It turns out that Albuquerque got $8.1 million of your tax money from the state to “plan” the “modern” streetcar. A “consultant” HDR was “hired” without competition. That consultant also “planned” the train to nowhere.
What happened to our $8.1 million?
HT: Terry Storch

Suddenly the councilors and mayor are sounding fiscally responsible:

Mayor Martin Chávez and City Council President Martin Heinrich said Saturday they will seek to repeal tax changes that would have financed a streetcar project.
In separate interviews with the Journal, Chávez and Heinrich said they are backing away from the streetcar project for the time being.
Each called for a comprehensive study of local transportation needs before the city decides whether to develop a streetcar system.
Chávez said it “makes no sense” to keep the tax changes in place when there is no consensus on the City Council about proceeding with streetcars.

Why couldn’t we have trusted them in the first place?

Check out Paul’s article today in NRO:

Fueled by oil and gas revenues that have been flowing into government coffers at a record pace, New Mexico has joined the nationwide rush to embrace expensive rail projects, with little regard for cost and even less consideration for utility.

And:

Unfortunately, Rail Runner is just one of New Mexico’s rail boondoggles. Albuquerque’s city council recently adopted a plan that would build a $270 million “modern streetcar” system, with up to $135 million of that money being funneled into one small part of the city from all over the state.
Although Richardson has not formally committed state funding to the scheme, as a close ally of Albuquerque mayor Martin Chavez, he has committed to “being helpful in contributing to the project.” With Richardson, “help” usually comes in the form of a tall stack of taxpayer dollars.

Read the whole thing.

Alan Meltzer has written a fine tribute to Milton Friedman. He documents how the country and world have changed due to Friedman’s courage and steadfastness in challenging the climate of opinion of the 1930’s and 1940’s:

Friedman’s four major successes were ending the military draft, floating the dollar and other currencies, removing interest-rate ceilings on bank deposits, and auctioning government debt. Each of these examples shows that a market solution is rarely the first choice of governments. Free-market solutions have a greater chance of success if officials gradually become familiar with the proposal and come to believe it can work.

And how it will continue to change:

In Free to Choose the Friedmans proposed to phase out Old Age and Survivors’ Insurance. They would honor existing obligations, repeal the payroll tax, and rely on voluntary decisions about savings and pensions. The United States has so far rejected every move to permit choice in the government pension program, but other countries have changed their programs in the direction the Friedmans advocated: Chile is a well-known example. Even Russia now relies heavily on private decisions after providing a public minimum. As the present generation of young workers moves toward retirement and recognizes the very low return they will receive on their public pensions, pressure for change will likely increase.
Milton devoted a large part of his later years to urging education vouchers that would permit students or their parents to choose a preferred school. Despite strong opposition–especially from teachers unions–school choice has expanded. The charter-school movement is a widely adopted example of choice. It is not the Friedmans’ proposal, but it is a move in their direction.
Welfare reform has emphasized work and choice in place of welfare. The present system is not what the Friedmans proposed. They preferred a negative income tax–a cash payment to the poor that would replace all other programs. The closest we have come is the earned income tax credit that supplements incomes for the working poor. Welfare reform and the earned income tax credit reflect the Friedmans’ influence and their emphasis on personal incentives and individual choice in place of bureaucratic regulation.

Check it out.

I’ve never been very good at math so help me out on this one. The Rail Runner’s website says that its 200,000 rider was celebrated on October 13. The Rail Runner has run on weekdays since July 14 (except for Labor day). That means it took 64 days of train rides before the 200 thousandth rider was celebrated (by counting all the weekdays from July 14 until October 13). Are you with me so far?
This article in the Albuquerque Journal quotes Lawrence Rael as saying that during the 3 and one-half month free trial period the Rail Runner was averaging 1500 riders per day. By counting all the weekdays until November 1 (when the free rides ended), we get 75 weekdays of free rides. But if I multiply the number of days (75) by Raels 1500 riders per day average I only get 112,500 riders during the entire free ride period. So here’s the puzzle: how can the Rail Runner celebrate it 200,000th rider on October 13 when only 112,500 riders had taken the train through October 31?
Here’s another one for extra credit: How can the Rail Runner be averaging only 1500 riders per day during the free ride period when 200,000 riders had taken the train by October 13? By my calculation that is 3,125 riders per day (200,000 divided by 64 days). Where have I gone wrong?
I wonder if this math puzzle arises from a later statement by Rael that ridership is now down to 800 to 1200 riders per day. It doesn’t look so bad if ridership goes from 15 hundred down to 8 to 12 hunderd per day. But how does it feel to explain a decrease that goes from over 3,100 down to 8 to 12 hundred per day? Doesn’t that look like ridership is down some 62 to 74 percent!? Inquiring minds want to know.

