American Enterprise Institute Education expert Rick Hess spoke yesterday at Rio Grande Foundation events in Albuquerque and Roswell. His Albuquerque remarks were video-recorded and are available below. The Albuquerque Journal covered Hess’ talk and that article is available here.
Education Expert Rick Hess discusses “Getting Charters Right” from Paul Gessing on Vimeo.
Those meanies in the Martinez Administration have announced that they are going to reimpose a work requirement on recipients of food stamps. That’s the program that has seen its budget explode in recent years. Growth was particularly pronounced during the recession, but was growing steadily in cost during the economic boom immediately prior to the recession:
Not surprisingly, the usual left-wing proponents of unlimited government spending are opposed to any effort to curtail the free goodies, including Rep. Lujan-Grisham.
But this “work requirement” is hardly the onerous burden the advocates claim. It is only 20 hours and those hours could be spent volunteering in the community. Yes, the classic single mom with kids will always face the issue of babysitting, but perhaps the discussion to have should be over how to reduce the number of single moms out there rather than constantly demanding that taxpayers give them free stuff?
Besides, even if you can’t get a job in New Mexico’s current, poor economy, sitting on your butt at home isn’t going to help you build the skills or network to find a new, paying job. Doing something productive for 20 hours a week in exchange for food stamps is very reasonable.
Recently, site-selection expert John Boyd was interviewed about New Mexico’s chances for getting the Tesla “gigafactory.” His comments were very enlightening. He said that manufacturing companies seek reasons to eliminate states when considering where to build major facilities, and the lack of a right to work law is at the top of the list. In the interview, Boyd again reiterated the need for right to work stating, “I can’t underscore how critical right to work status is.”
Unfortunately, despite polling data (recently released by Rio Grande Foundation) showing that nearly 85 percent of New Mexicans support such laws, they are controversial. In reality, such laws merely prohibit unions and employers teaming up to force new employees to join a union as a condition of employment.
While most people see voluntary association as an American birthright, many unions see it as a dire threat to their funding and political power. So they kill it every year in its first committee in Santa Fe.
Equally problematic is the “go-along” attitude of so many of New Mexico’s business leaders. With 6,000 Tesla jobs hanging in the balance, the need for our legislature to pass a right-to-work law should have been a centerpiece of the recent “Reinventing Our City” conference on Albuquerque’s economy, but it was hardly mentioned by the business and community leaders who spoke at the meeting. To be fair, Mayor Berry has repeatedly noted the importance of right to work in other venues.
Any serious discussion of how to turn around New Mexico’s economy must focus on big, difficult issues like right to work, serious tax reform and a dramatic rethinking of the way in which we educate our children and prepare them for the competitive 21 st century workforce.
Rather than taking on these difficult but important issues (right to work is actually the simplest and likely the most politically viable short-term reform), New Mexico’s statewide chamber, ACI, has recently focused its attention on government contracting. The Chamber is upset that New Mexico’s in-state contractor preference is inadequate and not adhered to closely enough.
I certainly appreciate that businesses want a fair shot at government contracts, but as state taxpayers we should get the best deal possible regardless of where the business is located. Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay above-market prices for government services and construction.
Businesses also have amazing ways of making themselves appear to be in-state when in fact they are not. Do we really want to hire a team of taxpayer-funded investigators to check up on businesses to make sure they are truly “New Mexican?” Simply put, government contracting reform is not going to have a major impact on New Mexico’s economy one way or the other.
The silver lining about New Mexico’s ongoing weak economic recovery is that more and more people are realizing that our state has depended on Washington’s largesse for way too long. That situation is changing both due to federal budget problems and the retirement of Senators Domenici and Bingaman.
This is the time for solutions and that means facing some tough decisions. As explained by Mr. Boyd, a national expert on business relocation, a right-to-work law is a must for any state that wants to grow its economy. It is time for our business and political leaders to upset the entrenched special interests that have been holding our state back for so long.
The alternative is a future of government dependency and poverty.
Paul Gessing is the President of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation. The Rio Grande Foundation is an independent, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and educational organization dedicated to promoting prosperity for New Mexico based on principles of limited government, economic freedom and individual responsibility.
