The Rio Grande Foundation hosted a luncheon on May 13, 2014 with Matt Kibbe, President and CEO of the grassroots/Tea Party group FreedomWorks. Kibbe is the author of “Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff” and he discussed the book and its message at the event.

FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe Discusses “Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff” from Paul Gessing on Vimeo.

Kibbe also sat down with Rob Nikolewski for a one-on-one interview that can be found here.

The City of Aztec is to be applauded for posting a variety of budget and bid information online in an effort to expand transparency and openness in local government. My organization, the Rio Grande Foundation, has been a leader in actually requesting and publishing such data online in an effort to encourage citizens and activists to be more informed and more active citizens.

A few major cities, counties, and school districts around New Mexico have taken steps towards additional transparency, but Aztec is one of the smaller cities in the state to do so. Hopefully, other governing bodies in the Four Corners (and around New Mexico) including the Cities of Farmington and Bloomfield, San Juan County, and San Juan Community College (to name just a few of the big ones) will follow Aztec’s example by publishing similar information.

One small area of improvement that we’d recommend for Aztec is to publish the actual pay for government workers (this is already public information) rather than the employee pay bands that are currently available. Employee names are not essential, but actual real-world numbers would be helpful.

The Rio Grande Foundation is currently in the process of collecting and posting information for counties, cities, school districts, and institutes of higher learning. As the information is received, we will post it on our website www.riograndefoundation.org. We’d love to have the relevant local governments do this themselves, but will continue to do so in the meantime.

A few years ago, Gov. Richardson signed legislation that created New Mexico’s Sunshine Portal. In recent years, that site has been expanded and improved. Of course, there is still a great deal of room for improvement even at the state level. The Rio Grande Foundation recently published a report encouraging the Legislature to post committee votes and hearing footage on a public website.

We the taxpayers ultimately pay the bills for our government. From employee pay to committee votes in the Legislature, this is ultimately our information and it is already public, just not necessarily in a user-friendly format. Kudos to the City of Aztec for opening up its books; it is time to encourage other Four Corners governments and New Mexico’s Legislature to become more transparent as well.

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

Recently, a representative of the New Mexico Association of Secondary School Principals wrote an opinion piece in the Albuquerque Journal defending his profession.

The most interesting part of the article comes toward the end where the author makes a clear grammatical error when he states, “Let’s not listen anymore to rhetoric that is being promoted by special interest groups that want us to believe that are schools are failing.” (emphasis added to the faulty wording which should be “our). I’ve certainly mis-typed and even mis-spelled words in my writing before, but having such a blatant error in an article written on behalf of school principals is not comforting.

More important is the sentence itself. “Special interests” want us to believe that schools are failing. I’m sure that as an educator, one gets tired of hearing about the failures of the system they are a part of, but that’s the issue, the system. As Capitol Report New Mexico reported just this week, New Mexico spends 20th most per pupil in the nation, but has some of the worst results when it comes to student achievement. Clearly something is failing.

And, yes, poverty is higher here and we have more minority students than most states, but Louisiana which has many of the same problems as New Mexico — including poor performance — has adopted the most robust school choice in the nation and an astonishing 91 percent of parents approve. If New Mexico’s principals really cared about their “customers” and wanted to improve the failing system they are a part of, wouldn’t they consider emulating Louisiana?

Left wingers from Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid down, rail against the Koch brothers. For some reason, they give left-wing billionaire Tom Steyer a free pass.

Steyer was recently criticized by the head of the Laborers’ International Union of North America for his vehement opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline. But now, Steyer may be picking a fight with the Obama Administration on natural gas. While Obama has been slow to approve LNG terminals to export gas, his Administration has been willing to see natural gas replace coal as a source of electricity.

But that may not be radical enough for Steyer who, as this article points out, “Tom Steyer is ready to bankroll groups opposed to all fossil fuel development – including natural gas.” The article goes on to note that “Opposition to natural gas will pit him against President Obama and his administration, including EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, and Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell.”

All of this would be just an interesting slow motion train wreck among two factions of the Democratic Party were natural gas not such an important part of New Mexico’s economy.

