As Harry mentioned, a majority of Senators sought today to permanently end the federal death tax, but could muster only 57 of the 60 votes needed to advance the measure.
New Mexico tax law links the state’s death tax to the federal one. By 2005, recent abatement of the federal estate tax effectively eliminated the state death tax. If nothing is done in Washington, however, New Mexico’s death tax will return, along with the federal tax, in 2011.
New Mexico’s Jeff Bingaman spoke out on the floor of the Senate against killing the death tax, before voting against the tax’s repeal. Given the strong tradition of family-owned businesses in New Mexico, one would think all of our representatives in Washington would know better.
Bingaman excuses the confiscation of the fruits of a lifetime of effort, effort that has already been subject to income and other taxes, because before the reductions, “there were only 200 people dying with any estate tax liability” in NM in 2001. That’s 200 of our favorite restaurants, our historic tourist-drawing ranches, our most productive family farms, even many of the funeral homes New Mexico families have relied on for generations.
And that’s only taxed deaths occuring in one year. The number of New Mexicans who will be subject to the death tax at the end of their lifetimes is much greater, unless the current federal law is changed.
It’s time the death tax itself took a trip to the funeral home.

This morning I was pleased to receive the following links from John Goodman, President and Ph.D. economist for National Center for Policy Analysis. If you would like to be enlightened on the “death tax,” international trade, the connection between social security and high tax rates on the elderly, the benefits of Roth IRA’s and/ or the harm done by minimum wage laws, then check out these links:
We All Pay for the Estate Tax –
Who would benefit from a Roth IRA?
Taxing the Elderly –
Trade & Economic Growth, Part I –
Trade & Econmic Growth, Part II –
The Negative Effects of The Minimum Wage –

The U.S. Senate will be debating permanent repeal of the so called “death” tax this week. I am seeing a lot of misinformed opinion about the effects of its repeal. For example, the SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER thinks the true cost will be a trillion dollars in lost revenue over the next decade. WAPO has a similar view.
What these views miss is the dynamic effects of the tax. There is massive avoidance of the tax. That massive avoidance would vanish with repeal; and the net effect would more than replace the lost revenues via more tax collections on capital gains and increased incomes. Here is an economically literate debate on the merits of repeal.

Unfortunately, this is one bad idea that has already oozed out of California and into NM. According to my former professor Jennifer Roback Morse:

The proponents of universal preschool consistently overstate its benefits. Their favorite study is a Rand Corporation study that extrapolates the benefits obtained by a program in Chicago in the 1980’s. The results of that particular preschool study have nothing to do with the results the average family could expect, or with the results the entire state of California would be likely to achieve.
The Chicago preschool program was targeted at low-income, high-risk children, most of whom had unmarried parents. Finding that high quality preschool helped this group of people says absolutely nothing about the impact of preschool on the children of middle class, married-couple households. Most of those kids are already in preschool programs anyway;overall, 65% of California children are in some form of preschool. It is pointless to spend taxpayer dollars subsidizing kids who are already well-provided for by their own parents.
These same kinds of studies are used to browbeat stay at home mothers into placing their kids in preschools or daycare centers. “Am I harming my child by depriving him of the enriching preschool experience?” mothers ask me all the time. No, I always reply. Just pay attention to what your child needs, and trust your instincts. Ignore the studies, unless they apply to your situation very specifically. The studies touting universal preschool are based on non-universal samples and have nothing to do with the experiences of most families.
Furthermore, the Chicago program was more than an academic program. It also required parental involvement, and taught parenting skills. Some of the program’s benefits are surely attributable to the improved parenting the mothers used throughout the child’s formative years. Yet the supporters of universal preschool assign all the credit to the one year the child spent in their precious preschool program. After all, we wouldn’t want to give credit to parents. Everyone knows parents are the problem. The sooner we get kids away from their parents and into government run schools, the better off everyone will be.

She also points out the state politics and mandates that will insure that it is a total waste of your money. You should read the whole thing.