As if the fact that they are getting 30 cents on the dollar as part of New Mexico’s film subsidy program were not bad enough (TV shows receive 30 cents on the dollar as opposed to 25 cents for movies), now New Mexico taxpayers are subsidizing The Bachelor, a television show that can only be described as insipid. The “plot” of the show involves one man choosing from a stable of 25 or so women.
The City of Santa Fe is putting up $100,000 to attract the show while New Mexico’s Tourism Department is putting up $50,000 according to KRQE TV.
I’ve never watched the show and I have no idea whether it is good exposure for the city in which it films, but state taxpayers are already losing more than 50 cents on the dollar for film subsidies. Additional taxpayer subsidies for The Bachelor adds insult to injury regardless of the show’s quality or lack thereof.
Notably, this is not Santa Fe’s first go-round when it comes to doubling up on film subsidies. Santa Fe studios also “doubled-up” its taxpayer subsidies by using $23 million to finance construction in addition to the 25 or 30 cents on the dollar thrown in by the state. In Santa Fe apparently, there is no limit on what taxpayers should pay for films and tv.
For an amusing but slightly off-color take on The Bachelor, check out the following clip from Chelsea Handler:
There’s yet another story about Tesla in today’s Albuquerque Journal. While the headline is mostly about the likelihood that the new giga-factory will be located near Reno, to my mind, the real news came from John Boyd, the principal at his namesake site selection firm (he helps businesses figure out where to locate). Said Boyd of New Mexico’s chances to lure Tesla “manufacturing companies look for reasons to scratch off states when considering where to build major facilities — and no right to work law is at the top of the list.”
Boyd continued saying, “I can’t underscore how critical right to work status is.” In conclusion, Boyd again reiterated the dire need for a right to work law in New Mexico saying, “New Mexico has enormous potential to become a manufacturing hub, especially if it were to adopt right to work legislation.”
We at the Rio Grande Foundation have been talking about the importance of right to work for years with no action by the Democrat-controlled Legislature in Santa Fe. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, right to work is not on the agenda of some crazy people who apparently are also hired by institutes of higher education who want to do “whatever it takes” to bring Tesla to town. Nor is right to work on the agenda of legislators who want to play politics with the Tesla factory but won’t advocate for right to work.
When it comes to film subsidies in New Mexico, the Rio Grande Foundation is about the only organization that publicly, clearly stands in opposition. Some even wonder if our position is legitimate given that it is such a “minority” viewpoint.
Media must accurately reflect range/ratio of perspectives. Is @DanBoydNM inaccurate or inconvenient? @pgessing @jfleck @MgallagherMike
— Gwyneth Doland (@GwynethDoland) July 23, 2014
Ironically, outside of New Mexico, there is relatively widespread agreement that film subsidies are poor public policy. The following links are just some of the reports generated in recent years in opposition to film subsidies.
University Journal
Rutgers Journal of Law & Policy
Legislative Agency
North Carolina General Assembly
From the left:
Center for Budget and Policy Priorities
Columnist Michael Kinsley
Gerry Bradley, New Mexico Voices for Children
Louisiana Budget Project
Right:
Heartland Institute
Tax Foundation
Mackinac Center (Michigan)
The latest Voices for Children “Kids Count” report came out recently with New Mexico ranked 49th. While much of the debate has centered around New Mexico’s dismal rankings and assigning blame for it, liberals have centered their “solutions” on a new pre-k program. Rio Grande Foundation has, of course, proposed a variety of free market solutions to alleviating poverty in New Mexico. The fact is that neither method will have an immediate impact in the same way that the best private-sector anti-poverty program would have. That “program” is called marriage and as the chart below illustrates, it is highly effective.
Creating policies to save marriage is admittedly a challenge and I admit that RGF is not expert on the matter, but given this data, it has to at least be mentioned (and the left certainly won’t do that). Perhaps government can at least stop creating welfare programs that dis-incentivize marriage?
It’s no surprise when you think about it using economics and reasoning. But liberals aren’t known for their understanding of either. And so it is that a new report as detailed in Forbes has found that Wal-Mart (and big box employees in general) are better, not worse-paid than their peers in smaller retail establishments.
