Colorado Competitiveness Is Flashing Red

The Denver Gazette published a perspective piece by Cinamon Watson, CEO of the Common Sense Institute, and the warning could not be much clearer: Colorado is still wealthy, productive, and loaded with talent, but its competitive edge is slipping. That is not a death certificate. It is a warning light on the dash.

Watson lays out what the Common Sense Institute has been saying with unusual clarity. Colorado’s 2010s boom was powered by people, opportunity, affordability, and momentum. Now the state is seeing weaker domestic migration, business losses, crushing affordability problems, and a regulatory thicket that keeps growing like bindweed after a wet spring.

This wound is self-inflicted. One-party Democrat control has given Colorado a government that never met a regulation it did not want to laminate, never met a fee it did not want to hike, and never met a productive sector it did not want to tax, lecture, regulate, or sue into submission.

The Bullet Point Brief

• Colorado is still strong, which is exactly why this matters. Wealth is not immunity. A rich state can still make stupid choices.
• CSI says Colorado ranked 48th in domestic migration as a share of population between 2024 and 2025. A decade ago, we ranked 3rd. That is not “growing pains.” That is the market quietly clearing its throat.
• Colorado lost 12,100 residents through domestic migration between 2024 and 2025. More Americans moved out than moved in. Apparently the rest of the country did not get the memo about our flawless policy laboratory.
• The business numbers are flashing red. CSI found Colorado lost a net 3,934 business establishments in 2024, along with a net employment loss of 13,287 tied to closures and slowdowns. Employers do not need a press conference. They need predictability, reasonable costs, and government to stop acting like every payroll is a piñata.
• The regulatory machine keeps chewing. Legislative output has grown 56% since 2012, and the 2025 Legislature passed 487 bills. That is what happens when one-party rule mistakes activity for achievement and complexity for wisdom.

My Bottom Line

The Common Sense Institute is one of the sharpest and most genuinely common-sense organizations in Colorado’s policy conversation today. This piece is spot-on because it makes the distinction that Colorado’s political class desperately wants to blur: current strength is not the same thing as future trajectory.

Colorado did not become competitive because Democrats in Denver discovered prosperity in a binder. People came here because Colorado offered opportunity, quality of life, affordable room to build, and a culture that rewarded work. Businesses followed the people. Families followed the opportunity. Investment followed confidence. That was not magic. It was the result of conditions that made sense.

Now one-party Democrat control has spent years piling on costs, mandates, taxes, fees, lawsuits, regulations, and uncertainty, then acting confused when workers, employers, and capital start looking elsewhere. You cannot make housing more expensive, energy less reliable, business more complicated, and daily life more costly, then slap a mountain logo on the brochure and call it competitiveness.

Colorado still has advantages most states would kill for. That is what makes this so frustrating. This is not an apocalypse. It is squandered advantage. The fix is not complicated, even if the Capitol crowd will pretend it is. Cut the regulatory burden. Lower the taxes and fees that make Colorado too damn costly. Restore predictability. Let people build, hire, invest, and stay. Competitiveness is not a bumper sticker. It is what happens when government remembers it is not the main character.

Source: The Denver Gazette