According to the Albuquerque Journal this morning, the City of Albuquerque faces a $24 million deficit this year. First and foremost, thank you Mayor Marty for leaving the incoming Mayor and the taxpayers of Albuquerque such a nice lump of coal in our (early) Christmas stockings.

Unfortunately, there are no easy ways to solve a major deficit like this in the current fiscal year. There is going to be pain and tough decisions have to be made.

Of course, even after completing this fiscal year, the picture is unlikely to improve dramatically. Deficits are likely to continue, but the good news is that the decisions are somewhat easier. For starters, Berry should do is to strongly consider halting some of the sweetheart union contracts signed during the Martin Chávez administration such as the one for firefighters that calls for a 6 percent pay raise in the coming fiscal year.

There are more systematic reforms available as well. One big one is “managed competition,” a concept that has been adopted in cities nationwide. Our friends at Reason Foundation found that San Diego taxpayers could save $80 to $200 million per year by allowing the private sector to compete with government agencies to do things like clean city buildings, perform maintenance on government vehicles, and run golf courses. There is no doubt that Albuquerque could save a great deal of money — with similar or even improved service resulting — if it adopted these practices.

The full reason study is available here, but the basic method is to take something like garbage collection and open it up to competitive bidding. This can include bids by private companies as well as the government employees who are currently doing the job. Significant cost savings can result. Sure, government employees may not like having to compete for their jobs, but taxpayers can experience significant savings which can come in handy when cities are facing massive deficits.

Yesterday, the Albuquerque Journal editorialized about the very real possibility that, due to the fact that the federal government has refused to extend the requirement that states align themselves with the 2005 REAL ID law, residents of New Mexico will be required to carry a passport in order to get on an airplane. Of course, New Mexico residents are not alone. We’re one of 36 states that haven’t gone along with REAL ID.

Unfortunately, the Journal argues, that if this happens and REAL ID does become the enacted law of the land, they would point the blame at Santa Fe, not Washington. As I wrote a few years ago, REAL ID is an abomination of an unfunded mandate that will cost New Mexico taxpayers $43 million to comply with. If this wasn’t done when times were good back in 2005, it seems hard to believe that New Mexico will come up with this kind of cash now when it faces a massive deficit and tax hikes.

Our Senators, Bingaman and Udall, have weighed in with a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano in support of extending the implementation deadline (and they should be applauded for attempting to forestall the absurdity of forcing millions of Americans to show passports to get on airplanes), but it would be better if they started working to repeal this costly and unnecessary mandate entirely.

Ever been frustrated because it seemed like party insiders had already chosen their candidate before you ever get to weigh in? Would you like to meet and compare the candidates for New Mexico’s highest office in a casual, low-key forum?

If you are interested in finding out more about the people who are vying to lead New Mexico in 2010, the Rio Grande Foundation has an event for you.

The Foundation is hosting a forum for each of the candidates* for New Mexico governor on December 9, 2009 from 6:00PM to 8:00PM in the auditorium at the Albuquerque Museum. The Museum is located at 2000 Mountain Road NW near Old Town. Admission is $5 payable at the door. Let us know you are coming by sending an E-mail to: rsvp@riograndefoundation.org. Light beverages will be provided.

Be ready to ask a question of the candidates. This is not a formal debate, rather it is an informal way for concerns to “kick the tires” and find out more about the candidates, their stances on the issues, and how they interact with the crowd. The discussion will be moderated by Rio Grande Foundation president Paul Gessing.

*All candidates of both parties have been invited and some have pledged to attend, but we have no way to guarantee that specific candidates show up.

I’ll be discussing our recently-released local tax burden study with a particular focus on tax lightning and property tax burdens.

Airtimes include:

Tuesday, Dec 1st at 1:30am
Thursday, Dec 3rd at 1:30am
Friday, Dec 4th at 11:00am
Saturday, Dec 5th at 1:30am

The segment will last about 15 minutes if you choose to record the program.

After a week off visiting RGF co-founder and former president Harry Messenheimer in Hawaii (The Big Island) I’m back in the blogosphere. I know, someone has to do it!

Having just flown to Hawaii and back, the opinion piece in today’s Albuquerque Journal from my friend Marita Noon at the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy really hits home. After all, traveling to Hawaii and back (or anywhere else over the Holidays for that matter) takes a lot of energy. This doesn’t include Christmas lights, Holiday meals, gifts, and dozens of other things that make our lives comfortable.

This emphasis on the real, every-day benefits of energy must be contrasted against the almost daily stories about how the environmental, global warming fear-mongers are manipulating data to make it appear like the climate is in crisis.