On the flip side, legislation introduced partially in response to Russian activities in the Ukraine in support of exporting natural gas to America’s allies recently passed a House Subcommittee on a bi-partisan vote. Unfortunately, as reported by the left-wing Daily Kos Majority Leader Reid has blocked the effort to speed LNG exports in the Senate.

As bad as the Obama economy has been and continues to be, the ironic thing is that the fracking boom has salvaged any semblance of economic recovery (and cut carbon emissions, by the way). Now, the billionaire-funded hard-left is moving against even that!

Rather than describing the story at length on my own, this article from the Alamogordo Daily News really explains the situation.

The key is that a conflict between the Federal Government’s US Forest Service/Department of Agriculture and Otero County, NM. The Sheriff of Otero County, Benny House has been instructed to unlock/open four fences that are limiting access to water by cattle on Forest Service lands in the County. Again, the specific issues and jurisdictions are complex, but it is another disagreement over who should manage resources in the West, the federal government in Washington or state and local governments.

Ultimately, we at the Rio Grande Foundation have endorsed state control as per the 9th and 10th amendments to the US Constitution, but it will take the intervention and activism of local government officials to spur the discussion and ultimately drive the shift in land management away from a far-off bureaucracy to the states.

It will be interesting to see if Sheriff House unlocks those gates and how the Forest Service responds.

What a badge of honor for New Mexico; Our senior senator, Tom Udall is the lead sponsor of legislation that would put Congress in control of our free speech rights. Remember, the First Amendment which used to be really popular on the political left. That First Amendment says

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

As Paul Jacob points out at his “Common Sense” commentary, Udall’s proposed Constitutional Amendment, Senate Joint Resolution 19, would rewrite the First Amendment to give powerful congressional incumbents “complete and total control over all money to be raised or spent by their competitors.”

These are the same incumbents that “already enjoy a tremendous name recognition advantage over their challengers.” As Jacob asks, “What happens when incumbents limit campaign spending too low for challengers to compete?”

Good questions. The sad thing is that Udall’s misguided amendment has the support of 35 of anti-speech Democrats including the junior Senator from New Mexico, Martin Heinrich.

To their credit, the ACLU which supports “campaign finance reform,” also supported free speech in the Citizens United case on campaign finance. I’ll be checking with the ACLU to get their views on Udall’s anti-First Amendment amendment.

During the 2000s, Gov. Richardson and the New Mexico Legislature enacted the largest pro-growth tax cuts in the nation leading to some great years of economic growth in New Mexico.

Unfortunately, particularly since the economic crisis of 2008, New Mexico has struggled with job losses, especially in the form of federal job cuts as Washington moves from “doing stuff” to transferring money from workers to ever-growing entitlement programs. This has left New Mexico’s still-Washington-dependent economy in tatters.

While making the political case for further income tax cuts may be a challenge, other states are making the move. Missouri and Oklahoma have recently enacted modest tax cuts. And, while Missouri legislators are also pushing for a Right to Work law, the state’s liberal governor remains an obstacle.

The fact is states, not Washington, are leading the way when it comes to embracing economic reforms. States like Florida and Texas which are zero income tax and Right to Work are blowing California and Texas out of the water economically, but we’ll have even better data on this as time goes on. Other states that are serious about jobs and economic growth are working to catch up to Texas and Florida. So far, getting policies in place in those states has been impossible in New Mexico. It is up to us to change that.

New Mexico’s state legislature has been controlled by Democrats since 1953, but there are some reasons to think that Republicans could take it over in 2014. While the Rio Grande Foundation is a non-partisan organization willing to work with anyone who shares our ideas, even on a single issue, we have prepared a report on long-overdue reforms that a Republican-led state legislature could have an advantage in enacting. (Democrats are encouraged to read it too!) Not only are these reforms good ideas in their own right, but we believe they are also appealing to the electorate.

They’re both good policy and good politics and given the poor economic performance during the ongoing economic “recovery,” New Mexico needs some good public policy reforms.

First, there’s ballot access reform. Political competition is a good thing, and it’s hard to imagine that the benefits of increased competition stop with the second party. Current New Mexico ballot access law imposes much steeper signature collection requirements on third-party candidates than on Democrats and Republicans. At a minimum, equalizing the signature requirements would provide for a fairer and more truly representative electoral process. Ideally the Legislature could scrap the signature requirement entirely and let voters see the whole menu before making a choice. Voters will like this.

