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I’ve been away from the blogosphere (and New Mexico) for a few days because I’m attending the State Policy Network annual Conference in lovely Asheville, North Carolina. Needless to say, I’ve been busy, but learning alot.

Anyway, one thing I just found out about is this excellent, interactive website which helps people understand why some markets are so naturally so competitive (sodas and television sets) and some (military and police) are far less competitive and actually create a legitimate mission for government. While we at the Rio Grande Foundation push hard for increased emphasis on market as opposed to government forces, the site explains some of the potential benefits and difficulties of putting that into practice and some of the reasons politicians and policymakers will give for why markets are not applicable or as beneficial in certain instances.

Instead of rushing to cut services or raise taxes to find millions to plug budget holes, the Legislature might root around musty accounts held by boards, commissions, agencies and school districts. A recent report by Kansas Watchdog found billions–billions–in unencumbered or carryover accounts held by nearly 2,000 government agencies. These are funds not needed to meet bills or pay other obligations. The report took a long time and lots of effort. But when you find billions of dollars that could provide services and stimulate the economy instead of earn interest for bureaucrats, it could be worth the try.

It’s a very impressive effort by Kansas Watchdog, and maybe something that should be tried here. Particularly when educators and teachers unions want to raise taxes to meet “pressing needs” or “avoid damaging cuts” to education, we should learn from Kansas. Kansas Watchdog first got interested in unencumbered funds when it discovered over a billion dollars in unencumbered funds being held by “cash-strapped” school districts.

We’ve got it written up over at New Mexico Watchdog.

Back in August, the Albuquerque Journal broke a story saying that New Mexico’s real graduation rate for 2008 was 54 percent. Then the state revised the rate to 60 percent or so (although I could not find an exact statewide number).

Unfortunately, I’ve seen other studies like the “Diplomas Count” study which found that New Mexico’s graduation rate was 54.1 percent while the national rate was 70.6 percent. Seems like the Diplomas Count study is a lot more reflective of reality than the revised numbers. When will our government officials be honest about New Mexico’s education problem?

Every year, 1,000 Americans die because they cannot find a matching bone marrow donor. Minorities are hit especially hard. Common sense suggests that offering modest incentives to attract more bone marrow donors would be worth pursuing, but federal law makes that a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Our friends at the Institute for Justice are suing to remove that ban, thus expanding the availability of bone marrow donors. A video presentation on the lawsuit is available here.

The law in question in this particular case is The National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) of 1984 which treats compensating marrow donors as though it were black-market organ sales. Under NOTA, giving a college student a scholarship or a new homeowner a mortgage payment for donating marrow could land everyone—doctors, nurses, donors and patients—in federal prison for up to five years.

For anyone who has even the most tenuous grasp on economics, it only makes sense that providing incentives for marrow donors would expand the potential pool of donors by encouraging people who otherwise might not do so to donate. Simple economics.

According to IJ’s analysis of the issue:

NOTA’s criminal ban violates equal protection because it arbitrarily treats renewable bone marrow like nonrenewable solid organs instead of like other renewable or inexhaustible cells—such as blood—for which compensated donation is legal. That makes no sense because bone marrow, unlike organs such as kidneys, replenishes itself in just a few weeks after it is donated, leaving the donor whole once again. The ban also violates substantive due process because it irrationally interferes with the right to participate in safe, accepted, lifesaving, and otherwise legal medical treatment.

I applaud IJ’s efforts and sincerely hope they succeed in breaking through yet another wall of medical socialism.

I understand the difference between “climate” and weather, but in my lifetime (34 years) which includes 21 years in Cincinnati and 9 in the DC area before moving to Albuquerque, I can’t recall significant snow falling before Halloween. Well, it is coming down hard today in Albuquerque. See picture below and realize that it is still coming down…hard:

Liberal New Mexico Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino writes a regular column for the Albuquerque Alibi. While we often disagree on policy, he wrote a column about the Mayoral race recently, “We Were Mugged” that had me disagreeing with some of his analysis of why Republican RJ Berry won. I’m not sure if Ortiz y Pino just wanted to cast doubt on the process, if he’s pushing for changes, or if it was just a case of sour grapes, but Democrats were not “mugged.”