In case you missed it, New Mexico should take a cue from Louisiana of all places.

The headline is pretty self-explanatory, so here is the article. If you have been living under a rock and don’t know about Obama’s phantom Congressional districts and our role in exposing them, check out the story here. If you want to support and continue these efforts, click here.

Jim Scarantino’s latest report on how Lt. Governor Diane Denish spent stimulus funds is now available at New Mexico Watchdog.

If you’ve been listening to the news recently, you probably heard of the controversy regarding the recommendations of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force relating to mammograms. The gist of the recommendations was to state that women in their 40s no longer need to have annual mammograms. So far, so good.

But the story behind the story is how the mammogram recommendation impacts the drive for nationalized health care. After all, it is one thing for a government panel to “recommend” certain guidelines, but is there any doubt that if the government controls and pays for your care that these will no longer be “guidelines,” but actual limits. In other words, women won’t be able to get mammograms in their 40s without, perhaps, proving to a panel of government bureaucrats that their family histories demand earlier mammograms. But do you really trust government bureaucrats with these decisions?

Steve Pearlstein, a liberal columnist with the Washington Post, understands the situation. And as an advocate for government-run health care wrote: “Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius did a marvelous job this week of undermining the move toward evidence-based medicine with her hasty and cowardly disavowal of a recommendation from her department’s own task force that women under 50 are probably better off not getting routine annual mammograms.”

While I take no position on the mammography issue, I’d rather have women and their doctors — constrained by real-world financial concerns as opposed to the current, third-party system — make their own decisions on mammography. Unfortunately, Congress and the President are going the wrong way.

I’m positively shocked that Governor Richardson has been a long time friend of the Hool brothers who are behind the Santa Fe Studios. The project, which I wrote about a few months ago, is being subsidized to the tune of $10 million by state taxpayers with taxpayers in Santa Fe County chipping in another $6 million. The whole thing stinks.

Of course, at the same time as he is pushing for additional subsidies for an already-subsidized industry, Richardson is pushing for tax hikes on the rest of us. The fact is that Richardson loves the film industry because he gets to control the money that is doled out and to whom. Then he takes credit for taxpayers’ generosity. Apparently he is not nearly as much of a fan of regular taxpayers spending their money as they see fit.

Sometimes I am a bit jealous of liberals. The Rio Grande Foundation is one of the leanest and most effective organizations around. Just google our name and read through the reams of news articles and data and understand that our budget is sub-$500,000.

Then there is left-wing billionaire George Soros with a net worth of $11 billion. He is a major funder of left-wing causes. Recently, as this Newsweek story pointed out Soros decided to spend $50 million of his own money to set up an “anti-free market” think tank. The group is to be called the “Institute for New Economic Thinking” and their mission as Soros sees it is “to take back the economics profession from the champions of free-market zealotry who have dominated it for decades, and to correct the failures of decades of market deregulation.”

I don’t have to tell you how much I disagree with Soros and the mission of his new “think tank.” Unfortunately, unlike Soros, we don’t have one $50 million donor. That goes for all of the free market think tanks in the State Policy Network. Of course, we have better ideas than the socialists like Soros do, so we are still winning the battle of ideas, but we rely on far smaller donations from concerned individuals. Maybe you can support what we do by clicking here? Help us stick it in Soros’s eye by showing that free markets and individual liberty, not top-down government control do work.

I am not making this up. See my new report at New Mexico Watchdog. The Obama Administration is claiming to have created jobs and spent tens of millions of dollars in ten New Mexico Congressional districts that do not exist. I repeat: I am not making this up. Read for yourself.

New Mexico’s free market think tank, the Rio Grande Foundation, has made public on its website a revised and updated tool for families to calculate their property and gross receipts tax burdens in New Mexico’s 10 largest cities.

Using publicly-available property tax and gross receipts tax (GRT) data for each city with a population of 25,000 or more, the Rio Grande Foundation local tax burden calculator allows taxpayers to compare the two major taxes here in New Mexico that vary widely from place to place.

Rio Grande Foundation President Paul Gessing explained the importance of making this information available in an easy-to-use format, saying “GRT and property taxes are two of New Mexico’s three most important taxes levied on individuals (the other being income taxes). Since GRT and property tax rates vary significantly from place to place. We felt it is time to give taxpayers and entrepreneurs an idea how dramatically location decisions can impact what they pay the government.”

The calculator was made public using research on local tax burdens contained in the Rio Grande Foundation’s new paper “How Tax Friendly is Your City,” which compares city tax burdens and how tax rates have evolved over time. The study is available here.