In this paper, we characterize the wages that have accompanied the growth in retail. We show that wage rates in the retail sector rise markedly with firm size and with establishment size. These increases are halved when we control for worker fixed effects, suggesting that there is sorting of better workers into larger firms. Also, higher ability workers get promoted to the position of manager, which is associated with higher pay. We conclude that the growth in modern retail, characterized by larger chains of larger establishments with more levels of hierarchy, is raising wage rates relative to traditional mom-and-pop retail stores.
It only makes sense that in the world of retail, more efficient, bigger players will pass on some of the savings to customers and will pass along some of the higher profits to workers. But the fantasy among many is that retail jobs will somehow receive the pay associated with jobs further up the economic ladder.
Maybe next time our friends on the left won’t try so hard to keep Wal-Mart from opening a store here in Albuquerque…ha!
A new report from the University of Arkansas should provide proponents of charter schools and school choice additional ammunition in their efforts to reform a struggling American education system.
According to Reason, Researchers examined data from 21 different states. While the results varied, charter schools were found to be more productive—and generate a higher return on investment—than traditional public schools (TPS). On average, charter school students scored so much better on assessments that spending money on charters was roughly 40 percent more efficient than spending money on TPS. According to the study:
Comparing [National Assessment of Education Progress] achievement obtained in public charter schools versus TPS for 21 states and DC, we find the public charter school sector delivers a weighted average of an additional 17 NAEP points per $1000 invested in math, representing a productivity advantage of 40% for charters; In reading, the public charter sector delivers an additional 16 NAEP points per $1000 invested, representing a productivity advantage of 41% for charters.
The bad news is that, according to the report, as pointed out on page 28 of the report, New Mexico’s charter schools have the lowest State-level Return on Investment for Charter Schools Relative to Traditional Public Schools of the states studied. It is still positive, but not as good as it could be.
Rarely is one vindicated so clearly and yet, clearly, the media is absolutely clueless (that second part about the media is not so rare). A new study done by the State was discussed in some detail in today’s Albuquerque Journal. The results are touted as showing that “film incentives pay off” and that the incentives are “linked to economic gains.”
The reality could not be more different and, unfortunately for our media friends, this fact could not be more obvious. Take just a few numbers from the Journal’s report:
Between 2010 and 2014, the state (taxpayers) paid out $251 million in incentives to the film industry with $103.6 million in state and local tax dollars generated. That is indeed 43 cents on the dollar as the study notes and last time I checked, if I gave you $1 and you gave me back 43 cents, you still owe me money or I’m getting ripped off (it is the latter in this case).
Curiously, this lack of full-time jobs was borne out by the Albuquerque Biz First which carried a listing (only partially available online) of the “top film and video production companies” in New Mexico by full-time employees. The top company in New Mexico has 13 employees and it doesn’t take long to get down the list to one and two person companies. I counted 74 full time employees among the top 21 companies. Perhaps some companies didn’t share how many workers they have and there are obviously greater numbers of part-time workers on any given production, but this is not exactly an industry that is going to lead New Mexico out of a recession with a cost of $50 million annually.
Updated: There was an error in the original posting involving subsidy per job. The correct cost per full-time job per the study is that each job cost taxpayers a bit more than $8,500.
There is a free market think tank in all 50 US states. We are all independent and set our own priorities and allocate resources based on our own priorities. It’s called the State Policy Network and it drives the left nuts.
Recently, we at the Rio Grande Foundation got in touch with our friends in Arizona at the Goldwater Institute to weigh in on a budding case of corporate welfare and economic development gone wrong. Read economist Byron Slomach’s piece from the Las Cruces Sun-News on the current discussion relating to an existing copper wire company based in Doña Ana County that could soon face some taxpayer-assisted competition.
The Hobby Lobby decision generated a lot of attention, but the real threat to ObamaCare is more likely to come from decisions like the one made today by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in the Halbig case.
Michael Cannon, a health care expert with the Cato Institute, has done extensive reporting on Halbig and its potential impact on ObamaCare. Just yesterday, he summarized the case, saying that it:
(C)halleng(es) the legality of the health-insurance subsidies the IRS is dispensing in the 36 states that did not establish a health-insurance Exchange under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or “ObamaCare,” and thus have Exchanges established by the federal government. Though the PPACA repeatedly states those subsidies are available only “through an Exchange established by the State,” and there are indications IRS officials knew they did not have the authority to issue subsidies through federal Exchanges, the IRS is dispensing billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies through federal Exchanges anyway.
