(Albuquerque) In early June, the Rio Grande Foundation published a report “How Transparent Are New Mexico’s Institutes of Higher Education?” which published payroll data for New Mexico’s institutes of higher education. This report also included links to payroll data from all of the institutes that complied with our requests.

One of the institutes, Northern New Mexico College, that received an “F” in our original report has complied fully with our request and will receive a revised grade of “A.” The school’s website now includes the following website: http://site.nnmc.edu/public-records which includes all relevant information for submitting a records request. The payroll records themselves are now available here.

Said Paul Gessing, President of the Rio Grande Foundation, “Our original efforts to obtain public records from Northern New Mexico College, were frustrated due to inability to find a contact for such requests on their website. This may have been our fault in not looking in the right place, their fault in terms of broken links or poor website design, or some combination of the two.”

Gessing continued, “We are pleased that Northern New Mexico Community College has responded to our critique and has made great strides in transparency with a clearly-listed point of contact and a timely response in terms of the information requested. We hope that all institutes that received a low grade in our report will follow suit.”

The New Mexico Public Employees Retirement Association is considering reducing future retirement benefits for more than 54,000 government workers, mostly because of growing concerns about the solvency of the fund.

It’s about time. The main reason why so many state and local governments are bankrupt, or on the verge of bankruptcy, is the combination of government-run monopolies and government-employee unions.

Government-employee unions have vastly more power than do private-sector unions because the entities they work for are typically monopolies.

As reported, the unfunded liability of the PERA fund has more than doubled in the past two years, from $2.3 billion in mid-2009 to $4.9 billion as of mid-2011. The unfunded liability is the difference between future retirement benefits due and assets on hand.

Carter Bundy, the political director for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union, is on record as saying, “the union believes the base retirement formula used to determine a worker’s pension should not be altered.” To that I say, the economics of the world have been altered, if Bundy hasn’t noticed.

There is a huge difference between private- and public-sector union employees. For example, when the employees of a grocery story go on strike and shut down the store, consumers can simply shop elsewhere and grocery-store management is perfectly free to hire replacement workers. In contrast, when a city goes on strike, there is no school and no garbage collection as long as the strike goes on. Teacher tenure and civil service regulations make it extremely costly if not virtually impossible to hire replacement workers.

The enormous power of government-employee unions effectively transfers the power to tax from voters to the unions. Because government-employee unions can so easily force elected officials to raise taxes to meet their “demands,” it is they, not the voters, who control the rate of taxation within a political jurisdiction.

Politicians are caught in a political bind by government-employee unions: If they cave in to their wage demands and raise taxes to finance them, then they increase the chances of being kicked out of office themselves in the next election.
The “solution” to this dilemma has been to offer government-employee unions moderate wage increases but spectacular pension promises. This allows politicians to pander to the unions but defer the costs to the future.

As taxpayers in New Mexico are realizing, the future has arrived. The PERA fund has $16.8 billion in future obligations and $11.9 billion on hand as of the most recent calculation. New Mexico must either raise taxes dramatically to fund these liabilities, or drastically cut back or eliminate government-employee pensions.

Government-employee unions are also champions of “featherbedding” – the union practice of forcing employers to hire more than the number of people necessary to do the job. If this occurs in the private sector, the higher wage costs will make the firm less competitive and less profitable.

No such thing happens in government, where there are not profit-and-loss statements in an accounting sense, and most agencies are monopolies anyway.

In 2012, as we have witnessed Scott Walker not being recalled as governor in Wisconsin because of his tough stance on public-employee unions, this pension charade appears to be on its way to being over.

American taxpayers finally seem to be aware that they are the servants, not the masters, of government at all levels.

Government-employee unions have played a key role in causing bankruptcy in most American states. We, in New Mexico, are at a crucial decision-point to decide not to travel that road to financial ruination and say “no more” to the pension demands of destructive public-employee unions.

Tom Molitor is adjunct scholar 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.

EJ Dionne is an ardent left-winger whose columns appear regularly in the Albuquerque Journal. I tend not to agree with much of what he writes, but found his recent column which attempts to separate the US future from Greece’s present to be particularly troubling.

He trots out the usual leftist arguments about the stimulus needing to be bigger and argues that Greece would be better off if it had a strong central government to aggressively stimulate its economy; then he rhapsodizes about the bank bailouts and the fact that the federal government was also not aggressive enough in pursing those; Lastly, he praises the Federal Reserve and its power to keep a united banking system in line as opposed to Europe’s fragmented system.