For the average taxpayer, Albuquerque and Las Cruces have the heaviest tax burdens in New Mexico, while Hobbs and Carlsbad have the lowest burdens. These results are the same as those in the Foundation’s previous study on the topic which was released in August, 2007. Of course, using our tax burden calculator will produce results tailored to individual taxpayers and their families.

While legislators are going to be considering economically-harmful tax hikes in January in order to compensate for years of over-spending, local governments can survive this tough economic time by keeping tax rates low and becoming leaner. Hopefully this study sheds additional light on just how much of an impact local governments can have on creating taxpayer-friendly economic conditions.

I love these studies that come out on education and particularly the headlines like “N.M. Education Above Average in Report.” This story ran in the Albuquerque Journal on Friday and is called “Leaders and Laggards.”

So, what does “above average really mean? Well, last year, the study focused on test scores and ranked New Mexico 49th in the nation. Hardly above average. This year, the report was changed and focused on several, less specific factors including technology, removal of ineffective teachers, and data management. Not surprisingly, New Mexico performed well in technology, which has little or no impact on actual education results, but the state was one of the most difficult in the report in terms of getting rid of ineffective teachers.

The fact is that New Mexico’s educational system is well below average in terms of actual results. Muddying the water by factoring in all of these measurements that have only some impact on actual results is a waste of time and only masks the system’s real shortcomings.

The debate in Congress has focused almost entirely on government solutions and while market advocates have brought ideas to bear, like purchasing health insurance across state lines, that have not really been applied at least in the medical sector in the United States.

This article from “The American” which is put out by the American Enterprise Institute discusses six market-based health care reforms that are working today in many states around the country. Rather than more government, these proven ideas should be the basis for health care reforms.

Ideas discussed and explained in the article include:

1. Retail clinics.
2. Retail clinic-hospital partnerships.
3. On-site workplace healthcare clinics.
4. Affordable $4 generic drugs.
5. Prepaid medical plans.
6. Concierge medicine.

HT: Harry Messenheimer

The Rio Grande Foundation’s New Mexico Watchdog, though it stands on its own, is part of a national network of Watchdog investigative reporting projects in other states. Jim Scarantino, who edits and reports for New Mexico Watchdog, is a former attorney. The Watchdogs in other states are run by veteran journalists, accountants, and policy analysts. For an idea of how large and impressive this effort is, read our “Watchdog Roundup.”

Awhile back I blogged about the ongoing fight in Congress over FedEx and UPS. Our friends over at Reason have put together this new video loosely based on the UPS whiteboard commercials to explain the situation.

As a state-level economic policy organization, the Rio Grande Foundation does not take a position on social issues like abortion. But With narrow passage of the House health care bill made possible by strict limits on taxpayer subsidies for abortion under the plan, the debate over abortion policy has moved front-and-center in the health care debate. Recently, in fact, a representative of a group calling itself “New Mexico Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice” wrote on the pages of the Albuquerque Journal that abortion should not impact passage of the legislation one way or the other. President Obama echoed this sentiment saying “This is a health care bill, not an abortion bill.”

The problem, of course, is that when the federal government is paying for health care (including abortion), the legislation is inherently an abortion bill. It is, after all, one thing for an individual to not wish to pay for or subsidize abortions of others. This is largely the situation we have been living under to date. It is another thing for the government to force people who have serious moral concerns about abortion (or other medical procedures) to be forced to pay for that through their tax dollars. Their concerns are certainly justified and I can understand why abortion opponents demanded such an amendment before voting for the bill.

There may be a way to find a compromise here, but it is now the largest single stumbling block to health care reform and abortion opponents hold the cards.

Rarely do opinion pieces get it as wrong as this one which appeared in the ABQ Journal on Monday. Essentially, the folks at the CCA-New Mexico Women’s Correctional Facility argued that because of the facility’s contributions to this community, which the writer notes include “employing almost 150 people and paying about $1 million in property taxes.” The ultimate point of the piece is to argue that the facility should not be closed and that Governor Richardson and the Legislature should preserve the facility.

While I would not contradict that the prison contributes to the local economy or even that the prison, one of New Mexico’s highly-efficient, privatized facilities is not cost-effective, the reasoning outlined in the piece simply doesn’t make sense.

Here are some simple arguments on the matter:

1) the money used to run the facility is not created out of thin air, it comes from tax dollars. Those are tax dollars that could be used in other ways were they left in peoples’ pockets;
2) If the facility is necessary to house violent criminals, then keep it open. In fact, keeping it open and protecting New Mexicans from violent criminals is one of the most basic functions of government. Other areas of the budget must be cut or eliminated immediately if this prison is necessary;
3) The Rio Grande Foundation has come up with several policy ideas that will make New Mexicans safer and reduce costs. Perhaps our friends in the prison system could implement dome of the ideas contained in this article.