Today’s ABQ Journal attempts to clarify (sr) how our money is distributed to schools in NM. Excerpts:

Under a formula developed in response to a lawsuit by a tiny, rural school district, the state cannot simply allocate the money to the overcrowded districts. It doesn’t matter how much it’s needed or how much the governor or legislators want to do it. At best, a council set up to administer the formula could “loan” the district some of the money, which would be repaid in the form of offsets from future allocations.
District Judge Joseph Rich of Gallup ruled that New Mexico’s system for awarding capital outlay money to public schools was unfair and unconstitutional. He told the state to draft a more equitable system.
The state came up with a uniform system for distributing construction money. It is based on various factors, including need, how much local tax potential existed and how much of that potential was being tapped. The system was designed to equalize opportunity statewide when it came to building projects, rather than penalize or reward kids depending on where they lived.
New Mexico’s natural resources provide money to build and improve public schools. The state sells supplemental severance tax bonds and the proceeds go into the Public School Capital Outlay Fund. The bonds are paid off by revenue generated from taxes imposed on the extraction of natural gas, oil and other minerals.
The state Public School Capital Outlay Council, a nine-member board, is charged with identifying critical construction and renovation needs and decides which schools will receive awards from the capital outlay fund. Awards are based on districts’ applications and district visits. The council’s administrative arm, the Public School Facilities Authority, runs the day-to-day operations of the capital outlay program. The authority has construction managers around the state to help keep projects on track.
Every year, staffers visit a certain percentage of the state’s approximate 750 schools to assess construction and renovation needs. The facilities authority maintains a list in which every school is ranked according to construction need. Late in the school year, districts submit applications to the council, then make presentations before the council early in the summer. If a project the district is requesting money for ranks high on the priority list, then chances are fairly good it will be approved. In 2005, the council approved the top 98 projects on the list.
Once the council agrees to fund a project, a formula devised by the Public School Capital Outlay Task Force is used to determine how much money the district will receive and how much the district must pay.
State and district student population, the previous year’s taxable value for the entire state and the district, and the property tax mill levy in the district are all factors considered in the formula. The formula determines how much of their own money districts must contribute for a construction project in order to receive state funding. For example, Zuni is the only school district that receives 100 percent funding from the state under this formula. There are 15 districts that must pay for 90 percent of their construction projects. APS is required to pay 53 percent of its construction.
The Legislature recently approved a new funding program called the High Priority Project Grant Assistance Program. Districts that are experiencing high levels of growth are able to receive large awards to construct new schools. But while the program’s title implies a grant, districts have to pay back what is a loan.
APS officials said it hoped for the full $90 million available in the new program [for new schools on the West side]. What it got was $67 million, of which it must pay back $52 million.

That clarifies the school funding situation for you, right? Yeah, right. Here is how funding is determined according to the Department of Educations website. Enjoy.

From the Economist comes economic sense about gasoline prices. Excerpts:

…petrol prices in America depend, first and foremost, on the price
of crude oil. This is determined by global supply and demand, something over
which American politicians have only marginal influence. A gallon of petrol
at an American pump costs $2.85 on average, according to the American
Automobile Association (AAA), 75 cents more than it did a year ago.
Taxes account for a mere 18% of the price of filling an American car, compared with, say, 67% in Britain. So a surge in the price of oil leads toa proportionally bigger rise in the price of American petrol. Americans could reduce volatility by raising taxes, but not even Al Gore, who calls global warming “the most dangerous crisis we have ever faced”, is suggesting that Americans should pay just under $7 a gallon, as Brits do.
Although the global oil price is the main cause of American motorists’ woes, local factors also matter. Oil wells and refineries around the Gulf of Mexico have not yet fully recovered from last year’s hurricanes, and petrol stocks are low. Weathermen predict another busy hurricane season this year. And all this bad news comes at the start of the summer driving season, when holidaying families hit the road and prices traditionally rise to annual highs thanks to the increased demand.
However, prices were already at high levels in mid-May. In part that was due to the cost of crude oil. The hangover from last year’s hurricanes, which knocked out 10% of America’s refining capacity, also contributed, as facilities that had deferred maintenance work to compensate for (and profit from) the shortfall belatedly shut down. Furthermore, refiners around the world are struggling to adapt as crude supplies become more viscous and sulphurous, and so harder to turn into petrol.
Another crucial local problem arose from the removal of a chemical called methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE) from petrol in Texas and several eastern states. The addition of MTBE helps to reduce smog from car engines. But researchers began to worry that it might be carcinogenic and was certainly seeping into groundwater, making it undrinkable. Retailers, fearing lawsuits, decided to switch to ethanol, which has similar properties. But petrol blended with ethanol, unlike MTBE, cannot be shipped by pipeline, since the two are prone to separate in transit. So distributors had to invest in new facilities to transport ethanol and mix it with petrol near the point of sale. Moreover, ethanol is in short supply, and therefore expensive.
At one point in late April, a handful of petrol stations actually ran out of fuel as a result of these accumulated woes. But by now, says John Felmy of the American Petroleum Institute (API), an industry group, distribution networks are up and running. The high price, meanwhile, has helped to attract imports of petrol, which have been running 36% above their normal level in recent months. Stocks are rising again, and prices have fallen on the futures markets as well as at the pump. The government now predicts that petrol will cost an average $2.71 a gallon over the summer-less than it does at the moment.
A similar story unfolded in the wake of last year’s hurricanes, when high prices attracted imports, which compensated for curtailed local supply. Members of the International Energy Agency, a club of oil-consuming countries, helped by releasing some petrol from their strategic reserves. Even if hurricanes wreak havoc in the Gulf of Mexico again this summer, Mr Felmy argues, America’s drivers should have no trouble refilling their tanks, as long as they can stomach the price.
Not all can, of course. According to most surveys, demand for petrol is atlast beginning to soften, as the poor or thrifty move about less or take the bus. The API reckons that America’s consumption fell by 0.7% in the first four months of the year. The Department of Energy calculates that it has risen, but at a fraction of the normal pace. Sales of the most gas-guzzling cars have also been falling for several years, which may have a more lasting effect.
In the long run, growth in America’s refining capacity (or the world’s) should also help to lower prices. But that will take time. Refining capacity in America rose by almost 300,000 barrels a day last year, a small fraction of 9m daily barrels of petrol consumed. It will take two or three years, according to Aaron Brady of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consultancy, to construct enough extra refining capacity for comfort.
For the most part, Americans are responding rationally to the high price of petrol. Suppliers supply more; consumers consume less. Politicians, however, take it as an opportunity to bluster. The House of Representatives has passed a bill barring “price-gouging”-that is, making it a criminal offence to charge more for petrol than some bureaucrat deems appropriate. This is popular; 69% of Americans even favour price controls. But in the long run, it would reduce the incentive for firms to invest in supplying petrol to Americans, and so would raise prices at the pump. With luck, the bill will die in the Senate.
Both parties tout their determination to free America of its dependence on jihad-fuelling foreign oil by some conveniently distant point in the future. Neither, however, proposes anything that might plausibly accomplish this. House Republicans passed a bill last week to allow oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which would help a tiny amount at best, and in any case is highly unlikely to get through the Senate.
Both parties say they wish to promote ethanol, not just as an additive, but as a fuel in its own right. In practice, this means a futile attempt by government to pick promising new technologies, plus fat subsidies for midwestern corn farmers while cheaper Brazilian ethanol is kept out with tariffs. Lawmakers could free the ethanol market, but many would rather drive their SUVs to a petrol station a block away from their offices for a photo-op denouncing Mr Bush and Big Oil.

HT: Carroll Cagle

It’s in the Washington Post.
HT:Newmark’s Door

Paul’s New Mexico government “Spend-o-meter” is spinning away and will soon reach $11 billion dollars for the fiscal year ending June 30 (yes, that’s billion!). That is almost 23 thousand dollars per second or nearly 1.4 million per hour. How does this relate to us as individuals? The government spends your money at the rate of $115 per person per week.

How do you drive up the price of homes beyond reasonable reach? Try land use restrictions. I am not hopeful that ABQ city councilors will pay attention to this anytime soon.