This all misses the forest for the trees. Greece is a small nation. It is more like an individual US state. If Greece were allowed to fail and were forced to abandon the Euro, the rest of Europe would be just fine. True, the European Union is mis-designed in the sense that it calls for a single currency while giving individual nations the ability to set their own banking and spending policies and this is a problem that the US Constitution avoided, but Dionne does nothing to contradict the point that if America continues to over-spend, we’ll have a fiscal crisis and riots in the streets. The difference is that there will be no one (except possibly the Chinese) to bail us out.

Greece will only be saved by a combination of labor market/regulatory/fiscal reforms that increase productivity and reduce government spending. The United States will only be saved by a combination of these same reforms with the same result. Clearly, we are a bigger, more powerful, perhaps even “too big to fail” nation on Greece’s trajectory. And lest you think that hope is lost, look no further than Canada which relied on a variety of free market reforms to pull itself out of an economic nosedive.

(Albuquerque) According to recent stories in the press, New Mexico’s largest public employee union, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 18, has filed a lawsuit in state District Court attempting to compel the Martinez Administration to remove the names and salary information of the state’s “classified” workers from New Mexico’s “Sunshine Portal”: http://sunshineportalnm.com/

The Rio Grande Foundation strongly favors transparency and openness when taxpayer dollars are at stake and has requested and posted the state payroll – including names and salaries of all state employees – on its website. The data are presented by month, starting with January and going through June of 2012.

January
February
March
April
May
June

“Unfortunately,” as Rio Grande Foundation President Paul Gessing pointed out, “while we are able to post the information ourselves as the state payroll is indeed public information, the biggest issue is that outside of the Sunshine Portal, information is not presented in a clear and concise manner. So, if AFSCME somehow wins their lawsuit, they are in no way preserving their members’ privacy, rather they are just making it more difficult for average citizens to actually understand what the data actually mean”

“The Sunshine Portal is the ideal way to post public records and documents. Efforts should be focused on expanding and improving upon the site, not restricting what information can be made available on it,” concluded Gessing.

Apropos of the front page spread on the ever-so controversial Wal Mart proposed for the West Side of Albuquerque (near my home), I saw a new study from two economists discussing how housing prices are impacted by the location of a Wal Mart nearby. Obviously, traffic could be a problem and several other factors have been brought forth by the NIMBY crowd in opposition to the store, but perhaps those concerned about having a rebound in home prices might want to know that, according to the authors:

In this study we use over one million housing transactions located near 159 Walmarts that opened between 2000 and 2006 to test if the opening of a Walmart does indeed lower housing prices. Using a difference-in-differences specification, our estimates suggest that a new Walmart store actually increases housing prices by between 2 and 3 percent for houses located within 0.5 miles of the store and by 1 to 2 percent for houses located between 0.5 and 1
mile.

I know that my house took a serious hit in price when the market tanked in 2008 and I’d lie to see a turnaround, but the real issue here is that conveniences like shopping centers make people MORE, not LESS likely to want to live in a given location. I know that is shocking, but it is why more and more Americans continue to move to cities.

As if to simply affirm what the Rio Grande foundation has been saying about New Mexico’s higher education system (see here, here, and here), a new 50-state report card from the US Chamber of Commerce and Institute for a Competitive Workforce, ranks New Mexico poorly on many aspects of higher education.

A few of the lowlights from the report:

4 year Access and Success: “D”, 2 year “F”;
Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness “D” for both 4 and 2 year;
4 yearMeeting Labor Market Demand “D”, 2 year “F”;
4 year Transparency and Accountability “F”, 2 year “D”;

The full report is worth a read.

The Rio Grande Foundation, Project on Government Oversight (POGO), National Taxpayers Union, and several other groups, submitted this letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee today.

POGO had this blog posting explaining the status of the debate and the issues at hand. Unfortunately (albeit not surprisingly), both Heather Wilson and Martin Heinrich who are running for New Mexico’s open US Senate seat are trying to “one-up” each other in supporting the costly boondoggle.

Heather Wilson has long been among the most liberal-spending Republicans while Heinrich came to Washington as a left-wing liberal and has gotten worse on spending each year.

All too often, people come along and say: “there oughta be a law” or “government should do….” This view was expressed relative to the Petroglyphs National Monument by a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

While I certainly respect PEER’s having called attention to this issue, I find fault with the attitude that more government is the answer to cleaning up this national monument. My letter which can be found below was printed recently in the paper:

Certainly, it is hard to disagree with the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility that “something” needs to be done to clean up trash and junk at the Petroglyph National Monument. The question is, how?

