It is being reported by the Albuquerque Journal that Governor Richardson has vetoed the food tax while approving, as expected a 75 cent hike in the cigarette tax, a .25% hike in the GRT, and a personal income tax hike for about one-fourth of New Mexico taxpayers. Total approved hikes come to $170 million.

Richardson says he’ll close the budget gap “by dipping into cash reserves, employing $20 million in federal stimulus money and cutting state agency spending as a last resort.” Of course, I’d rather have seen Richardson veto any one of the other tax hikes due to the economic harm (or harm to specific groups) that they inflict. It will be interesting to see how Richardson does in fact “close” the budget deficit. It seems more likely that the issue will have to be revisited either before Richardson leaves office or immediately by the next governor.

After all, according to the Legislative Finance Committee, FY 2010 revenues were down 9.3% over the prior year. The estimates for FY 2011 are for an absurd 6.2% jump in revenue. That 15.3% turnaround seems unlikely at best. Anyway, enjoy your tax-free groceries while you can. As for the rest of us taxpayers, we’re stuck with a worse economy and a more difficult business climate.

The folks at Reason — along with comedian Drew Carey — have put together a series of videos on urban development issues over at Reason.Tv.. One of the videos discusses how cities can and cannot successfully draw people to their downtown areas and make those areas vibrant places where people want to be.

The video below tackles convention centers, an expansion of which is now being considered by Albuquerque Mayor Berry (you can comment here). It also discusses sports arenas and stadiums, zoning, and activist efforts to stop politically-incorrect businesses from locating in certain areas. Enjoy!

Over this past weekend, I was on Channel 7 talking about efforts by a few schools around the state — using a combination of private grants and federal money — to provide full-service health care and a variety of other social services. The concept is called “community schools” and the idea is to further transform K-12 schools from centers of learning to being focused on the mental and physical needs of children and their families. The article and video available here.

You can’t turn on the television or radio these days without being bombarded by ads urging you to fill out and return your census form. This is especially true if you have watched the NCAA Tournament over the weekend where the commercials were played constantly.

One of the most common tag lines is “We can’t move forward til you mail it back.” The idea is that if you don’t fill out your census forms to let the government know you exist, hospitals, roads, schools, government office buildings, and other infrastructure will be inadequate. After all, we need to “get our fair share of federal dollars,” right? All of this loses sight of the one legitimate purpose of the census, that being Congressional apportionment.

This entire exercise clearly illustrates the power of the free market relative to the incompetent and inefficient government. After all, if hospitals, schools, roads, etc. were provided by the free market, then entrepreneurs would add to the existing infrastructure based on need. That need would be expressed as high enough prices and/or crowding that leads one to believe that additional services are necessary and can be supported in the free market.

So, on one hand, we have the free market which allocates all these resources efficiently based on need and for free. On the other hand, every 10 years, the government spends $13.7 to $14.5 billion in a futile attempt to replicate what the market does. I’m sure our new health care system will be just as efficient!

My daughter Grace reacted tonight to the House vote and the fact that she’s now personally in hundreds of millions of dollars of additional debt:

I do like this reaction from the Colorado Springs Gazette.

I protested the health care bill with the folks from the Albuquerque Tea Party today. 200 or so folks, including families and people of all races and creeds, protested the Obama Administration’s takeover of America’s health care system today.

Unfortunately, some “yahoos” in DC gave the national media fodder to label the whole Tea Party movement as a bunch of racists and homophobes. While one of the strengths of the movement is its decentralized nature, some in the movement clearly need to get “on-message” and not resort to racist name-calling. If Tea Partiers nationwide can’t be more disciplined, then I think it might be time for some effective Tea Party groups to break away and become their own, locally-controlled pro-taxpayer groups. Just a thought, but a few bad apples cannot spoil the whole bunch.

In case you haven’t been following them in recent years, the League of Women Voters has been transformed from a “mom and apple pie” group that attempts to get Americans (especially women) involved in the democratic process into just another left-wing advocacy organization. So, it was with some raised eyebrows that I read this recent opinion piece from the group which took the New Mexico-based Association of Commerce and Industry to task for assorted wrongdoing…namely, working on behalf of businesses attempting to squeeze out a profit doing business in New Mexico.

The League has an innocuous-sounding mission statement:

The League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan political organization, encourages informed and active participation in government, works to increase understanding of major public policy issues, and influences public policy through education and advocacy.

