Japan has a single-payer health care system. While the Japanese people may be a healthy lot, they also must put up with some pretty absurd government rules and regulations. According to recent reports the Japanese government will now demand that people of that nation have their waists measured (the new state-prescribed limit for male waistlines is a strict 33 1/2 inches). If they are considered to be “too fat,” the government will impose financial penalties on companies and local governments (and presumably people) that fail to meet specific targets.
As health care expert Paul Hsieh points out, such freedom-destroying regulations are the result of government payment for health care. After all:

Once a government starts violating individual rights by creating a “universal” health care system, this inevitably leads to further infringements of individual rights. This is not unique to Japan.
For instance, universal health care in Great Britain has led to infringements on the right to free speech. In 2007, the British government banned television stations from playing classic 1950’s-era humorous advertisements encouraging people to have an egg for breakfast, on the grounds that “the ads do not encourage healthy eating”.
When a government has to pay for everyone’s health care, it will naturally demand a say in whether people are leading a “sufficiently healthy” lifestyle, as defined by the government.

If we allow the state of New Mexico or the federal government to control our health care, we will inevitably face similar intrusions on individual liberty. Bill Richardson of all people should be sensitive to this issue.

Bad ideas never die. Thus, Albuquerque taxpayers were greeted with the headline “Downtown Arena Revisited,” this morning. While the article explains much of the story, you can only read it if you subscribe to the Journal. Thankfully, the story was covered elsewhere including KOB TV.
Certainly I knew that even though I’d debunked the need for a taxpayer-financed arena in Albuquerque a year and a half ago, Council will tonight vote on whether to spend $700,000 taxpayer dollars to study the issue. Obviously, since the arena and hotel complex are projected to cost at least $330,000, an expenditure of “only” $700,000 is a relative bargain. But we need to nip this rip-off in the bud.
The existing arena in Rio Rancho is struggling and, while that is far away from downtown, it certainly does not bode well for a competing arena in Albuquerque. Tingley Coliseum is also experiencing problems. Another arena is simply not necessary. Worse, the plan is to “double-down” a possible arena mistake by forcing taxpayer to subsidize hotel construction downtown. Why should taxpayers subsidize another hotel downtown when a vast majority of the hotels in this city (if not all) receive no such support?
Downtown is not just surviving; it is thriving. If a private entity wishes to build an arena or hotel anywhere in the city, Council should work with them, but demanding taxpayer support for this project is simply wrong and a waste of money.

According to a story in this week’s Albuquerque Alibi, UNM’s Health Sciences Center which includes UNM Hospital and the medical school, has adopted new restrictions to eliminate drug advertising in the University’s medical buildings. While those who see drug companies as evil subversives working to snooker doctors and their patients into purchasing their latest and greatest drug, it would seem that this is yet another effort by a University to stifle free speech.
After all, who is going to tell doctors what new drugs and treatment possibilities are out there? Are they supposed to hunt these treatments down on the internet? How about patients? Are drug companies’ advertisements (also under attack by those who dislike the pharmaceuticals industry) now the only way they can find out about new treatments?
The fact is that if we had a health care system that functioned more like a market with consumers able to price various options (using a consumer-directed mechanism like an HSA) rather than being shielded from them by health insurance or government programs, the so-called “problem” with drug advertising would largely disappear. After all, if it is patients who decide whether to use a generic drug or the latest name brand drug, they should be able to use it since they are paying for it. In fact, opponents of drug advertising justify their position due to the higher cost associated with name-brand drugs.