You can read my fact-based response here.

We at the Rio Grande Foundation have long been critics of the massive subsidies — 25 cents on the dollar — not to mention $15 million interest free loans. But imagine my surprise when I saw that one of the two most important roads in New Mexico (I-40) was shut down for 6.5 hours yesterday. In their story on the shutdown, the Journal said the road was shut down for 3 hours, but the article also states “The film shut down Interstate 40 Eastbound just outside of Laguna Pueblo from 7pm to 1:30am.” Do the math.

Anyway, it seems mighty inconsiderate for citizens to be inconvenienced in such a way, not to mention the cost in terms of time and actual monetary losses experienced by trucking companies and others who need to move people and goods from A to B. I’d bet this runs into the millions. Oh, and how about emergencies? My wife is pregnant and someone could have had a medical issue necessitating transport. Are we really going to shut down major transportation arteries for every Tom, Dick, and Harry that wants to shoot a movie?

Rather than shutting down heavily-used and economically-important Interstate highways, perhaps our Governor and his beloved film industry would consider combining boondoggles. From the looks of things, the RailRunner would be a good place to do some filming, especially if empty rail cars are needed.

No wonder the Rail Runner is running huge operating deficits. Personal observations (and photographs) back up the numbers showing lots of red ink. Read “The Red Ink Express,” our recent report on the Rail Runner’s shortfalls.

While not receiving as many front page headlines as it did this summer and fall, the health care debate continues to rage in Washington. Recently, for starters, numbers showing the modest profits of health insurers became widespread in the media. This is a good thing, because the more educated the American people become on health care, the more likely they are to be concerned about government as a panacea for health care.

Of course, there are still those out there for whom government is the cure-all. Terry Schleder and Emil Shaw recently wrote an article on health care on behalf of the New Mexico Alliance for Retired Americans. Judging from their article which can be accessed here, the organization (or at least the perspective of the authors) is well to the left of AARP and just to the right of Mao.

Their arguments are summarized as follows:
1) Medicare is great (ignore those trillion dollar unfunded liabilities);
2) Health care is a human right (regardless of who is forced to provide it to us);
3) “Quasi-privatized” Medicaid and “parasitic” Medicare Advantage programs are evil (this despite the fact that as government programs, both are far from resembling anything oriented towards the free market);

So, that’s the basic left-wing point of view here in New Mexico. Never mind the concept of unlimited wants and limited resources. The health care fairy (government) knows what is best and will provide everything for everyone. No tradeoffs required except getting rid of those nasty businesses involved in health care.

On that note, check out NTU’s recent letter to MoveOn demanding a “public option” for all areas of the economy, not just health care.

In case you haven’t already seen it, the Rio Grande Foundation has launched a new site called New Mexico Watchdog. While the Rio Grande Foundation’s investigative reporter Jim Scarantino handles much of the day-to-day work associated with the project, we encourage others to provide tips and help us uncover new areas of wasteful and corrupt government.

A few weeks ago, the Albuquerque Business Journal carried a story by Winthrop Quigley with a lot of hand-wringing from policymakers over how to keep New Mexico’s “best and brightest” at home. Of course, the real issue should not be keeping highly educated New Mexico’s at home, rather the issue, if there is one, should be continuing to attract the most educated and economically-productive workers to the state. It matters not where they come from. Unfortunately, policymakers are missing the forest for the trees, so I responded with the following letter which appeared on Monday:

Take a tip from Texas

The UNM researchers and elected officials have it exactly wrong when they say, as Sen. Tim Keller did, that “we can’t expect to build a rich, diverse, growing economy when 60 percent of our work force leaves our state.” (“N.M. faces struggle to keep best and brightest at home”)

The importance of a strong educational system cannot be understated and reforms to our K-12 system and university systems are desperately needed but, contrary to Keller’s assertion, the way to improve our work force is to create a stronger economy in New Mexico. After all, bright people, whether they are from New Mexico or Ohio or Beijing will move to the places that have the most favorable economic climates and thus the most jobs available to them.

Texas is a good example of this. According to the Department of Labor, in 2008 Texas created 59 percent of all the new jobs in the country and the state’s unemployment rate remains about 2 percent lower than the national average. It is no surprise that Texas lacks a personal income tax and ranks highly in most studies relating to business friendliness.