This morning the NY Times has suddenly abandoned its usual advocacy of a living constitution. Instead it wants politicians in the legislative and executive branches to be constrained by what the Constitution actually says regarding separation of powers:

The constitutional claims made by the Congressional leadership on the Jefferson case seem overblown. House and Senate members are protected from arrest while going about their official business to shield them from intimidation and meddling by the executive branch in the affairs of state, not to deter law enforcement officials from doing their lawful duty to investigate possible felonies.
But members of Congress who have been politically comatose or complicit as the Bush administration built itself an imperial presidency, immune from the historical powers of the legislative branch, are up in arms. The House Judiciary Committee, which has been in the forefront of the long-running cave-in, has scheduled a hearing that the chairman has titled “Reckless Justice: Did the Saturday Night Raid of Congress Trample the Constitution?”

Too bad the Times is so selective in wanting to follow the rules laid out in the Constitution. They should pay attention to the scholarship of James M. Buchanan:

In 1987, the United States celebrates the bicentennial anniversary of the constitutional convention that provided the basic rules for the American political order. This convention was one of the very few historical examples in which political rules were deliberately chosen. The vision of politics that informed the thinking of James Madison was not dissimilar, in its essentials, from that which informed Knut Wicksell’s less comprehensive, but more focussed, analysis of taxation and spending. Both rejected any organic conception of the state as superior in wisdom, to the individuals who are its members. Both sought to bring all available scientific analysis to bear in helping to resolve the continuing question of social order: How can we live together in peace, prosperity, and harmony, while retaining our liberties as autonomous individuals who can, and must, create our own values?

Our polictically incorrect friends at the Independence Institute in Colorado are having their annual Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms party on Saturday June 24. Here is the scoop according to their president Jon Caldara:

You should join us. The day includes sporting clays at the posh Kiowa Creek Shooting Club. If you’ve never shot clay pigeons, this is an opportunity to learn. And if you do shoot sporting clays, this is a way to test your skills. More importantly, we follow it up with a terrific lunch, lots of libations, and cigars and cigarettes for those who choose. New for this year, we will be giving out very special politically incorrect awards for qualifying shooters. The competition is sure to be fierce.

A few weeks ago, the Rio Grande Foundation questioned some signs posted at stations that are now being constructed for the new commuter rail system known as RailRunner. The signs stated in part that the project was “Funded by Governor Bill Richardson and the New Mexico Legislature.” After calling the Governor’s office, talking to a few legislators, and raising the issue with the Mid-Region Council of Governments (the entity managing the project), I am pleased to announce that the signs have been changed and taxpayers are now being duly credited.
While we at the Rio Grande Foundation and at this blog frequently criticize governments at all levels, it is nice to see the Mid-Region Council of Governments clarify this issue by crediting the hard-working New Mexicans who provide the resources used by our elected officials for RailRunner and hundreds of other government activities.

We’ll have more on the economics of the Global Warming debate soon. In the meantime, these scientific questions are well worth the read.

Now it seems to be: “Vote for me and I’ll give you other people’s money.”
Count me among those Americans “struggling to return liberal ideas to our public discourse.”

This is hard to believe. Don Harris seems to suffer from the Fatal Conceit. One wonders what kind of takings our councilors will think of next?

1. Muslims do not recognize Jews as God’s chosen people.
2. Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah.
3. Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the leader of the
Christian world.
4. Baptists do not recognize each other at Hooters.
HT: Wayne Unze

According to USA Today taxpayers nationwide “will soon get a surprise bill that could exceed $1 trillion for the cost of paying future medical benefits for state and local workers who retire.” I wonder what NM’s bill will be??? This will be fun to watch taxpayer reaction.
HT: Asymmetrical Information

Thomas Sowell asks the question.

As a result of the Wall Street Journal’s good editorial (sr) today on immigration, I have discovered this online record of President Reagan’s public papers. Liberty, opportunity, prosperity: check it out.