By and large, left-wing Democrats dislike privatization. After all, nothing illustrates the superiority of free markets and limited government like comparing the ability of free markets and the government to provide particular services. Government is so incompetent, however, that sometimes even those who are philosophically opposed to letting the free market work are forced to do so.
Consider the case of the US Senate’s dining services. According to the Washington Post, “the U.S. Senate’s network of restaurants has lost staggering amounts of money — more than $18 million since 1993…Come lunchtime, many Senate staffers trudge across the Capitol and down into the basement cafeteria on the House side,” (a 15 minute walk, yet, “House staffers almost never cross the Capitol to eat in the Senate cafeterias.” (The House cafeterias have been privatized for many years)
Because the situation had gotten so bad, the Senate recently voted to let a private company manage its food services. While a majority of both parties supported the decision (albeit quietly), some on the hard left dissented. In typical left-wing fashion, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), speaking for the group of senators who opposed privatizing the restaurants, said that “you cannot stand on the Senate floor and condemn the privatization of workers, and then turn around and privatize the workers here in the Senate and leave them out on their own.”
Jonah Goldberg, writing in National Review Online, who will be speaking at Rio Grande Foundation events in Albuquerque and Santa Fe on September 19, covered the story recently as well.

With oil prices over $4 a gallon and Congress doing nothing except make it more difficult to access the resources we need to keep our society moving forward, the average motorist may be frustrated. While ranting and raving about the oil industry and its supposed “windfall profits” is the preferred reaction of the political left, when compared to other major industries, the profits associated with the industry are actually low.
Currently, there is an online petition being circulated that any American can sign to express their support for increased oil and gas drilling. While increasing oil and gas supplies may take some time, we don’t want to be paying $10 for a gallon of gas in ten years. We can avoid that problem by accessing energy sources here at home. Nowhere is that more true than here in New Mexico where the NIMBY impulse is especially strong.

Americans are increasingly being asked to decide whether or not to allow or disallow resources to be accessed on both public and private lands. Unfortunately, the attitude that somehow certain people are “above” having resource exploited on or near their lands has become more prevalent in recent years and is to a large extent responsible for today’s rising commodity prices. Nowhere are these battles and this anti-resource attitude more prevalent than here in New Mexico.
As Marita Noon of the Coalition for Responsible Energy reports, yet another confrontation over resource usages will take place this weekend at a public meeting in Grants over whether all of Mt Taylor and many surrounding areas should be declared “off limits” to the public.
More background information on the battle over Mt. Taylor is available on the website of the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division. A big crowd is expected, so if you plan to go due to the highly-charged nature of the issue, so show up early!

During times of strong economic growth, the politics of the minimum wage seem to tilt in the direction of “higher and faster.” After all, when unemployment is at historical lows and job growth is strong, we all feel like wages should be rising.
Now, as the economy weakens, we see the proverbial “chickens” of artificially-mandated wages coming home to roost. This is not a theoretical proposition. My 17 year old cousin who worked for an above-minimum-wage salary last summer, has been unable to find a job this summer. From the looks of recent news stories, he is not alone.
Investors Business Daily recently editorialized of the impact of the recent minimum wage increase on teenage unemployment and how these policies have helped spur teen joblessness to its highest level in 60 years. Rather than enacting additional government programs to deal with the “crisis,” Congress and the New Mexico Legislature need to repeal recently-passed (and economically-harmful) minimum wage hikes.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, health care mandates are a big problem with increasing health care costs. Rarely is this issue discussed in the media, but George Will recently brought up the point with Stephen Colbert on health care and mandates (click here and fast-forward 2/3rds of the way through).
According to data compiled by the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, New Mexico has the 9th-highest mandate total (51) in the nation. Obviously, forcing people to buy a “premium” health insurance product if they are to buy any insurance at all is a big factor in giving the state the 2nd-highest-in-the-nation uninsured rate.

Housing in Santa Fe could get even more expensive if voters in the City approve a new real estate transfer tax. With a majority of Councilors having expressed support for the plan, a special election Aug. 19 to decide the matter is inevitable.
The plan which would levy a 1 percent fee on homes that sell for more than $650,000 would generate about $1.8 million each year for the city to help the city subsidize housing for police officers, firefighters, nurses, teachers and other essential workers. While these workers are by and large a sympathetic group, the idea of further taxing certain real estate in order to subsidize the cost of owning a home for other people is rather absurd.
Rather than forcing real estate prices up in order to drive them down, Santa Feans should repeal some of the absurd regulations (toilets, zoning/housing restrictions, and property tax hikes that have driven costs higher and higher.
Rather than raising taxes, Santa Fe’s political leadership and voters should consider reducing some of the more costly restrictions on housing in Santa Fe. This will certainly be a point of discussion leading up to the August 19 election.