New Mexico, while it has cut its income tax from 8.2 percent to 4.9 percent in recent years, is not as business-friendly and our regulatory climate makes things difficult for entrepreneurs. Rather than spending money to bribe educated New Mexicans to stay home, legislators should abandon efforts to raise taxes to fill the budget deficit and focus on removing barriers to job creation in New Mexico. That is the way to keep the “best and brightest” at home.

Americans love their pets. Americans also love the environment and want to be green. While recycling and treading lightly on the land are not bad things, the hard-core environmentalists want to go much further than that. In fact, according to a new book called “Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living,” if Americans really want to be green, they need to get rid of Fido and Mr. Whiskers. Get your copy here.

According to the book, “The eco-pawprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year.” Cat owners are not off the hook either as “cats have an eco-footprint of 0.15ha – slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf.”

The good thing is that the truth about what environmentalists really want from us in terms of lifestyle changes is finally being made public. The bad news is that while cute and smart, I don’t think my Siberian Husky Jack will be very tasty:

Rarely does something appear in the paper that makes me smile, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the article “Responsible People Shouldn’t Pay for Bad Choices of Others,”, written by Albuquerque resident Marsha Thole, in the Albuquerque Journal on Sunday morning. The article was a simple but thorough rebuttal of a previous column that had urged expanded government programs to cover for a variety of personal mistakes.

Writes Thole “The role of government is to provide for the safety and security of its citizens. Somehow it got off track and now supports the lifestyles of the irresponsible. We who have saved are seeing that money go toward higher taxes to pay for jerks who think they are entitled to welfare because they made poor choices.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Later in her article, Thole delivers the coup de grace:

Contrary to what the writer says, the building blocks of a healthy life are not numerous social programs, but teenagers who stay in school, don’t skip classes, graduate, don’t take drugs, don’t get pregnant; people who save, who don’t gamble away their welfare checks and families who do not have more children than they can support on their income.

And no, we are not all in this boat together, as she suggests. Irresponsible people are on a leaking ship, expecting taxpayers to appear in lifeboats full of money to save them.

Thank you Ms. Thole for delivering the message!

When push comes to shove, property rights form the basis of any truly free society. And, while no single group of people in North America has suffered from a loss of property rights to the extent that Native Americans have, Rep. Martin Heinrich has introduced legislation that represents one small step forward in improving the ability of residents of Indian reservations to buy and sell property. The legislation is described here.

As our friends at the Property & Environment Research Council have pointed out, Native Americans often had strong views on property rights, but these traditions were ignored by the federal government in their creation of the reservation system which made the buying and selling of property extremely difficult. So, while we still have a long way to go before individual property rights are completely restored on tribal lands, Rep. Heinrich should be applauded for working to move things in the right direction.

Conservatives are often portrayed as “heartless” by the left and those in government. After all, it is our view that individuals who earn money, should by and large be able to keep it and that expansive government programs (even those supposedly dedicated to benefiting the poor) are ineffective and even immoral. The ongoing saga of Garduños and their difficulties in paying their taxes, however, illustrates another phenomenon — that of government bureaucrats acting in a heartless manner in a quest for money.

Now, I’m not familiar with all of the ins-and-outs of the Garduños case, but from the articles I’ve read, the restaurant experienced a significant case of theft by one of its employees and, given the harsh economic climate, paying taxes has been difficult if not impossible. So, New Mexico’s Tax and Revenue Department is threatening to close the restaurant down.

Garduños is now hanging by a thread. But the question must be asked, “As long as they are legitimately making efforts to pay their taxes, who benefits from shutting Garduños down?” In this tough economy, 450 workers will lose their jobs and the store locations will sit empty, with little prospect of generating tax revenue for the state in the near term. That seems like a “lose-lose” to me.

So, without full information, all I can say is that Rick Homans and Tax and Revenue should make every effort to work with Garduños to get this issue resolved. The state is having trouble paying its bills, one can only hope they’d have some sympathy for a business that finds itself in a tough position.

In case you missed it, the Rio Grande Foundation has been doing a great deal of work on the issue of New Mexico’s bloated government bureaucracy. This should be a prime area for cuts during the ongoing special session.