More from Cannon on the case here.
In other words, the Courts could offer yet another rebuke to the Obama Administration which has repeatedly ignored or reinterpreted laws passed by Congress in ways that benefit its own agenda. Obama can argue whatever way he wants about what Congress “intended” to write into the law, but what really matters is what the law actually says, as written.
I’m no expert on the Supreme Court, but it seems unlikely that The Court will overturn this decision which is based on clear and unambiguous language. This is good news if you share the view that ObamaCare takes US health care down the wrong path towards big-government command-and-control policiesd and further away from market-based solutions.
As Cannon notes, Large numbers of New Mexicans (more than 94,000 to be exact) could be exempted from the individual mandate in the event that Halbig is upheld or is not appealed:
The following article appeared in the Las Cruces Sun-News on July 20, 2014. Although legislation has passed the House (and will likely pass the Senate soon) to temporarily prop up the highway program and avoid an immediate crisis, the need for fundamental change in how America builds and maintains its infrastructure remains.
The next manufactured crisis coming from Washington, DC involves the federal highway program. According to news reports, the Federal Highway Trust Fund is on the cusp of insolvency, with a cash shortage looming before the end of July. Despite the deadline, lawmakers are at an impasse over how to replenish an account that funds the nation’s highway projects.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is warning states would, on average, see a 28 percent reduction in federal dollars to cover the costs of current needs if additional funding is not found. One potential source of funding is a hike in the federal gas tax.
In its current form, the federal highway program is financed through an 18.4 cent-per-gallon tax on gasoline and a 24.4 cent tax on diesel fuel. Unfortunately, while the gas tax more closely resembles a user fee than other taxes charged by Washington, it isn’t. If it were a user-fee, gas taxes would finance roads, bridges and other items that benefit motorists who pay the tax. Instead, over the past decade, Congress has diverted well over $55 billion of gas taxes to non-highway projects, most notably mass transit.
Whether you want more mass transit or less, the fact is that transit riders don’t pay the gas tax, rather motorists subsidize these systems nationwide. Ideally, Congress would create transportation policy under the principal of “user pays.”
Unfortunately, Washington seems to be utterly incapable of making even the most basic reforms. Worse, transportation policies that work in New York and Chicago may not work so well in Albuquerque or Farmington, New Mexico.
The solution is simple: get Washington out of transportation policy and hand it back to the states. After all, as the Highway Program currently operates, Washington simply takes in the gas tax money, adds a bunch of requirements (like costly Davis-Bacon labor rules), diverts for pet projects and mass transit, and returns the money to the states.
This is silly. Washington played an important role in the creation of the Interstate Highway System, but that was completed in 1992.
Several bills have been introduced in Washington over the years that would devolve all or most of the program – thereby eliminating the federal gas tax – to the various states. The latest proposal called the “Transportation Empowerment Act” was introduced by Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) and Rep. Tom Graves (Georgia).
States would then be able to experiment with transportation policies that make sense for their own populations. Gas taxes could be raised or lowered. Or, as Oregon is considering, motorists could be charged based on miles driven. Priorities like transit could be emphasized or reduced also depending on the particular state.
Lastly, absent federal mandates favoring prevailing wage laws, Davis-Bacon states could decide for themselves whether they want to pay union rates for construction projects, build 15 percent more infrastructure, or save taxpayers up to 15 percent. New Mexico is a Davis-Bacon state, but neighboring Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and Oklahoma are not. Amazingly, Texas is the only adjacent state that, like New Mexico, unnecessarily inflates labor rates on public works projects.
Like so many things, the federal government undertook a specific project like the Interstate Highway System only to refuse to see its size and scope reduced. There is no reason for a disagreement in Washington to negatively impact New Mexico roads and bridges, but that is the system Congress has saddled us with.
We at the Rio Grande Foundation have often criticized policies enacted in Santa Fe, but there is no doubt that Santa Fe would do a better job than Washington. And, given innovation and competition from neighboring states to enact the best, most-efficient transportation system, I believe that Santa Fe would improve.