Second, the Legislature’s time management is unimpressive, to put it kindly, which decreases efficiency and transparency. It routinely wastes time during the session and committee meetings are rescheduled on the fly. This makes citizen engagement that much more difficult. There’s little guarantee that experts invited to testify before committees will get their chance, and monitoring what the legislature is up to is a full time job.

Allowing remote testimony is one small change with potentially large benefits. Our state is expansive and getting to hearings in Santa Fe is quite a commitment for most people in the state. Allowing remote testimony from community colleges, for example, would decrease the costs of participating in legislative hearings both for active participants and for citizen monitors. This is a small technical problem that was solved years ago that would also incentivize better scheduling and time management. This proposal, too, should be a winner with voters.

Third, there’s always the issue of taxes. Many states, including our neighbor to the north, require all tax hikes to be approved by the electorate at the relevant political level. We believe it’s sensible to adopt a constitutional amendment doing the same thing here. Asking voters to weigh the costs of a program against the promised benefits beforehand seems like a very politically defensible idea, especially in a state that is significantly poorer than the national average and can ill afford to spend tax money on wasteful programs. Forcing Santa Fe to ask permission from us citizens before spending our scarce tax dollars would incentivize cost-effectiveness and reduce government bloat. Again, it’s a good idea and a winning idea.

The fourth idea is more efficient infrastructure provision. Senate Bill 33 from the 2009 session requires state contracts to pay inflated union-level wages when there are plenty of qualified workers here who are willing to build roads, schools, and other public projects for less; in fact, only 8.7% of New Mexico’s private-sector construction workers have made the choice to join a union. (You can guess which special interest groups pushed for that bill.) Reining in the 15% overpayment on public projects would allow for more results at lower cost. Rather than raising the gas tax as was introduced during the recent legislative session, New Mexico policymakers should pay market rates for construction. This is a simply policy idea that should resonate the vast majority of voters.

None of these proposals is particularly radical. All of them are relatively simple, straightforward, cost-effective ways of furthering the public welfare. Political competition, transparency, efficiency, and wise use of public money are all worthwhile and politically sensible ideas. If the Republican Party does take the Legislature in 2014, we hope our report gives them some ideas. If they don’t, Democrats are free to take advantage of them as well.

McElroy is a Policy Analyst with 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

I just love the political establishment in this country. It is hard for most of us to fathom the bi-partisan self-congratulatory nature of these people. Take this news story about the folks at the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation giving former President George H. W. Bush it’s 2014 “Profile in Courage” award for breaking his “no new taxes pledge” to raise taxes.

Set aside the fact that presidential libraries are operated at taxpayers’ expense and the fact that JFK was one of America’s great tax-cutting presidents, are America’s political leaders really so devoid of leadership that raising taxes is the most courageous thing they do?

After all, the establishment and media can always be counted on to support tax hikes and oppose even modest fiscal restraint. Agriculture subsidies are just one of many spending programs that could have been cut and Bush didn’t do anything about entitlements (reforming Social Security or Medicare, now that would be courageous). Even Clinton’s welfare reform was far more courageous than raising taxes.

And thus it goes in a nation where true heroes who stand up for limited government and the Constitution are trashed while people who take the easy way out by stealing more of your hard-earned money are lauded as “heroes.” 1984 anyone?

The Sierra Club made their (weak) case in today’s paper for “climate change” being an issue of extreme importance and one that should drive policymakers to embrace “renewables.” In the absence of context, sure, Americans are “concerned” with lots of things, but where does climate change really stack up?

Well, according to Gallup, “Americans Show Low Levels of Concern on Global Warming.” As Goldberg accurately noted in his original article, there ARE indeed environmental issues that are concerning to increasing numbers of Americans, but the abstract issue of “climate change” is nowhere near the top of that list (per Gallup’s own data).