Thankfully, it seems like we have a fair amount of support for this position, at least among readers of the Albuquerque Journal. As letter writer Gary Hays wrote in support of our work:

BULL’S EYE for the Rio Grande Foundation’s revealing of what is really going on in Santa Fe regarding deficit spending.

While the Democrats are consistently blaming revenue shortfall, specifically the oil and gas industry, the real picture is an over-bloated and gluttonous government. It doesn’t take much observation to note that New Mexico’s government is tremendously over-sized for the population.

As the Rio Grande Foundation points out, the state is 51 percent above the national average of government worker for every private sector worker. What is especially troubling is that 60 percent of these government workers are employed somewhere in education in New Mexico. One would think that with the budget dollars committed to education and the vast number of employees receiving those funds, the graduation rate would be in the 80 percent range.

Reducing the government work force to the national standard in 2007 would have saved $2.7 billion, as the foundation reported. For those still thinking, that would have been a tremendous tax break for the New Mexican taxpayer.

But don’t get too excited about getting any money back. Gov. Bill Richardson isn’t about to turn his back on the government employee unions who financed his election and re-election. Besides, he is on his way out and has nothing to lose.

Have you noticed how government officials are quick to criticize and ridicule private sector management for mismanagement of a private company but turn a blind eye to their own mismanagement of taxpayer money? That kind of behavior should result in an immediate pink slip.

A second letter writer, James McClure, followed up on the theme, citing data from our recent work on the issue:

ARE GOVERNMENT workers entitled to keep their jobs while the rest of the economy is downsizing? The public employee unions want to raise our taxes rather than lay off a single government employee. Some politicians apparently agree that government workers are fireproof: Gov. Bill Richardson says he wants to avoid employee furloughs.

New Mexico’s government is bloated. A recent study showed that in 2007 (before the recession) state and local government employed 24.5 people for every 100 employed in the private sector, compared to the national average of 16.2 percent. The average state and local government job paid 9.2 percent higher than the average private sector job, more than in most other states. As private-sector employment continues to shrink, we taxpayers can no longer afford to support 60,000 state employees.

Please spare us the charade of threatening to lay off teachers. The state can make significant force cuts by doing what private companies have been doing for years: eliminating layers of management, reducing administrative and staff positions, outsourcing some services and redeploying employees where they’re most needed. The first step is a no-brainer: Immediately terminate all double-dipping employees who are drawing both a state pension and a state salary.

It’s time for Gov. Richardson to act like an executive and create a lean, efficient state government. It’s also time for legislators to remember that they represent taxpayers and not just government employees.

The Rio Grande Foundation has launched an investigative news site: http://newmexico.watchdog.org/ We’re still building the site and will do a “hard launch” soon. This is an early notice to our friends who visit this site. New Mexico Watchdog is associated with other Watchdog investigative reporting sites launched so far in Texas, West Virginia, Kansas and Nebraska. More and more Watchdog sites will be coming on line soon. I am busy learning how this baby works. Once I can steer the thing at full speed, expect a lot of action.

A few days ago I discussed President Obama’s “reverse Robin Hood” plan to send $250 checks to all seniors because they are not receiving a cost of living adjustment during the coming year.

I decided to write an op-ed on the issue and it has appeared in a few papers including the Clovis News Journal. Check it out here.

New Mexico’s Legislature is now engaged in a difficult special session. The crux of the issues they face is whether to raise taxes, cut government spending, or patch the hole with one time money in hopes that the economy turns around. At this point, it appears that the latter two routes are most likely, but there is no doubt that the tax hikers will continue to make their case throughout the session and through the special session in January.

Well, there is a state that has followed the advice of those who would continue to increase taxes in hard economic times. The model to avoid is Michigan and, to say the least, it is not one New Mexico should be following. As the article notes:

In 2007 Governor Jennifer Granholm signed the biggest tax increase in Michigan history, with most of the $1.4 billion coming from business. The personal income tax—which hits nonincorporated small businesses—was raised to 4.2% from 3.95%, and the Michigan business tax levied a surcharge of 22%. The tax money was dedicated to the likes of education, public works, job retraining and corporate subsidies. Ms. Granholm and her union allies called these “investments,” and the exercise was widely applauded as a prototype of “progressive” budgeting.