But don’t be fooled. In reality, the League is a far-left organization that not only endorsed ObamaCare, but endorsed the anti-democratic “deem and pass” methods considered by Pelosi to allow the federal government to take over 1/6th of the US economy without a recorded vote.

If you know anyone who thinks the League of Women Voters is not far-left, please disabuse them of that notion and by all means, don’t donate to the League of Left-Wing Voters!

As I noted recently, the nature of the health care debate has declined dramatically in recent months. Once Scott Brown was elected in Massachusetts, the intellectual debate ended. The Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats shifted their thinking away from persuading the American people to looking for loopholes that would allow them to pass their plans “by any means possible.”

That is why this recent column from my colleague John Hood at our sister think tank in North Carolina, the John Locke Foundation is so refreshing. Hood, like me, has clearly had enough with debating the shape-shifting, nation-bankrupting plan that will likely be voted on in the House this weekend. Instead, he’s calling for civil disobedience as the only moral reaction to this Constitutionally-bankrupted debacle.

I for one see no other alternative and would be happy to join Mr. Hood in taking this last stand for freedom.

I just learned (from reading an article in today’s Albuquerque Journal) about the “Coffee Party,” which is supposedly a more polite alternative to the Tea Parties. Now, I have had nothing but good experiences with the various New Mexico-based Tea Parties, particularly those in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Las Cruces, but I certainly understand the need for civility and I think an overwhelming majority of the Tea Parties and people involved with them are civil. Of course, the media will focus on those outliers and other “man bites dog” episodes.

The description of the Coffee Parties offered in the Journal article, instead of making me want to get involved with the movement, leaves me cold, particularly her blaming the attack on the IRS building on the Tea Parties to which not even a tenuous connection has been made. Ultimately, the indictment of the Coffee Parties is on their own website which indicates a basic ignorance of the Constitution and the vision of the Founding Fathers:

We want a society in which democracy is treated as sacrosanct and ordinary citizens participate out of a sense of civic duty, civic pride, and a desire to contribute to society. The Coffee Party is a call to action. Our Founding Fathers and Mothers gave us an enduring gift — Democracy — and we must use it to meet the challenges that we face as a nation

This is all wrong. The Founding Fathers were not big believers in “Democracy” or majority rule. Rather, they wrote the Constitution in a way that strictly limited the power of the federal government, set up a system of checks and balances to slow the political process, and gave us the First Amendment protections for free speech. The First Amendment’s protections are extremely important, not because it protects free expression on the part of the majority, but rather the views of the minority.

So, in summary, I won’t be heading to a Coffee Party anytime soon. I’ll take my TEA strong, thank you.

You might enjoy the New Mexico Watchdog video report on the Kewa “station.”  We had fun doing it.

A few weeks ago, we at the Rio Grande Foundation started circulating this petition in response to the unfair attacks upon them by the Los Angeles-based Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters. The union is stationing small numbers of “protesters” in front of local businesses with banners stating “Shame on…” for something the business is doing that the union doesn’t like. The Rio Grande Foundation is urging supporters to actively visit businesses that have been targeted by the Union.

Please sign the petition, send it to your friends and other concerned citizens, and send the names of locations of businesses that have been targeted and thus deserve support to info@riograndefoundation.org. The current list of businesses is available here.

I enjoy picking up The Alibi, particularly when Jerry Ortiz y Pino’s columns run. For starters, Ortiz y Pino provides a good window into the thoughts of New Mexico’s left-wing progressive/socialist community. In the past, it has also given me some nice fodder for letters to the editor. I was a bit disappointed in this week’s missive from the good Senator, however.

In his column, Ortiz y Pino simply resigns himself to the “unhappy compromise” that is the recently-passed budget. As a reminder, that budget included the following tax hikes which are estimated to raise the following amount of revenue:

$.75 cigarette tax hike: $31.3 million;
Reinstate part of the gross receipts tax on food: $70 million;
.25% increase in GRT: $60 million;
Eliminate an income tax deduction for taxpayers that itemize: $66 million;
Clarify that the compensating tax applies to most goods and services purchased by New Mexico businesses: $12 million next year.

So, why am I disappointed in Ortiz y Pino? Well, the left which supposedly stands up for the poor, willingly increased taxes on the poor in a regressive manner (cigarette taxes, the GRT, and the grocery tax are all regressive). I wish Ortiz y Pino had stuck up more for his beliefs or maybe admitted that they were wrong to spend $500+ million on the Rail Runner, $80 million annually in film subsidies, hundreds of millions on the Spaceport, and $36 million on a supercomputer.