It is also polls far below nearly all other major issues, especially the economy:

And, when discussing polling data, the issue of tradeoffs is important. Should we raise the minimum wage? Support for that is strong, but it goes down dramatically if job losses are discussed. The same is true for the environment. Everyone wants a cleaner environment, but at what cost? And that is assuming that “renewables” as implemented are really cleaner…

But, when it comes to wind, according to the latest U.S. Energy Information Administration data (as discussed by the Heartland Institute), “nine of the 11 largest wind power states are experiencing skyrocketing electricity prices, rising more than four times the national average. Moreover, prices in eight of the 11 states are rising more than twice as fast as in the 39 states with less than 7 percent wind power generation.” Fortunately, New Mexico is not on that list YET.

We soon could be, however. As we’ve reported in the past, New Mexico’s Renewable Portfolio Standard WILL cost utility customers billions of dollars once fully implemented and hundreds-of-millions annually after it is fully-implemented in 2020. Notably, the heaviest burden of increased electricity costs will be borne by the working poor who the left so often claims to support if only to expand government.

I don’t have a crystal ball and don’t know the answer to that question, but at least one media outlet, The Washington Examiner, has written a story discussing the possibility. West Virginia is also on the list of states seen as possibly “flipping.”

Interestingly, a national Democrat organization has thrown in the towel on the race for Gov. in NM while the New York Times claims that Sen. Udall is a “shoe-in” for reelection as well. The relative scarcity of competitive “up-ticket” races could certainly raise the profile of some of these legislative races.

As I wrote in our recent policy brief and discuss in the opinion piece below, New Mexico is in desperate need of conservative leadership in the Legislature. We’ve provided what we think are some politically-popular, free market ideas. Also, see the opinion piece outlining these ideas that ran in the Rio Rancho Observer. Please pass this information along to candidates in legislative races of either party. It is time for a change in the Land of Enchantment.

Nothing makes me happier than to wake up in the morning and see another incoherent letter to the editor attacking me and the work of the Rio Grande Foundation. The latest such blast appeared on Tuesday of this week in the Albuquerque Journal and is copied below:

Where do I start in deconstructing such loony garbage. For starters, Grover Norquist who I know personally and believe to be a brilliant guy, is on the board of GOP Proud, a pro-gay rights Republican organization. Hardly an anti-gay bigot as the author claims all Republicans to be.

But how about the Rio Grande Foundation and our dastardly work on behalf of school choice. Yes, we believe strongly that parents and students should make decisions about where to get an education, and, that if education is funded by tax dollars (not a given in our view) that the customers should be given a choice whether that be traditional, private, charter, religious, or home schooling. The woefully-misinformed letter-writer is demonstrably wrong when he claims that charters cost more than regular public education and that they don’t take students with disabilities.

School choice would improve our state’s and our nation’s educational attainment, but more importantly, it would restore some semblance of individual freedom and even a “free market” in education.

Letter writers like this one are the reason that I love the following Mark Twain quote so much: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Paul Gessing of the Rio Grande Foundation recently appeared on KNAT TV to discuss the prospects of the electric car company Tesla locating its “gigafactory” in New Mexico. Interview time is about 15 minutes. Check it out below:

Talking Tesla and the potential for the electric car company’s “gigafactory” in New Mexico from Paul Gessing on Vimeo.

Paul Gessing recently appeared on KNAT TV to discuss the Rio Grande Foundation’s “Freedom Index,” the results of the 2014 legislative session, what issues were dealt with, and which policy ideas need to be discussed in order to turn New Mexico’s struggling economy and education systems around. Interview lasts about 15 minutes.

Paul Gessing Discusses the 2014 Freedom Index legislative tracking tool from Paul Gessing on Vimeo.

I was asked to present to the State Personnel Board because we had some concerns about the way they calculate whether government employees in New Mexico are overpaid or underpaid. My remarks follow:

The Personnel Office’s Compensation Report discusses employment issues involving government employees in New Mexico. The general conclusion of the 2013 report was that New Mexico government employees are underpaid when their salaries and benefits are compared to government employees in neighboring states.

The Rio Grande Foundation, New Mexico’s free market think tank, has reported on this issue as well. Our findings are generally contrary to those of the Personnel Office insofar as we found, based on an analysis done by economists David Macpherson of Trinity University and William Even of Miami University. that when workers with similar experience and skills are compared to each other, New Mexico’s government workers are paid about 8 percent more than equivalent workers in the private sector.

What gives and which is the more relevant comparison?