Study after study by the Government Accountability Office has found that the federal government is incapable of adequately managing its own lands. In 2003, the GAO reported that the National Park Service’s maintenance backlog was more than $5 billion. Since then, federal land acquisitions have accelerated, placing even greater burdens on an obviously inefficient and overstrained system.

While the City of Albuquerque’s lands are much more limited, governments inevitably suffer from unlimited demands upon limited resources. Patrolling for dumping never seems to be at the top of the priority list (usually for good reason).

Rather than waiting for either government to act, perhaps PEER and other concerned citizens could put together volunteer groups to clean up the Petroglyphs? Perhaps they could even form a non-profit to actually clean up the land rather than lobbying the government to do so? The size and scope of the federal government’s indebtedness need not be re-stated in full detail here and this seems like one small way in which we can take responsibility for improving our small portion of the country without waiting for someone from the government to do it for us.

Environmentalists are a funny bunch. They often claim the mantle of popular opinion, but rarely do they talk about the costs and the real-world tradeoffs associated with government policies aimed at forcing us all to be “green” (at least according to their definition). They also talk a lot about transparency (at least when it comes to their opponents).

But, the moment someone tries to illustrate that “green” policies cost consumers more, they cry foul. The case of PNM’s proposal to put a line item on their electric bills showing that consumers are being forced to pay more for electricity generated by wind and solar generated howling opposition from Steve Michel, chief counsel for Western Resource Advocates who said, “Line-item treatment of renewable energy on bills creates a target for customer dissatisfaction.”

Duh! As the Rio Grande Foundation pointed out in its study of New Mexico’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, ratepayers in the state will be forced to pay an additional $2.3 billion for electricity over the period of 2011 to 2020. That number is back-loaded as the number ratchets up from a mere 10% renewables in 2011 to 20% renewables by 2020.

As Jonah Goldberg recently noted in his Albuquerque speech, utilities like PNM are the preferred model of today’s left. Government-imposed rules and regulations raise costs while ignorant consumers blame the company and free enterprise, not policymakers, for price hikes and shoddy service. If we are all going to pay more for our electricity, we should at least be told why.

Jonah Goldberg spoke in Albuquerque on his new book “Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas” and the 2012 elections. We had another sellout crowd in attendance and a great time. Video of Jonah’s speech can be found below. For those who couldn’t make it or would like a copy of Jonah’s book, the Rio Grande Foundation has a limited supply of signed copies. Call us at: 505-264-6090 for details.

Jonah Goldberg presentation on Tyranny of Cliches in Albuquerque, New Mexico from Paul Gessing on Vimeo.

I admit it. I’m skeptical of democracy. Voters have natural biases, lack information, and simply don’t care enough due to their rational ignorance to make informed decisions much of the time. That doesn’t mean that voting is bad; it’s just that I trust markets where businesses and consumers have some skin in the game and an incentive to research their purchase/sale more.

But some seem to thrive on ignorant voters. Take the controversy over elimination of straight ticket voting. It is amazing that this is such a big deal. If someone is a Democrat and they really support Democrats, one would think that they can muster up the will to fill in the circles for their preferred candidates. Same thing with the Republicans.

But, some Democrats have expressed “outrage” that straight ticket voting has been eliminated. Obviously, you can still vote all “D” or all “R,” just not by filling in one circle. Talk about lazy! And we rely on these supposedly informed and intelligent voters to elect people to wield the monopoly on violence known as the state….

Interesting take on the situation in America’s higher education system from syndicated columnist Victor Davis Hansen.

Over at NMPolitics.net, I expand upon some of the Rio Grande Foundation’s recent research (here and here) on higher education with an article of my own.

I remember a time when liberals liked the First Amendment to the US Constitution (the ACLU, for one, still does). You know, the one that reads:

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.

That was before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. So, a bunch of left wingers who don’t like speech they disagree with have been busy trying to undermine the decision by passing resolutions in opposition of the law (like the one that was pushed through the Legislature this year). Albuquerque City Councilor Rey Garduño is the latest culprit with this resolution which will be discussed at City Council tonight. Sorry Rey. Free speech is free speech whether you like it or not. That’s the point.