To date, none of New Mexico’s congressional representatives has co-sponsored this legislation or any bill that would really reform the federal transportation system. Unfortunately, that means New Mexico will continue to rely on the whims of a dysfunctional Washington for something as basic as transportation funding.
Paul Gessing is the President of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation. The Rio Grande Foundation is an independent, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and educational organization dedicated to promoting prosperity for New Mexico based on principles of limited government, economic freedom and individual responsibility
The Competitive Enterprise Institute has produced another fine report this week. The topic of he new report is how much better off individual workers would be if the state had a Right to Work law in place (right to work simply means that one cannot be required to join a union as a condition of employment).
CEI’s analysis which looked at economic data going back to 1977, broke down the impact of not having a right to work law by state and found that on a per-capita basis, New Mexicans lost out on $2,638 in annual income.
This is obviously relevant to individual families and workers, but it is driven by the broader growth seen in such states nationwide (updated versions of this and other information can be found in the CEI report):
Carl Graham recently sat down and talked with Fred Martino of KRWG TV in Las Cruces. The video of Graham’s interview can be seen below. Feel free to fast-forward through the valentine to heavily-subsidized so-called “renewable” industry to the 5:25 mark when Graham’s interview starts. After Graham’s interview, there is an interesting (albeit one-sided) discussion of the land the State of New Mexico could receive due to the Organ Mountains Monument land grab.
Check out the following chart from our friends at the Tax Foundation. Looks like New Mexico is a leader in one thing: taxation.
And, while New Mexico’s Legislature has been controlled by Democrats for many years, both houses were under Republican control back in 1919. BTW: Woodrow Wilson was president at the time.
And gas taxes are not the worst tax in the world especially if they are dedicated to funding road construction and maintenance. Unfortunately, a large portion of the 18.4 cent/gallon gas tax collected by Washington is diverted to transit and other “transportation-related” projects.
Ride-share companies Uber and Lyft continue to face opposition at the Public Regulation Commission. Representatives of incumbent taxi cab companies have led lobbying efforts against the ride-share companies having published articles in various newspapers decrying the new companies’ plans to enter the New Mexico market.
Two articles, both written by taxi drivers, have appeared in the Albuquerque Journal alone. Concerns supposedly include “an uneven playing field” that gives ride-share drivers an “unfair” advantage.
Complying with complicated and arcane government regulations is expensive. Business models that avoid those regulations (often through the innovative application of new technologies) can provide better customer service at a lower cost. This is good, not bad for consumers.
Consumer interests are the other, oft-cited justification for onerous government regulations. In reality, consumers are no more than a fig-leaf in the fight against competition.
It is, after all, not angry users of these ride-share services that have been complaining to the media. We’re instead expected to believe that taxi drivers are so public-spirited that they are ignoring the benefits they receive from government regulations protecting their market-share to selflessly defend those poor consumers from being taken advantage of by the unethical competition!
In reality, of course, at least some self-interested taxi drivers are hoping to bend government regulations to protect their businesses. Absent government protections, taxi drivers are just another small business that must innovate and improve or whither away. Imagine if buggy whip manufacturers had been able to lobby government to strangle the automobile industry in its early years. How many American jobs would have been lost and how would living standards have been reduced?
The phenomenon of using government regulations to quash innovation in a given industry is called “regulatory capture” by economists.
Rather than lobbying for innovation-killing regulations on ride-share companies, it would be great if the taxi industry worked to deregulate their own industry to make it more competitive. The issue of market-entry was just dealt with a few years ago when modest reforms shifted the “burden of evidence” from proposed startups to the incumbents. Imagine having to ask your competition for permission to set up your business! But it is far from a “free” market when one has to hire legal help and beg the government for permission before trying to make a living.
And this is where New Mexico’s political culture and broader economy come into play. It isn’t news that the economy here in the Land of Enchantment is struggling terribly. And Lyft and Uber alone won’t provide enough jobs to drag our economy out of the ditch, but technophile Millennials in particular aren’t as interested in owning cars as were previous generations. They also like the hip factor that these services provide. We need to keep/attract these technophiles to New Mexico to start businesses and create jobs.