Without analyzing or critiquing the entirety of the Personnel Office report, we believe that comparing state workers across state lines is not a relevant statistic for several reasons:

1) Economic conditions vary dramatically from state to state. As seen in this chart which was taken straight from the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico’s job market was far weaker over the past year than the job market in neighboring states. We all know that New Mexico’s economy has been far weaker than that of most of its neighbors in recent years. It only makes sense that those working for the state in New Mexico (a relatively weak economy) would not make as much as those in relatively strong surrounding economies.

2) I don’t have data on how much movement there is by government employees from one state bureaucracy to another, but it seems unlikely that there is a great deal of direct competition for talent between Texas and New Mexico. This would certainly be worth studying and having data on;

3) Another thing worth studying is how state government turnover rates actually work and what turnover rates actually mean. Are workers leaving to join the private sector in New Mexico? Are they leaving for private sector jobs in other states? Or are they leaving to work in government in another state? How do pension changes impact turnover and how might New Mexico change its compensation system in ways that might be attractive to workers and taxpayers at the same time?

It might also be worth studying how external economic factors, both federal and state, impact turnover rates and workers’ desire to look for new opportunities.

4) Lastly, we believe that comparing categories of government employees across state lines is very difficult and may not be a relevant tool in comparing overall worker benefits.

In conclusion, it is our belief that the most relevant comparison when it comes to government pay is with similar private sector workers here in New Mexico. When that comparison is made, the packages available to government workers are more generous than those available in the private sector. Such analysis should at least supplement existing analyses.

With the dual controversies over mental health in New Mexico (both the Gov.’s HSD shakeup and now the role of mental health in Albuquerque’s shootings) the left is on the warpath. Tax hikes have been proposed in Albuquerque, ostensibly for more mental health spending, and New Mexico Sen. Bill O’Neill stated in an opinion piece in the Albuquerque Journal that “New Mexico continues to rank 50th in the country in funding for mental health services.”

I’ve already addressed the tax hike proposal, but I am wondering where this talking point about New Mexico’s mental health spending is coming from. According to Kaiser Family Foundation, New Mexico is firmly in the middle of the pack when it comes to per-capita mental health spending. Worse, I couldn’t find a single article on the Internet stating that New Mexico had the lowest spending in the nation when it comes to mental health.

There are discussions to be had about the Gov.’s HSD reforms as well as the police and mental health systems in Albuquerque, but both need to be informed by accurate data and a better understanding of the various policy options available whether those might require additional funding or not.

Business columnist Winthrop Quigley recently wrote a detailed article in the Albuquerque Journal about New Mexico’s economically-harmful gross receipts tax. The article made a number of good points, but I felt that it needed a few details about the specific harms associated with the tax as well as a discussion of some potential solutions.

Winthrop Quigley’s article on New Mexico’s gross receipts tax (GRT) is a must-read for anyone concerned about turning around our sluggish economy. We at the Rio Grande Foundation have fingered the tax as the single biggest obstacle to our economic success.

Another point on the GRT is its outsized impact on small businesses and entrepreneurs who contract with as opposed to hiring professional talent including accountants, legal help, and accounting services (to name just a few services). The GRT adds 7 percent or more to these services when purchased from a New Mexico-based as opposed to an out-of-state provider.

What can be done? The bad news is that the current, “Swiss cheese” GRT regime is untenable. Giving exemptions to a few, politically-connected industries and causes while socking everyone else with rates upwards of 7 percent on items that are not even taxed elsewhere, is a guaranteed jobs killer.

Policymakers must either embrace the GRT for all of its flaws by eliminating exemptions, reducing rates, and eliminating the personal income tax as a separate tax (the GRT in its pure form taxes personal income, but is currently exempted). This was the idea behind legislation introduced by Sen. Bill Sharer and Rep. Tom Taylor during the 2013 legislative session. The top rate under this proposal would have been 3 percent.

Alternatively, through a combination of fiscal restraint, a push to increase revenues elsewhere, and some type of rate increase, New Mexico could eliminate the GRT and switch to a traditional sales tax.

Neither path is easy, but the GRT is a big problem that demands a big solution.

Rio Grande Foundation has done detailed analysis of the GRT and its many harms. I also previously posted comments here about the Taylor/Sharer reform proposal.

