Tonight, the bottle let me down BY AL DIAMON

People with experience collecting referendum signatures have told me the best places to find voters willing to sign petitions are at the local transfer station and outside churches. People with experience collecting referendum signatures must have a high tolerance for boredom. Who wants to spend Saturday hanging around the dump talking to the attendant about recycling rates? And lurking near a house of worship on Sunday would probably get me arrested for loitering.

So I realized that if I wanted to have any fun on the weekend and still sign up a few of my neighbors, I’d have to resort to Plan B.

I hit the bars.

I came equipped with a petition seeking a public vote on a plan to cap state and local government spending in Maine, allowing budgets to increase only by the rate of inflation plus a factor to account for population growth (currently about four percent). If any excess money is collected, 80 percent would be returned to taxpayers, while 20 percent would go into a rainy-day fund for emergencies. In addition, the proposed law would require approval by a two-thirds majority in the Legislature and a vote of the people before taxes or fees could be raised. The measure is called the Taxpayer Bill of Rights or TABOR.

Right away, I discovered that acronym was going to be a problem.

"TABOR?" said one happy-hour patron. "Wasn’t that the monster in some old sci-fi movie? ‘TABOR the Great’ or something?"

"I think that was Tobor," said his well-oiled companion. "It’s ‘robot’ spelled backwards."

"Well," the first drinker asked me, "who would win in a fight to the death, Tobor or TABOR?"

I moved on down the bar. Where things only got worse.

"Nomar?" said a patron whose eyes were glued to ESPN. "Is this a petition for the Red Sox to get him back from the Cubs? I’m not signing that, ’cause I like Edgar Renteria at short. And anyway, Nomar’s on the disabled list."

"You idiot," said the next drinker, "He said ‘East Timor.’ "

A third patron chimed in: "I thought he was supporting Al Gore."

To which a fourth souse added, "Nevermore."

I headed for the door. The dump was starting to look pretty good.

Obviously, there are lots of misconceptions about TABOR. Even among sober people. Knowledgeable friends with distinct liberal tendencies were reluctant to sign the petition, having heard a similar law had wreaked havoc in Colorado. The tax-and-spend crowd seems to be laboring under the impression TABOR would force Maine to eliminate all sorts of valuable state programs, such as free Viagra for sex offenders and the $50 million in overpayments to doctors who treat Medicaid patients. But that’s not necessarily true.

Between 2001 and 2003, the recession caused Colorado’s tax receipts to drop 16 percent. The state couldn’t meet its current obligations, leading to massive budget cuts. Maine’s TABOR guards against that possibility by establishing a rainy-day fund to cover such shortfalls.

Colorado also suffered because its cap was tied to revenue. When the amount of cash coming in decreased, the size of the state budget declined. After the recession, revenues increased, but spending couldn’t return to its former level because the base from which the cap was figured was now millions of dollars lower. The result: Colorado is refunding $345 million to taxpayers over the next two years, at the same time it’s facing a $235 million budget shortfall. Maine’s plan avoids this paradoxical situation by linking the starting point for future spending to previous expenditures. That means even during economic downturns, the budget would remain relatively stable.

Finally, Colorado voters made the mistake of passing a constitutional amendment in 2000 (just before the economy began circling the toilet bowl in a counterclockwise direction) that mandates annual increases in education spending. That effectively exempts schools from the spending cap, while intensifying its effect on the rest of the budget. There’s no such requirement in Maine, and if voters display a modicum of common sense, there never will be.

We should be grateful to Colorado for having agreed to serve as a bad example. Thanks to the Rocky Mountain State, TABOR Version 2.0 should be glitch-free.

It’s tough enough to explain all that to skeptical liberals. But just try getting somebody trying to down his fourth A-OK without spilling any on his pants, while simultaneously listening to the headbanger channel on satellite radio and ogling the bartender (who’s old enough to be his mother), to grasp the idea of TABOR.

"Theodore?" he slurred. "Isn’t Roosevelt dead?"

"Did you say the Mighty Thor?" inquired his drinking buddy. "That was my favorite comic book."

"Somebody call for a stevedore?" asked a guy dressed like an escapee from the Village People.

"Gotta go," I said. "I think I’m late for church."

To get the score on TABOR, visit www.taxpayerbillofrights.com. If all this got you in an uproar, email me at ishmaelia@gwi.net. Don’t be a bore.