Greg Mankiw is one of the more interesting economists around. He is known in the field as one of the leading exponents of “new-Kenysianism.” These are folks who believe that the macroeconomy occasionally suffers from large-scale failure and that government intervention is occasionally necessary to put the economy back on track. Unlike old-Keynsians, however, new-Kenysians are not single-mindedly fixed on aggregate demand shortfalls. Many largely accept the lessons of the “new classical” and “real business cycle” schools of thought and believe that fluctuations in both aggregate demand and aggregate supply determine the economy’s path.
In my mind, the single most important contribution of new-Keynsian analysis was to provide microeconomic theoretical and empirical justification for the notion that occasionally prices and wages do not move as fluidly as might be ideal. This seems far more realistic than the mathematically-precise but unrealistic assumptions which dominated the profession for so long.
One of the most interesting things to note about the new-Keynsians, though, is their ideological diversity. As one might expect, their ranks include a number of old-style Kenysians who prefer that government take an active role in the economy. These are folks like David Romer and Joseph Stiglitz. They also include a number of relatively free-market economists, however. And in this camp, one must surely put Greg Mankiw and the new fed chair Ben Bernanke.
Mankiw, of course, recently served a stint as President Bush’s economic advisor. He has a new blog here which is very readable and very interesting. He also has a forthcoming article with Weinzierl in the Journal of Political Economy. In it, he finds empirical justification for “dynamic scoring,” the old supply-side notion that when you estimate the impact of a tax cut on treasury revenues, you should account for whatever boost the cut will provide the economy. While tax cuts hardly pay for themselves (sorry conservatives), they do find that 17 percent of the revenue loss from a reduction in labor taxes is recouped by the treasury because of greater economic activity. Moreover, fully 50 percent of the revenue loss form a cut in capital taxes is recouped. Personally, I think tax cuts are good for their own-sake, irrespective of their impact on the treasury. Still, this is a powerful refutation for those who say that tax cuts will bankrupt the government.

Here is a column by Doug Powers that is well worth the read.
HT: Newmark’s Door

Competition and freedom of choice are the institutions necessary to make us prosperous. They do so by compelling each of us to make decisions individually that result in coordination of our actions in a way that leads to improvements in our lives. In fact, the improvements resulting from the process of competition and choice are far superior to those resulting from the alternative institution of government control. We at RGF call it “liberty, opportunity, prosperity.”
Of course, this goes for education as well. The endless “reforms” that always manage to maintain government control of education will never result in improvement. Writing in today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Professor Boudreaux predicts that government run K-12 schools will continue to fail; and he explains why by contrast to the process of competition and choice:

Government K-12 schools, as now run everywhere in the U.S., will never excel at educating students. The reason is that each school gets its students and its budget without having to compete for them.
Imagine if, say, supermarkets were run the same way we run schools. Everyone in my county would pay taxes to fund the county supermarket system; each one of us would then be assigned one specific county supermarket at which we are allowed to shop.
Of course, once in our assigned store, all the groceries that each of us gets are “free” — meaning, we don’t have to pay for them on the spot. If the products and services supplied by the supermarket are of poor quality, we’re not allowed to switch to other county markets; we must, instead, complain to politicians.
The managers of the supermarkets will agree that their stores offer abysmal service and undesirable products; they will assert that this sad fact is caused by underfunding. We will be warned that only by paying higher taxes will we have any possibility of getting better supermarkets.
So our taxes will rise and funding for supermarkets will increase. But quality will remain poor — and the excuses offered by the government-employed managers of the supermarkets will remain that they need yet more funding.

Wake up, New Mexico!

Paul and I visited the construction site at Paseo-Journal Center station. Something seemed to stand out when we read the sign explaining the project:

Here you will find a good economic perspective on the prospects for oil and gasoline markets. The article has a supply emphasis:

Having oil is one thing. Delivering it to a growing market is another. World economies differ greatly in their capacity to organize enterprises, adopt new technologies, raise capital and supply what consumers want. When it comes to increasing oil production, economic systems matter quite a bit. More oil would flow onto world markets and prices would be lower if major oil resources were in countries where producers responded freely to market incentives. The extent of economic freedom in the countries with the world’s oil supplies will greatly affect how well that oil is delivered to consumers.

Even though the vast majority of current oil production comes from inefficient, socialist state control, the authors are optimistic:

To a great extent, rising oil prices are self-limiting. Higher oil prices encourage conservation and development of unconventional oil resources and alternative fuels. Higher oil prices should also help overcome at least some of the difficulties in developing the vast conventional reserves not fully connected to the market [for example, the tar sands located in Canada’s province of Alberta]. In the long history of natural resources, the prospect of scarcity and higher prices has provided ample incentive for innovation.