Thanks to Silvio Dell’Angela for rallying the public in opposition to the streetcar nonsense.

Larry Reed is thankful for think tanks. RGF is thankful for Larry Reed.
Don’t overlook this priceless insight about the first Thanksgiving.

Bob Parmelee of Santa Fe describes in gory detail why voters throughout New Mexico — not just in Albuquerque — should be worried about the budgetary impact of the Albuquerque trolley system now moving through City Council. He also has a few kind words for the work of the Rio Grande Foundation.

Here are the latest probablilites from tradesport.com (notice who does not make the list????):

Update 11/21/06: Thanks to a couple of observant readers who noticed that “500 adult residents” of ABQ should read “500k adult residents.” I have changed “500” to “half-million” for clarity. Thanks for the help.
My remarks at yesterday’s streetcar rally:
Last Wednesday the mayor’s spokesman wrote an opinion piece arguing for the streetcar initiative. The piece was an exercise in extreme sophistry (I thought perhaps it was satire when I first read it). That being so, I want to make three main points in rebuttal:
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Streetcar Arithmetic in Wealth Transfer Terms
There is a blatant and unfair wealth transfer being disguised by the feel-good rhetoric of the mayor and streetcar proponents. The fiscal facts are being hidden from us. My conservative guesstimate of the total cost of this boondoggle will be around $500 million (including operation and maintenance over the years). Albuquerque has roughly a half-million adult residents. Divide $500 million by a half-million adult residents and you get an average up front cost of at least $1,000 per adult. That is the essence of the fiscal fraud. Who will benefit from this largess? Answer: the few businesses and government entities along Central Ave.
Why doesn’t the mayor make this wealth transfer clear to all? Suppose the mayor said “enough of this nonsense; we’ll just take $1,000 from each adult in ABQ, transfer half a billion dollars in hard cash to downtown and Nob Hill entities and let them choose how to spend it.” Do you really think the recipients would choose to give it to Greg Payne for a streetcar boondoggle? Absolutely not! So, here we are facing an absurd transfer of at least half a billion dollars to special interests who will not benefit by nearly that much. Similar comments apply to the mayor’s comparison of the streetcar to the “wildly successful roadrunner.” The Railrunner is a taxpayer rip-off. How long has it been since the mayor observed ridership on the Railrunner? Does he know what it is costing us? Wake up, Mr. Mayor, the people won’t be fooled this time.
Campaign Promise
The Mayor makes much of his campaign promise to give us a streetcar. But did he also not promise to be fiscally responsible? For example, I don’t recall him promising to raise our taxes by a lot to transfer wealth to a few. BTW, the mayor says he has “given us lots of roads.” He fails to mention, however, that it is actually you who have provided our new roads via your hard earned tax dollars. We could only hope that our generous-sounding mayor would personally give us lots of new roads, thereby saving us the expense.
Public Comment
In an effort to deflect criticism the mayor says we (the public) have had plenty of opportunity to comment. But did the mayor go to various neighborhood associations and explain the fiscal realities of the streetcar? Most citizens of our city just want to go about our daily business in the hope that our representatives are actually representing us. But they are not representing us; they are representing the special interests in downtown and Nob Hill while being quite vague about the fiscal impact on the rest of us. Unfortunately, this is not unusual in political process. A characteristic of representative democracy is the relative ease of giving concentrated benefits to a few when the costs are spread among many and thereby often unnoticed.
There is a certain big-government arrogance at play here, too: the mayor thinks he can make decisions about your life better than you can. The mayor seems to think that he knows what is best for us – just trust him. I don’t think that is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they established our “representative democracy.”
BTW, thanks to RGF president Paul Gessing for tracking down some fiscal realities of this boondoggle; and thanks to Jim Ludwick of the ABQ Journal for keeping us informed of the political maneuvering and statements as this proposal makes its way to the Council.