Some prototype. Every state has seen a big jump in joblessness since 2007, but with a 15.2% unemployment rate Michigan’s jobs picture is by far the worst. Some 750,000 private-sector payroll jobs have vanished since the start of the decade. For every family that has moved into Michigan since 2007, two have sold their homes and left.

Certainly, the death of the Big Three at the hands of managerial incompetence and union intransigence has played a big role, but policymakers could have capitalized on the arrival of the “transplant” automakers from Japan and other nations, but Michigan was not a friendly climate. Nonetheless, it is notable that Michigan’s top income tax rate is 4.2%, lower than New Mexico’s 4.9% rate which many on the left are trying very hard to raise to 8.2%. A cautionary tale indeed.

In case you were unable to attend our showings in Santa Fe and Las Cruces, you missed out. We had turnouts of 70+ people for each showing of Note Evil Just Wrong and the crowds were enthusiastic about the film and its message of not falling prey to the hysteria of Al Gore and others who are attempting to convince humans all over the world to live at much lower standards and sacrifice billions of human lives to solve the supposed “crisis” of global warming. Oh, and in case you are not a football fan, it snowed yesterday in the Boston area.

If you did see the movie, you know that Roy Innis of the Council on Racial Equality was among the film’s stars. He authored the following opinion piece, Climate assumptions from another planet, which decries the direction of global warming and energy policies currently being discussed in Washington.

Lastly, if you want to help us set up a showing of “Not Evil Just Wrong” in your community, please contact us at: info@riograndefoundation.org If you want your own copy of the film, you can order that here.

In case you haven’t heard, because the federal government’s cost of living indicators are showing slight deflation, there will be no cost of living increase for Social Security recipients next year. Of course, seniors vote in large numbers and are a politically-powerful voting bloc, so as soon as word came down that there would be no COLA, spineless members of Congress and President Obama started looking for ways to give seniors money anyway.

It appears that they have settled on $250 payments to the more than 50 million seniors on Social Security for no good reason. On top of all the other deficits including those we already face for Social Security, this is a $12.5 billion in debt that will be placed on the backs of America’s children and grandchildren.

The dirty little secret here is that senior citizens as a group actually are the wealthiest segment of society. Back in 2002, Indeed, the average net worth of seniors age 65-74 was $146,000, while the average net worth of Americans under age 35 was a mere $9,900. With the addition of the prescription drug benefit under President Bush, this disparity has only grown.

Seniors and the rest of Americans should unite in opposing this $250 transfer from the poor to the rich.

If you don’t normally read the Albuquerque Journal, you’re missing out. There’s my plug for dead-tree media. But in all seriousness, there have been some really interesting articles on the paper’s opinion pages recently and I’m not just saying that because one of ours ran yesterday. One recent opinion piece called “Schools Can’t Take More Cuts” argued that “Our schools have already felt the pain” of the state budget crisis.

The author goes on to talk about reductions in “unit value” for operational funding, but doesn’t really get specific until he says “this year’s budget reduced the state’s commitment to public education by $165 million and supplanted that amount with non-recurring federal stimulus money.” Now, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that this is a long-term problem, but it is obviously not a “cut” and the schools haven’t experienced any pain thus far.

The rest of the article talks about the potential for future cuts to education, a threat that is very real if the budget situation does not improve, but the fact is that our schools have really been spared any significant cuts to date. We’ll see what happens in the special session.

Another article worth reading was written by the “Santa Fe Alliance.” The idea behind the group seems to be “buy local,” but the article “Public Sector Spending Important to Economy,” is nothing but a justification for bigger government and bad economics. The short rebuttal to their entire article is that while government can perform some useful functions in our society, every dollar that government spends has to be taken from businesses or private citizens. Usually, there is a significant “dead weight loss” because businesses and citizens undertake less economically-worthy projects in order to avoid the tax man. Thus, $1 of taxes actually costs society $1.25 or something on that order (it depends on what is being taxed).

It is shocking that even in Santa Fe you’d have businesses on board with such a big-government, high-tax organization like the Santa Fe Alliance.