The little stuff matters. Details count. NYPD proved it with their application of the Broken Windows Theory. I think that approach applies equally to how we hold government and politicians accountable. Combing through records showing how the Lt. Governor spent $225,000 is a good case study in application of this theory.

I expect to have one more report in this series. I will then provide a compilation of all the links for the convenience of anyone else who cares how Diane Denish chose to exercise complete discretion to spend tax dollars meant for economic stimulus.

Amazing how corporate welfare backfires. Remember the Kelo v. New London decision on eminent domain? The Supreme Court’s decision in that case essentially gave governments across the nation a green light to take any American’s property for any reason so long as the public received some benefit from the taking.

Now, having used (abused) the power of government to take the homes of dozens of long-time area residents, Pfizer has abandoned the development entirely, so the supposed economic benefits to the City of New London of abusing the property rights of its citizens have evaporated leaving empty plots of land. How appropriate.

Thankfully, policymakers here in New Mexico, at the behest of the Rio Grande Foundation and the Institute for Justice — the libertarian law firm that argued Kelo before the Supreme Court — New Mexico now has one of the strongest eminent domain laws in the nation, “A-” on the Castle Coalition’s 50 state ranking.

Ultimately, government officials all around the country — and here in New Mexico — need to learn the lesson that favoring one business or industry above all others is a bad strategy and doomed to ultimate failure. Whether the subsidy is taking private homes or tax dollars to fund Eclipse Aviation, the policies are both unfair and likely to fail.

A Denish worker paid with public funds was paid for what appears to be the Kerry train rally and visit to Albuquerque. There are questions about the invoices themselves, too. They appear to have been approved before the work was done. Read my latest report at New Mexico Watchdog.

Rep. Martin Heinrich voted in favor of the health care bill that narrowly passed the House over the weekend. He also wrote an opinion piece in the Albuquerque Journal defending the bill and his decision to support it. He points to six principles that he wanted included in the legislation:

1) Stability for health consumers; in practice, this means “guaranteed issue,” a practice that drives up the costs of health insurance for the young and healthy, thus driving them out of the insurance pool, driving costs up for everyone (as only the unhealthy will buy insurance) and pushing peopole into the so-called “public option.”

2) Contain costs: This from the National Taxpayers Union “Several analyses have placed the real cost at as much as $1.5 trillion over the first ten years, or more than $2 trillion over a decade when the bill is fully phased in. The House legislation used innumerable gimmicks to artificially reduce its score, including splitting the so-called “doc fix” into another bill to hide a quarter-trillion dollars and not indexing the taxes in the bill for inflation, meaning they’ll run deficits in the future if they don’t “fix” those provisions like they have to do with the Alternative Minimum Tax.”

3) Patients can keep their doctor and health plan. We already know this to be false. For starters, I hold a health savings account that I love. That plan will cease to exist under the House-passed plan.

4) Improving the quality of private insurance and closing Medicare Donut Hole; Oh, and I’m sure this will all come in at no additional cost to taxpayers, right?

5) Coverage for all Americans; Illegal immigrants are major consumers of uncompensated care, but they are not included in the legislation. How much of the uncompensated care will really go away?

6) Public option; Operating without government subsidy, but for how long? Will Congress really let the government option die if it can’t compete? No, they’ll eventually prop it up and you simply can’t write this legislation in such a way as to stop this from happening once you create the public option.

The Rio Grande Foundation has announced two upcoming events. The first is an Albuquerque showing of “Not Evil Just Wrong.” The showing will take place on November 21 and we will be co-sponsoring the event with the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE) and the Albuquerque Tea Party. The showing will take place at the Albuquerque Museum which is located at 2000 Mountain Road NW at the edge of Old Town.

The movie will start at 6:00PM and lasts about 90 minutes with a short discussion to follow. Cost of the film is $8. Payment will be accepted at the door.

Also, on December 2nd, we will be hosting “Liberty in Concert.” The event is a reception followed by a
concert program by Jamie Story, Miss Texas 2004.

Story is an accomplished pianist, freedom fighter and President of the Grassroot Institute in Hawaii.

The event will take place at Hotel Albuquerque which is located at 800 Rio Grande Blvd. NW
Albuquerque, NM, in the Grand Piano Atrium

Admission is $35, RSVP Required to: (505) 301-9953 or libertyinconcert@riograndefoundation.org

Holiday Business Attire; The Reception begins at 6:00PM; The Concert Program begins at 7:30PM