Most of these spending items have little positive impact on the poor (or on New Mexico’s economy as a whole), but the left seems all too willing to go along with higher taxes on the poor. Who is the “progressive” now?

Winthrop Quigley of the Albuquerque Journal claims to be a “free market fan” in his column in today’s paper. He then spends 800 words defending the various bailouts passed under both President Obama and Bush. Worse, Quigley makes no serious arguments in defense of massive government intervention. The best he can come up with is the fact that the recession supposedly ended in the middle of 2009.

To say the least, I find his arguments dubious. Kind of akin to the Aztecs sacrificing a virgin to the gods for a good harvest and believing that sacrifice to be effective when the harvest turns out well. Quigley essentially admits this at the end of his piece.

I believe that government policies have actually exacerbated the current crisis and sown the seeds for an even greater future crisis. This has been the case historically as the “too big to fail” Long Term Capital Management and the pumping up of the housing market through Fannie and Freddie are two major policies that sowed the seeds for the current crisis.

The market –even a heavily-regulated one like we have now — is more resilient than Quigley seems to believe. If the big banks, AIG, and even the automakers had failed with no bailouts, the US economy would emerge from this crisis in much better shape than before with more responsible, less corrupt companies coming in to replace those that failed. Better still, the federal government would not be burdened with trillions of dollars in debt that Bush and Obama gave us. As this article from Reason Magazine argues, the economy is getting worse, not better thanks to these federal policies. Only time will tell, but I find Quigley’s arguments unconvincing.

Given the huge impact that the regulations being considered by the Environmental Improvement Board could have on New Mexico, I felt that it was important to alert a national audience to the issue and the possibility that similar actions could be undertaken in their state. Check out my National Review Online article here.

The left loves to talk about various “rights,” particularly the supposed right to health care and other economic rights that are not really rights because they involve infringing on others’ rights. But how about the right to home school one’s children?

Thankfully, despite efforts to limit home schooling, particularly in California, most US states are willing to leave home schoolers alone. That is not the case, specifically in Germany, where home schooling is illegal. According to the article, the parents, “music teachers, left Germany because they didn’t like what their children were learning in public school.” The family decided to move to the US “in 2008 after he and his wife had accrued about $10,000 in fines for homeschooling their three oldest children and police had turned up at their doorstep and escorted them to school.”

I am proud that, despite its many flaws, the states of the United States by and large stay out of the way when parents wish to home school their children. It is a freedom to be jealously guarded. I hope our government bureaucrats see fit to give this family — which is clearly fleeing persecution at home — asylum.

I remain a hot topic among Alibi readers in this week’s letters pages. Good to see that I rattled some cages among the lefties with my recent article.

Here are some responses to the points made in the letters:

Letter 1: Not sure what the writer’s point is here. He seems to claim that giving a group of people property rights over animals, for example, is a clear sign that capitalism doesn’t work. Not sure if the writer understands that a corporation is merely a legal entity formed by multiple people (typically) to act in the legal and economic spheres.

Letter 2: According to this individual, the sum total of the conservative philosophy can be summed up in one book by John Dean. All of the other sources on conservative and libertarian thought are out the window. This is silly.

Letter 3: The author makes no attempt to respond to my points. Very silly and I don’t know why they printed it at all.

Letter 4: Thanks Bill! Agreed.

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

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

Nothing gets the blood flowing like internecine warfare. It is very easy to lob bombs at the left and others who want to “socialize” medicine, but it is quite another thing — a much more difficult one — to disagree with a nationally-recognized advocate for free market health care.

John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a health care expert with far more years in the field than I, recently blogged about some of the ideas put forth by Republicans in their health care meeting with President Obama. The idea that Goodman disagrees so vehemently with is to allow all out-of-pocket spending on health care to be deductible. This, proponents (like me) argue, would ultimately undermine the third-party-payer system of health care in this country because employees would no longer have the incentive to rely on their employers for health care and would instead take the additional pay and enter the individual market, more than likely adapting health savings accounts and other consumer-driven health care products in large numbers.

Goodman argues that eliminating taxes health care expenses would create a situation in which “government would be paying almost half the cost…” With this subsidy, health care spending would rise dramatically. He instead argues for equalizing the tax treatment of health care with other goods — an ideal solution that I agree with — but I doubt that Congress or the American people would go along with such a massive tax hike unless tax rates were lowered…and you get the picture. Very complex and not likely to happen.