Check out Arnold Kling’s summary of Friedman’s arguments for freedom. This is the best summary by far that I have seen since Friedman’s passing. This is the superb kind of writing that I have come to expect from Kling.

Larry Summers has a great tribute to Milton Friedman in today’s NY Times. Check it out.

Following up yesterdays article, the NY Times again features Larry Reed with emphasis on how free markets will free Africa from poverty.
Once again the reporter’s overuse of the adjective “conservative” shows that he does not really understand what economic freedom is all about. Otherwise, though, an excellent article.

If you have followed New Mexico politics and the Rio Grande Foundation at all over the past year, you are probably aware of the RailRunner commuter rail train and the streetcar system that is now being fast-tracked through City Council by Mayor Chavez.
I attended a public hearing on the RailRunner in Santa Fe on Thursday, the 16th. While at least 100 people were in attendance — many of them skeptical of the RailRunner in the first place — the only real discussion focused on which of two routes should be used to lay track to downtown Santa Fe. Unfortunately, no one has any numbers on whether the system as it operates now is a success or failure. While backers of the project and the streetcar seem to think that the RailRunner’s success is self-evident, they give no data to support their claims.
The fact is that since it opened to great applause from the media and politicians, ridership on the Rail Runner is down significantly. I took a ride on it a few months ago and noted the drop in ridership and I took another ride on it on Friday, November 17. While 60 or so people were on the 7:24am train downtown, 10 or less were on the 7:35am train from downtown to Bernalillo. Even on the trip downtown there was plenty of room to spread out as each car is designed to hold 200 passengers.
Of course, the only way to really tell what is happending would be for MRCOG to release detailed ridership statistics and revenue information, but that hasn’t happened yet. Before we spend $270 million taxpayer dollars to build another rail project, shouldn’t we at least find out if the first one is achieving its goals?

Bruce Bartlett summarizes how Milton and Rose Friedman influenced my life. I am so grateful to them. Free to Choose (coauthored with Rose) should be read by all.

Friedman’s most influential publication was the slender volume, Capitalism and Freedom, based on lectures given in 1956 but not published until 1962. In that book, he put forward one of the most powerful cases for the free market ever written. Its greatest virtues were the clarity and vigor of Friedman’s exposition. It had enormous impact in making free market economics respectable once again, after being falsely blamed for the Great Depression. In his Monetary History of the United States, Friedman put principal blame for that disaster on the Federal Reserve, which allowed the money stock to shrink by one third, bringing on a massive deflation.
In 1976, Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and stabilization policy. The following year, Friedman retired from active teaching and took up residence at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Although retired, he continued working until the very end. In 1980, Friedman probably achieved his greatest renown with the best-selling book and PBS television series, “Free To Choose,” which explained to average people why free markets work best.
A key reason for Friedman’s enormous output and influence is that he was blessed with a gifted partner, his wife Rose. A distinguished economist in her own right, she contributed heavily to her husband’s thinking, most evident in their co-written memoir, Two Lucky People, published in 1998.

Good news this morning. Freedom is featured in the NY Times.

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. — Lawrence W. Reed is one of those people with so much passion for an unusual line of work that he invented a new occupation, and it has helped shape the conservative movement from here to the Himalayas.

My only objection to the article is their overuse of the adjective “conservative.” We are not “conservative,” we are market liberals. No nanny-state conservatism for this think tank.
Update: BTW, the NY Times misunderstands the basics of economic freedom, to wit: their deciscion to place article about Milton Friedman’s death in the business section. Friedman specifically, and our think tank movement generally, tries to explain human interaction — how the world works. We are not for or against busness; we assess both sides of a transaction whether it be in a free market or in a “political” market.