In case you missed the news, “cap and trade” legislation ostensibly to fight global warming, died in the US Senate late this week. Senator Domenici actively opposed the legislation (which would have resulted in a massive new hidden tax) and made an eloquent statement to that effect on the Senate floor.
In the meantime, a supposed “Republican” argued in the Albuquerque Journal that Sen. Bingaman should “stop trying to derail or weaken the climate bill.”
Robert Samuelson, also in the Journal, argued that “cap and trade” would:

Act as a tax, but it’s not described as a tax. It would regulate economic activity, but it’s promoted as a “free market” mechanism. Finally, it would trigger a tidal wave of influence-peddling, as lobbyists scrambled to exploit the system for different industries and localities. This would undermine whatever abstract advantages the system has.

As Samuelson points out, “cap and trade” is nothing but a tax. Worse, it lacks the simplicity and transparency of a tax on carbon (not that such a tax would be good policy) and opens the door to lobbying and political meddling. “Think of today’s farm programs — and multiply by 10,” argues Samuelson.
Unfortunately, both a prospective President McCain or President Obama would likely sign such legislation which would undermine New Mexico’s energy-based economy immediately and the entire US economy over time. Americans need to be educated about the very real problems of “cap and trade.”

Barack Obama’s now-former minister has made news recently for his inflammatory comments on a wide-variety of topics. While this has been a problem for Obama in his campaign for the presidency, as Fox News reports, the Chicago church, Trinity United Church of Christ, receives federal funding for a wide variety of programs and has done so for 15 years.
While many in the media have questioned remarks by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, it is hard to believe that the federal funding issue has not made bigger waves. After all, it is one thing to make inflammatory statements in a privately-funded church, but it is quite another thing for the rest of us taxpayers to subsidize childrens’ programs that are most likely teaching children many of the same ideas espoused by Wright and his cronies.
Since the programs have been subsidized for 15 years, it is hard to pin the blame for this on President Bush, but I wonder if this is the kind of program the President envisioned when he created his Faith-Based Initiatives. Surely, subsidizing these programs is not an appropriate role for the federal government (or any government for that matter).

I wrote an article recently in the Albuquerque Journal about some important health care reforms taking place in Georgia. I love it when people respond to articles written by the Foundation because it shows we are having an impact and making people think.
Unfortunately, the response to my article came from Dan Davis of Los Lunas, a regular, left-wing letter-writer to the Journal. His response focuses on two points: 1) Georgia’s law was passed by a Republican Legislature and signed by a Republican Governor 2) The American Cancer Society worries that high-deductible health plans make preventative treatment cost-prohibitive.
My response to Davis is two-fold: whether the law was passed by Republicans or Democrats is irrelevant. Political leaders of all stripes must be concerned with the state of American health care. Moving to a system under which costs are directly related to benefits is the only proven way to improve quality and cut costs simultaneously. Regarding the concerns expressed by the Cancer Society, consumer-driven health care plans have been on the cutting edge of efforts to improve patient quality. After all, it is much easier to convince the average person of the importance of their own health if you can attach dollar signs to healthier lifestyles.
Davis is a hard-core lefty and I don’t expect to convince him, but hopefully other readers cut through his rhetoric.