So, I remain supportive of eliminating taxes on health care. Why? Well, first and foremost, even if you are being subsidized to the tune of 50% for health care, you still control the money and will work to keep costs down. Pricing will become a part of the health care industry in a way that it is not today because of the third-party system. Also, the individual market will grow, thus making that a more viable proposition and keeping costs down and giving millions of Americans greater control of their health care (no more remaining stuck in a job just because of health care). Lastly, consumer-driven health care like HSA’s will take off and flourish. These all seem like good things to me. Besides, do you really trust politicians to not cave into special interests by exempting health insurance from taxation as we did in New Mexico (NM’s gross receipts tax still hits certain health care costs like deductibles and co-pays).

Ending taxation of health care costs seems to have more benefits than drawbacks. Maybe I’m wrong. What do you think?

The problems associated with Toyota’s faulty brakes are by now widely known. Many on the left and in government will use this as an opportunity to expand government power while blaming the free market for yet another failure.

But, as this column from the free market think tank, The Independent Institute points out, people (and businesses) are not perfect. Toyota clearly screwed up here and the market (average customers reacting to information) is punishing them. The loss of millions of dollars in sales, not to mention the harm this issue has done to the company’s public image, will serve as an incentive to Toyota not to cut corners next time and a reminder to other businesses — automotive and otherwise — to make sure that their products are ready for “prime time” before they are sold to the public.

In other words, the market is responding quickly to make sure this doesn’t happen again or happens less often in the future. As we see in the field of education, the same cannot be said for government.

Footage of my appearance before the Environmental Improvement Board on March 1, 2010 is now available (below). Also, Paul Chesser over at the American Spectator blog picked up the story and added his own thoughts.

Dr. John Vigil was one of two doctors that appeared on a panel with me at Rep. Martin Heinrich’s town hall meeting last summer (video available here). (Remember the good old days when Obama and Congressional Democrats actually cared what form health care reform took rather than just attempting to pass any health care reform they could muster up the votes for?)

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised when I sat on that panel to learn that Rep. Heinrich had not stacked the panel with pro-government reform proponents. Dr. Vigil in particular impressed me. Well, in today’s Albuquerque Journal, Dr. Vigil explains that medical malpractice, while not solving all of America’s health care problems, could have a significant, positive impact in terms of cost savings of $20-$30 billion annually or more.

Tort reform, as one component of other market-based reforms, could have a significant, positive impact on costs and quality, but as we have seen since Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts, Obama is pushing harder than ever, regardless of what that “reform” ultimately looks like.

On this week’s Forum over at the New Mexico Independent, the question was whether or not Gov. Richardson should or should not sign the tax hike on groceries which he claims to “hate.” View my response (and those of other panelists here). As I point out, the decision at this point is a difficult one. No one hates taxes more than I do, but as Terri Cole points out in support of re-instating the tax, this is a broad-based tax.

If Richardson really “hated” the food tax, he might have wanted to consider that before he pushed so hard for/refused to reconsider costly projects like the RailRunner, the Spaceport, and $80 million annually in film subsidies. Even during this legislative session, Richardson refused to get serious about cutting government spending and our bloated state government (including merging agencies as was recommended by his own government efficiency task force).

So, should Richardson sign the food tax hike? Well, since he seems hell-bent on raising taxes, I’d rather have that tax raised than hikes to income taxes or further hikes to the economically-devastating gross receipts tax even further. No matter what happens, it is clear that Richardson doesn’t “hate” the food tax hike enough to actually do something about it.

Last week, the Rio Grande Foundation hosted a candidate forum between District 3 (the norther district) Congressional candidates Tom Mullins and Adam Kokesh. Incumbent Ben Ray Lujan was invited, but did not attend.

The video is split into two parts. Part one can be found here:

Part two can be found here:

The Rio Grande Foundation, in response to the unfair attacks upon them by the Los Angeles-based Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters, is urging supporters to actively visit businesses that have been targeted by the Union, to report which businesses are being targeted (for posting at ErrorsofEnchantment.com) and to sign this petition which will be released to the local media in early April and mailed to the union in Los Angeles (all contact information will be stripped from the petition before it is sent).

So, sign the petition and send the names of locations of businesses that have been targeted and thus deserve support. An initial list can be found here:

La-Z-Boy on San Mateo & McLeod
Healthsouth hospital on Jefferson and Ellison
Lovelace Women’s Hospital on Montgomery
Il Vicino at Alameda and Corrales
Hotel Andaluz (downtown)
Hotel Albuquerque on Rio Grande
The New Mexico Educators Federal Credit Union
on Americas Parkway NE