Of course, the suspicion of new technologies and outsiders attempting to make a profit is nothing new. It has been ingrained in the psyches of many New Mexicans for generations. Suspicion of free market capitalism has led to business and entrepreneurship-destroying public policies coming from Santa Fe. A report from the Canada-based Fraser Institute found New Mexico to be the least economically-free state in the US and New Mexico consistently underperforms its neighbors on business friendliness measures.
This lack of economic freedom was masked somewhat over the decades by generous federal spending in our state. We still had high poverty rates, but federal spending made the data look better than they really were.
That situation is changing. New Mexicans can no longer rely on Washington to prop up our economy. We need far-reaching, tax, education, and regulatory reforms. Allowing Uber and Lyft to operate in a competitive will not resuscitate New Mexico’s economy by itself, but such a move combined with broader deregulatory efforts could finally help grow New Mexico’s private sector economy.
Paul Gessing is the President of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation. The Rio Grande Foundation is an independent, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and educational organization dedicated to promoting prosperity for New Mexico based on principles of limited government, economic freedom and individual responsibility
Rio Grande Foundation president Paul Gessing will be defending individual and religious freedom in hostile territory when he appears on the KUNM Call-in show to discuss the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision which impacted the provision of certain birth control products under the health care law known as “ObamaCare.”
The KUNM Call-in Show will air live from 8 to 9am this Thursday morning on 89.9FM.
The call-in number is: 277-5866 or toll-free 877-899-5866
Gessing plans to argue, in part, that:
• The “original sin” of American health care involved placing corporations in between health care consumers and providers. This was done during WWII and the employer tax deduction for health care was enshrined into law shortly thereafter;
• I agree with opponents of this decision who don’t want businesses/employers making health care decisions for their employees. Individuals should purchase their own health care, not their employers;
• Individuals don’t give up their rights by being a part of corporations. If you are forcing me as a business owner to pay for something, I should at least have a say in what is purchased. Congress has gone a step further, specifically passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to protect religious liberties. The Court simply held that the law applied to private business and not just individuals;
• Even the very liberal Congress of 2009–10 never explicitly decided, or even really debated, whether to force companies to provide contraceptive coverage. HHS used the authority the law gave it to impose the mandate.
• Hobby Lobby provides 16 kinds of birth control for its employees;
• Analogy: Hobby Lobby not providing specific birth control options is equivalent of a Muslim or kosher Jewish company refusing to offer pork and beans in the employee lunchroom. Employees could bring their own or go elsewhere to eat.
• Putting government in charge of health care purchases through a “single-payer” plan could result in a religious conservative president/congress outright banning certain procedures or products. Canadians are frequently forced to cross the border into the US in order to obtain various health care services. Only a few years ago, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that individuals could purchase health care services through private providers as opposed to the government health care service;
I’ve previously called Nick Estes, formerly an analyst with the liberal group Voices for Children, a “crackpot.” Having debated him on economic policy issues, I can assure you that Nick is a very nice man, but he is genuinely clueless when it comes to economics.
Take his recent column in the Albuquerque Journal. For starters, there is the loose use of the term “we.” Who is this “we?” The federal government, state governments, corporations, individuals? He also makes it sound like any healthy, working-age person could simply be put to work building/installing solar panels and wind turbines. Unfortunately, these are fairly technical fields and not every “Joe” on the street is cut out for such work.
Yes, the federal government financed a lot of nice projects back in the 1930s, but as Estes himself seems to admit (and Amity Shlaes documents in her excellent “The Forgotten Man”, Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t bring the US out of the Great Depression. The Depression ultimately ended after state management of the US economy ended in the wake of World War II.
Of course, throughout his piece, Estes claims that all of his economic policies can be enacted essentially “for free.” We all know that “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” The resources government taxes and spends must come from somewhere. These could be used elsewhere in the absence of government taking those resources.
A personal note: I’m a Catholic. The Church’s politics make me crazy for a number of reasons. I’m not referring in this post even to economics, but to the Archdiocese of New Mexico’s position in support of a massive new pre-K entitlement. Advocates point to some very old, highly resource-intensive pre-k “experiments” from the 1960s, but conveniently ignore existing, large-scale, state programs that have been operating for decades in Oklahoma and Georgia.