This article appeared recently (May 28) in the Albuquerque Journal. The author’s basic point is that Native Americans were promised health care paid for by the federal government and that the government has fallen short of its obligations. Of course, more money is essential (in the author’s mind) to rectify this injustice.
This promise of a “right” to health care is strikingly similar to politicians’ promise to “universal” health care and other plans to dramatically alter America’s health care system. While more money may indeed be necessary to “fully” fund the Indian Health Care system, history has shown that government-run health services are very expensive and thus, by their nature, are ultimately “underfunded.”
While the Indians undoubtedly had little choice in the wording of the “treaties” they signed with the US Government, their costly and ultimately sad experience with “free” health care should give so-called progressives pause when promoting the idea as a panacea for current problems.

Recently, I discussed our new study on eliminating New Mexico’s personal income tax with Alan Riehl on Las Cruces radio station KSNM 570AM. You can listen to the show here.
If you’d rather read a short, 700 or so word article about eliminating the personal income tax, you can read that here.

A few weeks ago I blogged about the importance of candidate surveys from Project Vote Smart. With the primary election on Tuesday, the Rio Grande Foundation and several other New Mexico-based non-profits surveyed candidates on several issues of interest to each group.
The results of the House Candidate surveys can be found here and the Senate surveys can be found here. The questions that we chose were number 3 and number 9, but each of the questions is relevant in its own way to voters hoping to make an informed decision. If candidates in your area chose not to fill their survey out, make sure to tell them that voters need to make an informed decision and they can only do so if candidates are willing to take firm positions on the issues.

A few weeks ago, I blogged on this page about the reforms Georgia has recently made to health care policies within its borders. Today, I wrote about these changes and urged New Mexico policymakers to follow suit, in the Business Journal section of the Albuquerque Journal. Check out the article here (no subscription required).

I have often heard that one of the keys to improving our failing education system (both here in New Mexico and nationwide) is to get business leaders and the business community more involved in education. While forcing schools to adhere to the principles that businesses must adhere to in a competitive economy is the centerpiece of the Rio Grande Foundation’s education reform agenda, I’ve long been skeptical that businesspeople taken as a whole have any particular insight into making the fundamental reforms necessary to improve American education.
That reality was made clear to me this morning as I sat through a presentation by a manager of Intel Corporation’s education experts. While he had a lot of great information on how to help bring technology to the schools, his company’s solutions are designed to work exclusively within the context of the current government school monopoly. Like Bill Gates’ efforts to improve K-12 education by throwing money at government-run schools, Intel’s efforts are destined to fail to have any long-standing or widespread impact.
You’d think that corporate guys would figure it out. The key to their success is the fact that they have to compete to make a better product or some other company will take their market share and they’ll lose money. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that many business types actually understand how the market system actually works. Thus, when it comes to reforming something like education, they don’t see the big-picture problems and incentives as necessary to their success.
This is the stuff of college theses and grand intellectual inquiries, but what we ultimately need is education reform that demands schools compete as if they were the next Intel or Microsoft. After all, even a flawed Vista operating system is forced to compete with Apple. Our schools face no real competition.

The Navajo Nation is planning on building a coal-fired power plant near Burnham, NM. It applied for an air permit from the Environmental Protection Agency in early 2004, but still hasn’t received permission to begin construction. The Diné Power Authority, a Navajo enterprise, filed a lawsuit against the EPA on March 18 attempting to force the federal agency to make a decision on the permit, according to the Albuquerque Journal (Navajo Enterprise Sues EPA Over Proposed Power Plant, Mar. 19, 2008). “The lawsuit claims the tribe is losing $5 million in… revenue for every month the permit is delayed.”
“The EPA says it was initially delayed by climate-modeling uncertainties… and then by nearly 1,000 mostly negative comments posted on the agency’s Web site,” according to the Santa Fe New Mexican (‘We want the smoke to stop’, May 21, 2008). The Feds say they have to respond to every comment before issuing a permit.
With improved emissions technology, the new Desert Rock Energy Facility will be able to crank out ¾ of the electricity with only 1/5 of the emissions currently being produced by the Four Corners Power Plant in Fruitland, NM (The New Mexican). On top of that, the operators of the new facility are “exploring options that may prepare the project to capture and sequester CO2 emissions from the plant in the future when technology exists that makes this process technically and economically feasible.”
On March 19, New Mexico Environment Secretary Ron Curry, who has a hand in delaying the permit along with the EPA, issued a statement that said, “We respect the sovereignty of the Navajo Nation and the rights of tribal governments to determine their economic futures and to pursue positive change within their communities. However, the responsibility of taking strong action to combat global climate change is one we must all share.”
Curry is operating in quite a paradox. If the government recognizes the sovereignty of the Navajo Nation, then why is it being prohibited from starting a project that will “bring $52 million a year in revenues to the tribal government and provide up to 400 jobs on a reservation where unemployment hovers around 50 percent” (The New Mexican)?
This anti-development mentality on the part of outsiders, mostly wealthy outsiders, was the point of the Rio Grande Foundation’s recent showings of the film Mine Your Own Business. In fact, the film drew a crowd of nearly 100 to Farmington for a showing of the film.