Recently, the Santa Fe Reporter did a cover-story on the “education exodus” in New Mexico. While not specifically blaming Gov. Martinez’s reforms for the rate of attrition, that would certainly appear to be an underlying aspect of the article. Nonetheless, I responded to the article with the following published letter:

The important point here is that choice and competition are inherently pro-teacher. After all, teachers are professionals with commensurate freedom and pay tied to success and should be treated as such, not as unionized factory workers circa 1920.

I like Fred Nathan. His group Think New Mexico has largely embraced the view that New Mexico is in dire need of a healthy private sector and this can only come about with the adoption of free market policies. Fred recently had an article that outlined some specific reforms. Those reforms were countered by some conservative voices including Kenneth Brown who used to work at Rio Grande Foundation and, writing in the Santa Fe New Mexican, Jack Stamm, a friend and supporter of RGF.

Undoubtedly, Rio Grande Foundation differs from Think New Mexico in our approaches and policies. But where do we come down on their proposals? For starters, Nathan’s group proposes an economic development strategy based on post-performance incentives as has been enacted in Utah. Nathan claims great successes based on these strategies in his article. RGF is all for cost-benefit analysis of all economic incentives.

The idea of rebating companies for 30 percent of the new tax revenue produced when they relocate to or expand operations in New Mexico also makes sense and should be considered in the Legislature. Of course, we already know that film incentives are bad policy and that Right to Work and other regulatory and tax reforms are direly needed. I wouldn’t say there is much disagreement here.

Nathan’s other proposal involves allowing New Mexico’s public universities to offer in-state tuition to international STEM students and to enhance their STEM programs for local students. I don’t have a huge problem with this either although I question its effectiveness: The federal government controls immigration policy and that is where the bottleneck is in terms of skilled workers. Also, just because a student comes to New Mexico as a student doesn’t mean that they will choose to set up business here, especially once they learn about our business-killing gross receipts tax, our regulations, and our poorly-trained workforce resulting from an inadequate K-12 system.

In other words, bringing new talent here to start businesses will take a long time (they’re still college students by definition) and is a high-risk proposition. It might not be a bad idea, but New Mexico needs jobs and economic prosperity NOW, not in 10 years.

To conclude, I think Fred and his group are attempting the “art of the possible” given our current Legislature which, by and large, is controlled by the economically-ignorant. Rio Grande Foundation is looking big-picture, hoping to change public opinion to the point that whoever controls the Legislature embraces free market ideas because they are proven to work.

For even the most detached observers, the last few years have been tough ones in Albuquerque and New Mexico as a whole (outside of the fast-growing oil patch). So tough, in fact that author Wally Gordon recently penned a column questioning whether or not Albuquerque is “dying” in the same ways in which cities like Detroit have “died.” While I don’t have significant issues with Gordon’s analysis as far as it goes, he offers no serious policy reforms and, were he a self-identified “conservative,” he’d be immediately and harshly attacked as he lives in Edgewood, not Albuquerque.

Nonetheless, the potential “death” of a city in which I DO live is too significant to ignore. Is Albuquerque dying? I’d say “no.” While the economy is struggling mightily, none of the area’s major employers: Sandia, Kirtland AFB, or Intel have left. As you can see, this area is entirely too reliant on government jobs, but this is nothing new:

Unlike Detroit which was once one of America’s truly great cities, Albuquerque has never risen to those heights, nor has it experienced a total Detroit-style collapse. Were a base or a lab or Intel to close, this might change.

That doesn’t mean the situation is good:

Obviously, the police situation needs to be reformed, but the police and mental health situations are the result of, not the cause of our City’s maladies. The cause is our terrible economy and over-reliance on government. Unfortunately, the City has limited levers with which to work. Economic policy is controlled in Santa Fe, specifically by the liberal-controlled Legislature. Rio Grande Foundation has outlined 9 public policy reforms that the Legislature could move forward with right away, but the leadership in Santa Fe doesn’t have a clue about economics so they focus on raising the minimum wage and spending more money on pre-k programs.

Heritage Foundation is hiring for a media position out in the southwest.
Click here for the description.

