Another one bites the dust!

Despite all the tax hikes during the last legislative session, we at the Rio Grande Foundation got some sense of vindication today when yet another pork project that we had outlined in our 2008 Piglet Book (page 13) was abandoned. The latest is the $13 million that the Legislature had set aside for a $23 million equestrian center from which money will be diverted to other, more pressing capital projects.

While this hardly represents a “victory” for taxpayers in light of all of the spending and the general lack of fiscal responsibility among those in the Executive and Legislative Branches who control the process, it is a start. Now, if we’d only abandon (or at least constrain the growth of) programs like the $80 million film subsidies, never have built the RailRunner or Spaceport, and gotten serious about reducing government employment, we’d be dealing with surpluses rather than tax hikes.