Last week, the Rio Grande Foundation and CARE (the Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy) held a series of showings of the film Mine Your Own Business in Albuquerque, Farmington, and Roswell. As this article from the Farmington Daily Times discusses, the film drew a crowd (80 people) in Farmington. This included some hostile opponents from San Juan Citizens Alliance and the Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment.
While we certainly wish that more people shared our belief that responsible mining and access to dependable energy sources are compatible with and integral to our modern way of life, increasing numbers of environmentalists are anti-progress. Our hope is, by showing this film, to expose New Mexicans to the dark side of the environmental movement and point out that we should not blindly attribute altruistic motives to those who say “save the earth.” After all, it was Jacques Cousteau who once said, “In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 per day.”

In 2006, Santa Fe County voters agreed to a tax increase to fund improved emergency medical services to outlying communities around the city of Santa Fe and throughout the county, according to Julie Ann Grimm of The Santa Fe New Mexican (911 Stretched Thin, May 20, 2008). So far, $6 million has been levied from county taxpayers and given to the county government for this purpose, but the county’s emergency needs still haven’t been met.
The county’s been having a problem with recruiting and retaining enough paramedics. If a county resident calls 911 because of a heart attack, there may not be enough county paramedics to respond. Odds are the city of Santa Fe, which has its own fire department and adequately staffed emergency response team, will have to send its own paramedic team to far off county lands, leaving the city more vulnerable to a shortage. The city and county medical employees try to work together to meet the needs of citizens.
Unfortunately, the city and county governments don’t cooperate in the same way. Santa Fe city residents (who are Santa Fe county residents as well) are helping to pay for services outside of the city, but their city government is actually contributing to the county shortage by offering more competitive wages to paramedics, leaving the county fire departments in need.
While this competition drives paramedic wages up, it almost seems that the County and City should combine rescue efforts so services do not overlay. Even better, the City and County would likely save even more up to 2/3rds of the money it spends now by privatizing some emergency medical services.

Ned Farquhar, a regular columnist for the Albuquerque Journal, is one of my favorite punching bags. His stances on most issues are predictably left-wing and rely on the coercive power of big-government.
A recent column of his, “Four Options with More Mileage than ANWR,” remains stuck in my crawl. In his article, Farquhar expresses his opposition to drilling in ANWR on the grounds that the area would produce “only” a million barrels a day and “only” reduce our reliance on foreign oil from 65 percent to 60 percent. Considering that the US uses approximately 20 million barrels daily, I’d say that it is well-worth drilling on 20,000 acres of frozen tundra (half the size of the District of Columbia) in a wildlife refuge the size of South Carolina.
Obviously, drilling in ANWR alone is not the answer to all our energy needs and “energy independence” is not a reasonable or relevant goal, but we are reliant on oil (not addicted as Farquhar would assert) and we have to drill for it somewhere.
But, Farquhar believes otherwise. His preference is for (1) electric cars which are not on the market yet (and rely on some other energy source like nuclear) and hybrids which still use gasoline. Clearly, this is at best a partial option for the future. (2) Farquhar predictably pushes renewables which he admits generate less than 2 percent of our energy. He claims, apparently using a magic wand, that we can up that to 25 percent by 2020. (3) Use bio-fuels. Again, it sounds nice on paper, but can we really ramp up production to necessary levels? (4) More efficient vehicles (using government mandates). Again, no details are necessary and individual preferences are ignored.
The ironic thing is that with oil at $130/barrel, the market, not government bureaucrats, is the most powerful force acting on behalf of efficiency. Demand for fuel efficient cars and hybrids has skyrocketed. Now, most Americans are unhappy with current fuel prices, but if Farquhar and his friends in the environmental movement have their way, fuel prices will go up and freedom will drop. It couldn’t be any simpler than that.

