The bill creates the Youth Mental Health Services Access Enterprise and creates a fee on certain online gaming transactions to fund the enterprise’s services. Many of the games are produced by overseas companies that will ignore Colorado fees. And how really are we going to block services on the companies that don’t pay? It’s up to parents, not the state government, to oversee their children’s use of the internet. It may be a proper role of government to address youth mental health problems, particularly when behavior becomes criminal. The funding concept of taxing a narrow sector of society to pay for problems of another sector violates the principal of equal protection under law and violates the definition of “fee.” Establishment of yet another bureaucracy, one that is not directly accountable to the citizens, is also objectionable.