The Albuquerque Journal’s Washington columnist, Michael Coleman, recently wrote a story quoting some Eastern publications (The Washington Post and a legislation tracking site called Legistorm) are the two mentioned) as they made snide/silly remarks about New Mexico Rep. Steve Pearce’s decision to hold three town halls regarding the lesser prairie chicken’s listing as “threatened.”

All of this seemingly humorous “clucking” about what is a very serious economic issue in Southern New Mexico (and due to it’s potential impact on oil and gas all of New Mexico) illustrates a very important point: when it comes to federal lands and federal land regulations, Easterners — especially in the media and government — just don’t get it. Unfortunately, reform of the Endangered Species Act is seemingly not on the radar screen right now, but federal land reforms are very much a point of discussion these days.

The standoff over Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s ranch was just the latest example, but Utah has already shown the way for Western states (like New Mexico) and supporters of federalism to combat the ignorance of those who have little knowledge of the extreme importance of land ownership and regulations to those in the West.

When it comes to government in a democracy, it is far easier to play the role of Santa Clause than Uncle Scrooge. In other words, it is easier to say “yes” than it is to say “no” when it comes to spending other peoples’ money and using government regulations to benefit special interest groups. As any parent knows, saying “yes” feels better in the short-run, but saying “no” is often better in the long-run.

“Unfortunately,” says Rio Grande Foundation president Paul Gessing, “New Mexico policymakers have been saying ‘yes’ for too long and needs a healthy helping of ‘no’ when it comes to government spending and regulations. The good news,” says Gessing “is that there are many free market policies that would be good for New Mexico’s economy and education system while also being quite popular with average voters.”

The Rio Grande Foundation has compiled some of the best of these ideas into a list entitled, Common-Sense Ideas for a Conservative Majority in the New Mexico House. This paper is available at our website and it includes specific policy ideas and relevant polling data and arguments that should make these ideas a proverbial “slam-dunk.” The document should be an invaluable resource as conservatives look to gain control of New Mexico’s House of Representatives for the first time in more than 60 years.

Several of the ideas outlined have been introduced as legislation in the past including elimination of 3^rd grade social promotion and creation of a system of tax credits for school choice. Ending “worker’s compensation” payments to drunk or drugged workers who injure themselves on the job and taking action to restore federally-controlled lands in New Mexico to state control are also included.

Other ideas involve opening New Mexico government to greater public involvement by eliminating unnecessary signature requirements for New Mexico’s volunteer legislature (or at least making the requirements equitable among the various political parties) and allowing for remote testimony in legislative committees.

Lastly, the Rio Grande Foundation offers several popular and free market reform ideas that have been implemented in other states. Such ideas include amending New Mexico’s Constitution to require voter approval for all tax hikes at the state or local levels, repealing New Mexico’s onerous “prevailing wage” law which increases construction costs for projects like roads and schools by 15 percent or more, and shifting all new government workers out of New Mexico’s failing “defined benefit” pension plan and into user-controlled-and-directed “defined contribution” plans.

We at RGF haven’t done a whole lot of commenting on the recent police shootings in Albuquerque. Although we do work on criminal justice policy from a predominantly fiscal perspective, the issues of mental health and police policy are not in our “wheelhouse.” What is in that “wheelhouse” is tax policy and we were asked to comment for a recent KRQE Channel 13 story on Albuquerque city councilor Klarissa Pena’s proposal to raise the local gross receipts tax by 1/8th of a cent to pay for additional mental health services. Unfortunately, due to a separate incident, we were not able to get on camera.

This is the first statement by anyone that I’ve read or heard about inadequate spending being the problem with APD shootings and our community’s efforts to work with the mentally ill. Interestingly, according to the Kaiser Foundation, New Mexico as a state is middle-of-the-pack when it comes to mental health spending per-capita. So, what will the additional money be used for, specifically? What problems are being caused by inadequate funding particularly given the fact that New Mexico’s courts have struck down “Kendra’s Law” which would allow involuntary commitment of the mentally-ill.

In other words, no one knows if more money is a viable solution for our mental health woes. If someone comes up with valid research indicating that such funds are needed, then a discussion will be worth having. Until then, it would appear that the court system, APD, and the law itself need to be the primary focus points. This proposal would spend money for the sake of spending it and “doing something” no matter whether it solves the problem or not.