When discussing the federal budget, the size of the numbers being dealt with and their different meanings and calculations becomes overwhelming and even irrelevant. The federal deficit is an example of this. While President Bush and federal bureaucrats like to cite our supposedly reduced deficit as a result of their successful policies, when future obligations are accounted for, the picture is much worse. In fact, according to a recent article in the USA Today, “the federal government’s long-term financial obligations grew by $2.5 trillion last year, a reflection of the mushrooming cost of Medicare and Social Security benefits.”
As the article goes on to explain:

Taxpayers are on the hook for a record $57.3 trillion in federal liabilities to cover the lifetime benefits of everyone eligible for Medicare, Social Security and other government programs, a USA TODAY analysis found. That’s nearly $500,000 per household.
When obligations of state and local governments are added, the total rises to $61.7 trillion, or $531,472 per household. That is more than four times what Americans owe in personal debt such as mortgages.
The $2.5 trillion in federal liabilities dwarfs the $162 billion the government officially announced as last year’s deficit, down from $248 billion a year earlier.

Clearly, entitlement reform should be a top priority of politicians in both parties, but it doesn’t look like any of the current crop are making it a top priority…instead, it seems that our children will be inheriting our debts.

Yesterday’s Albuquerque Journal featured an article titled APS Will Cover $20M Funding Hit. Apparently, the state did an audit in 2007 that found that the Albuquerque Public Schools district was over-reporting teacher experience and special education staff. The state determined that it had given APS $20 million too much because of these errors.
Part of the problem was that from at least 1991 to 2001, APS was calculating teacher training and experience against state rules. APS’ criteria for “teacher training” were more lax than the state rules allowed. Even after the state warned APS in 1991 and forgave the errors, the district continued to miscalculate for another decade.
APS also used a “computer program that accidentally doubled its number of special education staff.” Who knows how much that computer program cost the city? My little cousin could’ve designed a program that can count numbers. He probably would have done it for free too.
APS will not have $20 million of state money in ‘08-’09 that it’s used to receiving. APS says it can “cover the loss with its cash reserves next year.” But, unless APS suddenly hires teachers that actually meet its over-reported levels of training and experience, and unless it doubles the size of its special education staff, it will be $20 million ‘short’ every year.
The district’s chief business officer, Gina Hickman, said that we were giving APS $13 million too much for teacher training and experience, and $7 million too much for special education staff. I can understand that APS may have different guidelines for calculating teacher training and experience than the state does. I would assume APS was giving this $13 million to teachers with more training and experience. But, if the faulty computer program was doubling the numbers of special education staff, what was APS spending our $7 million on?

In case you are not aware, the Rio Grande Foundation and the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE) are hosting free film events around the New Mexico. We are showing the film Mine Your Own Business in an effort to expose the real agenda of all-too-many in the environmental movement.
The Farmington Daily-Times had an excellent article in which both Paul Driessen, who is speaking after each of the film showings, and I were interviewed about the film and its message. See you in Albuquerque this Tuesday, Roswell on Wednesday, and in Farmington on Thursday.