I am sad to say that my hero Milton Friedman died today. Here is my favorite quote from Capitalism and Freedom. It pretty much sums up the outlook of our Foundation.

…conditions have changed. We now have several decades of experience with government intervention. It is no longer necessary to compare the market as it actually operates and government intervention as it ideally might operate. We can compare the actual to the actual. If we do so, it is clear that the difference between the actual operation of the market and its ideal operation – great though it undoubtedly is – is as nothing compared to the difference between the actual effects of government intervention and their intended effects.

BTW, if you did not guess who Fenwick was, now you know.

Considering the “thumpin’” received by Republicans in the recent elections, it is mind-boggling that the lame duck group that should have learned its lesson is instead continuing to earmark and spend its way to electoral oblivion.
According to Brian Reidl of the Heritage Foundation, this year’s final 11 appropriations bills for fiscal year 2007, which will be voted on during the current “lame-duck” session, “contain an estimated 10,000 pork projects.”
Among the more ridiculous projects is: $150,000 to study shellfish genetics at Oregon State University, $250,000 for Carnegie Hall in New York City, $232,000 for the National Wild Turkey Federation. Perhaps our elected officials should lay off the Wild Turkey and pork?

Given the incredible number of tax breaks given to New Mexico’s film industry, one might be led to believe that the industry is completely benign and obviusly beneficial regardless of whether the policies that bring the industry here in the first place are economically sound. Unfortunately (for film backers at least), a recent UCLA study of the film industry in Los Angeles found the industry to be the single most polluting industry outside of the petroleum industry in the five-county region that forms L.A.
With Governor Richardson dedicating himself and millions of our tax dollars to reducing supposedly harmful greenhouse gases, perhaps the good Guv should reconsider his willingness to bet the farm on film.

Recently on the pages of the Albuquerque Tribune, the Rio Grande Foundation and New Mexico Voices for Children have traded jabs on the issue of whether a Colorado-style Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights would be a boon or a bust for New Mexico.
While the answers to most of her criticisms are contained in my original piece, Kay Monaco is not singing a new song. In fact, her arguments are nothing more than regurgitated talking points from the Washington, DC-based Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Of course, our side has its own talking points and those were developed by the DC-based Tax Foundation. These talking points answer most of the rest of Monaco’s assertions.
Ultimately, the conflicting points can be summed up in one line from Monaco’s piece “Fiscal conservatives are careful to overlook the most important fact when they talk about taxes – that taxes represent an investment in America.” If you believe that government at any level needs an unlimited amount of your tax dollars — state government grew by approximately 8 percent last year in New Mexico — then you need to pick up an economics book. Governments at all levels are at their best when their roles are limited. That is why the Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution that strictly limited the powers of the federal government. State governments too need to take on only those tasks for which government is best, anything else tends to wind up being wasteful and/or a hindrance to our freedoms.

Larry Reed’s recent visit to New Mexico was a big success. Diane Velasco of The Citizen covered the event and offered her own assessment of Reed’s speech and the freedom movement in New Mexico. We appreciate the coverage and hope to continue expanding the circle.

Although it would be easy to interpret the Democratic Party’s victory as a call by voters for bigger government, a new opinion poll clearly shows that while the American people have been frustated by the foibles of Republicans, their votes for change should not be confused with favoring higher taxes or more government spending. Among the nuggets contained in the recent survey is the finding that 62% of voters would like the 2003 capital gains and dividend cuts extended and 57% of voters would rather have a member of congress that cut spending rather than bringing home pork.
While it is hard to attribute national election results to any one factor — was it the Iraq War or was it spending and corruption that hurt the Republicans? — I believe that many voters simply voted for divided government.

The Rio Grande Foundation has often criticized special interest tax breaks and subsidies, so, when Larry Barker, Channel 13’s investigative journalist broke a recent story about shenanigans involving New Mexico’s film tax credit program, he contacted us for comment. The stories are posted here. Gessing appears in both stories.