An interesting article caught my attention in the “careers” section of the Sunday paper. The article discussed something called a “portable skills certificate.” Basically, it is a private certification that you have a particular set of skills.

Why is this important? For starters, in an age when a high school and even a college diploma means little in terms of specific skills, it is a private sector attempt to actually quantify what skills a potential employee has. Even better, this is an end-round of the traditional, failing, government education system and it shows a potential path forward for increased reliance on meaningful certification developed in the private sector not just for basic manufacturing skills, but for basic skills like reading and math.

I’m sure that the people behind this certification process do not want to be seen as “competing” with the traditional school systems, but I can only imagine how much more cost-effective and responsive to the needs of both individuals and the marketplace itself, the private sector could make the educational/skills acquisition process.

Jonah Goldberg will be joining many friends and supporters of the Rio Grande Foundation for lunch on Wednesday (more info here). He has a great column over at National Review Online, where he writes a regular column, on the left’s broad-based support for any conservative that is no longer in office.

The simple fact that Mitt Romney seemingly is the GOP’s nominee for President (with his many apostasies from conservative thought) would seem to illustrate that the Republican Party is not more conservative than it was in the past, but that fact seems to be ignored by too many pundits.

By State law, payroll information is considered public information. We at the Rio Grande Foundation have been working under this law to provide to the public payroll information for New Mexico’s largest cities, all counties, the largest school districts, and universities.

Unfortunately, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) doesn’t seem to like transparency and is suing Gov. Martinez for placing the payroll for state workers on the Sunshine Portal. The good news? For starters, this action makes AFSCME look out of touch. The better news? Regardless of the outcome of this lawsuit, payroll records for all state employees will remain online because I have sent the following request for public records to the State Personnel Office and the Rio Grande Foundation will be posting the records on our website as soon as we get them.

This is a formal request under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act. I wish to obtain electronic copies of the employee name, department, title, rate, and annual salary of all employees of the State of New Mexico for 2012. I request this information to be sent in an electronic format, preferably a pdf or excel spreadsheet to me at info@riograndefoundation.org.

If the file is too large to be emailed, I can provide a USB drive for copying electronic records. Please notify me when the records are available for inspection. I can be reached by phone at (505) 264-6090. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

The debate over the merits of unions is often muddled and confused by advocates and detractors alike. The recent article from someone named Tim Taylor that appeared in the Albuquerque Journal is only the most recent case. The article which defends unions has several problems

The author makes the unfortunate mistake of not differentiating between government and private sector unions. Generally, conservatives have no problem with the existence of private sector unions, but there are problems with the mere existence of public sector unions which represent government workers. As long as unions and the companies union members work for must compete in a private sector, the worst that can happen is that the union strangles the host company and makes them uncompetitive (as happened with the domestic auto industry). But, in a free market, consumers can choose to patronize or not patronize union companies. UPS which is heavily unionized, competes against FEDEX as just one example.

The problem, of course, with government unions is that they don’t compete in a free market. Money used to pay them is forcibly taken in the form of taxes and consumers cannot easily choose a competitor. Also, government labor unions are able to organize and contribute to electing their bosses and then sit across a bargaining table from them. Even FDR opposed them.

The author also asks “what is the one democratic institution in the workplace?” I’m not even sure what this means. Yes, unions vote on lots of stuff, but they also take a portion of workers’ paychecks and in New Mexico this is done automatically. In Wisconsin, when Gov. Scott Walker gave public employees the choice of whether or not to pay union dues — as opposed to having them automatically pulled from their paychecks — the number of dues-paying union members shrank rapidly. The state’s second-largest union, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, had membership fall to 28,745 in February from 62,818 in March 2011, the Journal said Thursday. The organization’s Afscme Council 24, composed of state workers, fell more than two thirds to 7,100 from 22,300 last year.

So, it would seem that government workers who are given a clear choice on whether to join the union or not, often decide not to join the union. That’s one reason I’m skeptical of “democracy.” Votes are cheap. In New Mexico they can be bought and sold for liquor. What I support is people who are willing to invest or remove their money from a specific company or union based on the value they believe they are getting from it (after all, we spend time working for money). In the case of Wisconsin, apparently workers aren’t buying what their union is selling.

Scary, that’s how I’d describe the fact that the author of this misguided and racially-charged piece once headed up the health care reform offices of Gov. Martinez. Clearly, the Administration either didn’t vet Derksen or they don’t understand just how central the issue of health care reform is to human freedom.