So, the church is advocating for policies that would, we believe, waste billions of dollars in the Permanent Fund on a pre-k program. But that’s not what really drives me nuts about the Church’s policy stances. It is that the Church is not willing to put a fraction of the time and resources into promoting school choice (specifically, tax credits) which are now in place in 14 states (see a detailed analysis here) and were last seriously considered in New Mexico in 2012 when liberal Democrats introduced bills to expand school choice.
A further indictment of the Church’s position is that the data on student performance in Catholic Schools is actually much better than the costly new pre-K program. A University of Chicago study found that urban African Americans attending Catholic schools are 26 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school and twice as likely to graduate from college as comparable students in public schools. Considering that such programs could actually SAVE tax dollars, it is nothing less than mind-blowing to me that the Church hasn’t endorsed tax credits for school choice wholeheartedly.
Perhaps it is true what they are saying about Allen Sanchez?
Graham and Gessing sat down with KNAT TV host Ethel Maharg to discuss federal lands policy in New Mexico:
Carl Graham of Coalition for Self Government in the West & Paul Gessing of RGF discuss federal lands policy from Paul Gessing on Vimeo.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a free market group based in Washington with which we sometimes work. They, like Rio Grande Foundation, are concerned about the fiscal impact of government employee pensions, specifically the fact that they are under-funded and poorly-designed in the first place. As time passes absent systemic reforms, these pension systems are destined to consume ever-greater public resources.
The RGF has known for years that New Mexico’s pension system was among the most troubled in the nation, but efforts to compare pension problems from state-to-state are challenging. The CEI report (available here) offers several different evaluations based on different methodologies each using their own calculation techniques. All of these are useful, but as Table 8 of the report illustrates, New Mexico’s pension system, when compared with those of other states, fares the worst when the various studies are factored together.
This poor result is particularly amazing considering the constant attention (at both the state and national levels) given to pension reforms in Illinois and other states facing pension issues.
Other states are dealing with the pension reform issue. Oklahoma recently shifted all new hires to a 401K-style system.
The Rio Grande Foundation has requested 2013 payroll information for New Mexico’s 16 institutes of higher education (universities, junior colleges, and community colleges). The Foundation has posted this information online in order to make information that is technically “public” (available upon request) more readily-available than before.
The Foundation was able to access records for 15 of New Mexico’s 16 institutes with only New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech) failing to comply with the Foundation’s requests.
One institute, New Mexico Tech, failed to comply. A representative of New Mexico Tech stated that employee payroll information was available only in printed format at significant cost.
On the flip side, Rio Grande Foundation President Paul Gessing noted with appreciation that “University of New Mexico and Central New Mexico Community College both post payroll on a publicly-accessible website. This should be the model pursed by all schools”
Gessing continued, saying “New Mexico’s taxpayers support each of these institutes of higher learning. In this day and age with the modern Internet now 20 years old, important public information should be proactively published online for the public to access. While the Rio Grande Foundation is happy to request public records on the public’s behalf, it is unacceptable to not have such basic information readily-available or to not respond to repeated and varied requests.”
Click on the name of each school to access the 2013 payroll of that institute.
New Mexico State University (also includes Doña Ana Community College)
Central New Mexico Community College
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology: “cannot comply”
Hillary Clinton recently did an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel in which the topic of “income inequality” was raised (the media focus has been on her “poverty” upon leaving the White House). After the usual platitudes about inequality being a “threat to democracy,” Clinton gave a more specific answer in which she largely agreed with conservatives’ views on inequality and the economy:
SPIEGEL: The average annual income of an American household is $43,810 (€32,191.77). You earn up to $200,000 an hour for a speech. Can you understand if people are bothered by that?
Clinton: Well, certainly, I can understand that, but that’s never been the crux of the concern in our country, because we’ve always had people who did better than other people. That’s just accepted. The problem is that people on the bottom and people in the middle class no longer feel like they have the opportunity to do better. The question is, how do we get back to having an economy that works for everybody and that once again gives people the optimism that they too will be successful.
This is exactly the point I made in my debate last year with liberal Nick Estes. Inequality is not the issue so much as the sputtering economy which has made living standards worse for working class Americans. Of course there are things that can be done to reduce inequality while also improving the economy including: school choice/education reform, end the Federal Reserve’s printing money, and work to shore up the American family.
