

I didn't find the first report's conclusions that surprising: Colorado felt very little of the 1990-91 (Gulf War) recession because the state's economy was still growing rapidly out of the crash it took in the late 1980s. That crash was more of a regional downturn due to an overbuilt real-estate market, a collapse of the oil-and-gas industry, which was important to Colorado, and the nation's savings-and-loan crisis.

The forces of the tech...