Here is my critique of the article:

1) Bringing up George Wallace and racism simply doesn’t fly. Denial of equal rights under the law is far different from not being given “free” health care at taxpayers’ expense. There is not a doctor in this country that I have ever heard of refusing to see minorities. Conflating these issues does nothing to move the debate forward.

2) The author states that “It’s estimated that someone dies each day in New Mexico for lack of health insurance.” This is simply wrong and illustrates an obvious misunderstanding of the appropriate role of insurance. No one in the history of the planet has died from a lack of insurance. People do die for lack of quality and affordable health care, but that has nothing to do with insurance per se.

In fact, insurance is a major problem in American health care, not a solution. We need to restore the fiduciary relationship between doctors and their patients, not provide even more incentives for Americans to expect their employers and insurers to pay more for our routine care and checkups.

Of course, if anyone DOES die for lack of care in this country, it should not be for lack of emergency care as hospitals cannot refuse to treat those who cannot pay for emergency care.

3) Derksen is all for expanding Medicaid as will be done if ObamaCare is upheld, but questions about as to whether Medicaid actually improves health care outcomes or expands access to health care.

Obviously, health care is a complicated issue. Most of this complexity is the result of government meddling. ObamaCare and its 2,700 pages, certainly does nothing to reduce this complexity. Hopefully, the departure of Derksen from the Martinez Administration means that she will fight for real health care reform, not more government control.

Today the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced that it is withdrawing its proposal to add the Sand Dune Lizard to the list of species protected under the Endangered Species Act. The lizard, which is native to Southeastern New Mexico, has generated a great deal of controversy and concern that listing would negatively impact both New Mexico’s oil and gas industry and the state economy. The Rio Grande Foundation is pleased with this decision. Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar praised the efforts of the oil and gas industry in working to preserve the lizard’s habitat through Candidate Conservation Agreements, saying they were “nothing short of historic.”

The good news is that New Mexico gets a reprieve on the lizard. The bad news is that the Endangered Species Act remains open to abuse by environmental groups.

More information from our friends at Energy Makes America Great can be found here.

(Albuquerque) Deane Waldman, MD, MBA, is a practicing pediatric cardiologist, adjunct fellow with the Rio Grande Foundation, and author of three books as well as hundreds of articles on health care and health care reform. In a new report, he makes a compelling case that even in nations where health care is presumed to be a right; it really isn’t – not in the world that we all live in. His full paper is available here.

Americans eagerly await word from the US Supreme Court as to whether or not the power of the federal government can be used to force Americans to purchase health insurance. Their decision on whether the health care law (ACA) passed by Congress and signed by President Obama is constitutional – will impact the future of American health care.

In his paper, Waldman examines the fundamental question that everyone is intentionally ignoring. That is the question of whether Americans (or anyone) has a right to health care. For example, as Waldman points out, “Great Britain,” where health care is supposedly a right, “denies kidney dialysis or heart surgery over certain ages.”

Waldman shows that the government “in universal health care nations…is the balancer (rationer) of health care goods and services. The right to health care constitutes what the government says it is,” not what your doctor says you need. Thus, nowhere is health care truly a right.

There cannot be a true right to health care in the traditional sense of rights, like that of free speech, free press, and all our other rights in the Bill of Rights that constrain the government. A right to health care enslaves one person – a provider – in the service of another individual – a patient. That is simply un-American. The focus of health care reform must be on economic policy decisions such as who can allocate resources more efficiently and effectively: central, government planning or individuals operating in a free market.

Rio Grande Foundation President Paul Gessing said of Waldman’s report, “Once the charged moral-sounding issue of rights is removed from the debate over health care reform, the issue becomes a more honest discussion over conflicting economic policies in the health care sector. In this regard, Waldman’s paper performs a valuable service.”

More information on Waldman’s books – “Uproot U.S. Healthcare,” “Cambio Radical al Sistema de Salud de los Estados Unidos,” and “Not Right!” – is available at www.uproothealthcare.com.

Indiana now has a Right to Work law. Wisconsin has completely renegotiated how the government interacts with organized labor (in a more taxpayer-friendly direction). But, the folks in the “City Different” continue to live up to their name with the nation’s-highest mandated minimum wage and now a “Project Labor Agreement.”

The law is entitled “community workforce agreement,” but it does the same things as the more controversial and well-known PLA’s. The law mandates contracting with construction unions in order to work on Santa Fe city construction projects that cost more than $500,000.

A community workforce agreement is a special interest scheme that discourages competition from nonunion contractors and their workers by requiring a construction project to be awarded only to contractors and subcontractors that agree to recognize unions as the representatives of their employees on that job; use the union hall to obtain workers; obey the union’s restrictive apprenticeship and work rules; and contribute to union pension plans and other funds in which their nonunion employees will never benefit unless they join a union.

Obviously, the good folks who have controlled Santa Fe government in recent years are not concerned about economic development and freedom. Unfortunately, while David Coss was rejected in his bid for the Legislature, he remains the Mayor of Santa Fe. These policies have been adopted under his watch and with his support albeit not by him alone.

Higher education has been a hot topic both nationally and in New Mexico recently. Congress has been haggling over the interest rates charged on federal student loans while economists question the economic impact of deeply-indebted college graduates. Here in New Mexico, UNM faculty complains that their salaries are not competitive with other, similar schools.

Unfortunately, decisions are being made and policy reforms are being discussed based on inadequate information. Sometimes, this lack of information appears to result from a strategic plan to make it more difficult for the public and policymakers to make sound decisions.

Recently, the University of New Mexico released payroll data for the school online. We applaud this measure but note that just this April, when the Rio Grande Foundation requested the same information from UNM, we received a letter stating that the University “did not have this information in electronic format” and summarily declined our request. Most other institutes of higher ed were more responsive, but not all.

NMSU, ENMU, Highlands, WNMU, NMMI, CNM, and San Juan College all received top marks because, as proscribed by law, they had a clearly-noted point of contact on their websites for information requests and they complied within the allotted time.

Unfortunately, other schools did not have clear contacts made available and for some we were completely unable to track down points of contact and thus, received no information. Obviously, this is unacceptable.

Sadly, posting payroll data online is just an indicator of bigger issues within higher education in New Mexico. Information is essential in allocating scarce resources. This is the power of the free market. We obviously don’t have that in higher education, so we need to ask other questions to better understand the goals of higher education in the state, such as:

Should students in a 300-person lecture pay the same rate per credit hour as someone in a 10 person lab? What about offering some of those large lectures in an online environment (especially given our campus bloat)? Should policymakers allocate greater resources to “in-demand” STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) that generate high salaries and form the basis for New Mexico’s economy?

A report from National Information Center for Higher Education Policymaking notes that New Mexico students pay the 2nd lowest combined tuition and fees of any state in the nation while taxpayers in our state bear the 2nd-highest burden for higher education expenses as a percentage of personal income of any state in the nation. Is it wise for taxpayers to pick up a disproportionate percentage of the costs of higher education when the benefits largely accrue to those who actually receive the educations?

New Mexico has 65 higher education campuses spread over 16 schools. Do we really need that many or should relatively more money be allocated to attracting and retaining the most effective teachers?

Finally, can individual schools (like the UNM law school, for example) be given greater budgetary autonomy and incentives to innovate by operating as independent institutions, free of taxpayer subsidies, as opposed to one component of a university?

The fact is that higher education needs to evolve and become more efficient and more transparent. The question is whether policymakers will be forced to blindly cut in the next budget crisis or whether the leadership both of the individual schools and in Santa Fe will act now to provide needed information and make changes now.

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.

Like fiscal conservatives throughout the nation, we at the Rio Grande Foundation were heartened by Scott Walker’s big win in Wisconsin this week. People on all sides of the issue are attempting to parse the results of the election and what they mean going forward.

One of the most interesting aspects of the election is that despite Walker’s big win, a variety of polls found Obama outpolling Romney in the race for President. The accuracy of these polls has been called into question, but I believe that Obama is leading Romney right now in Wisconsin.

This is good news/bad news for conservatives and advocates of limited government. Obviously, Walker received some measure of support from Obama supporters, thus showing that not ALL Obama supporters are knee-jerk advocates for bigger government and big labor. That’s good. The flip side is that conservatives are stuck with a Republican candidate who has shown no signs of being willing to make the tough choices that Walker has. This could hurt him among conservatives and independents on Election Day.

So, it would seem that nearly all conservatives and many independents are concerned about the fiscal future of their country and their state governments. If Mitt Romney can seize the mantle of reform a la Scott Walker convincingly, he has a great chance to win. If he fails to differentiate himself from Obama on government reform, Americans will likely choose to “stay the course” in November.

With all of the election-related news here in New Mexico and nationwide, you may have missed Gary Johnson’s appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In that case, video of his interview is below: