The Albuquerque Journal did an important public service to New Mexicans with its two-part series on New Mexico’s unsustainable higher education system. Part 1 is the most important part containing the big-picture data and a broad overview of the problem. Unfortunately, as New Mexico’s Legislature grapples with the budget, it shows no signs of systematically addressing the fundamental issues in higher education.

As we’ve noted before, New Mexico’s spends 6th-most of any state per full-time student. Clearly, it is not getting a great return on that investment in terms of economic growth or an educated workforce.

Amazingly, while the map that ran with the Journal story (below) was dotted with campuses, it actually under-reports the issue. CNM is listed as one dot on the map, for example, yet it has 7 branches not including its main campus.

Western New Mexico University has campuses in Gallup, Deming, and Lordsburg, none of which are shown on the map.

NMSU has an Albuquerque campus and UNM has its West Side campus which is also not found on the map.

In other words, New Mexico’s higher education bureaucracy is extremely bloated and expensive. Cutting back would be an important means of saving limited resources and concentrating them in ways that improve the system’s mediocre outcomes. Alas, the Legislature has not addressed the issue in any serious way this session.

As we at the Rio Grande Foundation have previously noted, New Mexico government is bloated. The number cited is typically total state spending including all of the federal pass-through money, but even the General Fund (which represents 1/3rd of total spending) has grown in recent years. See our latest chart illustrating that growth below:

Thanks to our friends at Americans for Tax Reform for the research!

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At the Rio Grande Foundation, we feel very confident that the ideas of free markets and individual liberty are the best methods for economic and social organization. We have repeatedly debated the merits of various such policies over the years.

Unfortunately, the political left – from college campuses to the media to congressional town halls – is increasingly unwilling to tolerate differing views.

• Location:  Albuquerque Marriott Uptown, 2101 Louisiana Blvd NE, Albuquerque, NM  87110.
• When:  Tuesday, March 14, 2017, 12:00 noon to 1:00pm.
• Cost:  Seating is limited and can be purchased at the discounted price of $30 until Friday, March 10, 2017; $40 after that.

Mary Katharine Ham (current CNN contributor and former Fox News Channel contributor) and Guy Benson (currently a Fox News Channel contributor) rank among the most recognizable and influential young conservatives in the American media today. Ham serves as Contributing Editor to HotAir.com; Benson is Political Editor at Townhall.com and appears regularly on the Hugh Hewitt radio show.

Close friends for nearly a decade, the pair has collaborated on numerous projects &ndash coauthoring political analyses, co-hosting radio shows, and speaking jointly to live audiences across the country. Ham graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Georgia in 2002 and lives in Arlington, VA. Benson graduated with honors from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2007 and lived in Obama country (Chicago) prior to relocating to the Beltway in 2010.

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Last week Errors of Enchantment called HB 252 a “silly billy,” since it would spend $125,000 “to educate the people of New Mexico about the missions of the nuclear-powered submarines USS New Mexico, SSN-779, and USS Santa Fe, SSN-763, and the effort to retire the USS Albuquerque, SSN-706,” as well as recognize “the state’s naval junior reserve officers training corps,” and lobby to “name a navy warship after Los Alamos county.”

In response, a helpful reader, who is also a retired naval officer, informed us that two “bases” of U.S. Submarine Veterans, Inc. exist in New Mexico — and if members are anything like the shipmates he had, “they would be more than delighted” to provide information to the public about the submarine force, “and would not need tax $$$ to do it.” Albuquerque’s base can be found here, while the White Sands unit is here. (Our reader also suggested the Naval Submarine League as another resource.)

As for the retirement of the Albuquerque, Naval Today recently reported that the boat, launched in 1982, was “decommissioned during a ceremony held at Keyport Undersea Museum.” At the event, Rear Adm. John Tammen noted that the Albuquerque “deployed 21 times to every corner of the globe, accumulating approximately 1.1 million nautical miles steamed, the equivalent of 52 global circumnavigations.”

Just because something is a good idea doesn’t mean that taxpayers should be subsidizing it. The fascinating tales of the submariners who served aboard the New Mexico, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque deserve to be told, but individuals and non-government organizations are more than capable of doing the job.

The Foundation is tracking announcements of expansions, relocations, and greenfield investments published on Area Development‘s website. Founded in 1965, the publication “is considered the leading executive magazine covering corporate site selection and relocation. … Area Development is published quarterly and has 60,000 mailed copies.” In an explanation to the Foundation, its editor wrote that items for Area Development‘s announcements listing are “culled from RSS feeds and press releases that are emailed to us from various sources, including economic development organizations, PR agencies, businesses, etc. We usually highlight ones that represent large numbers of new jobs and/or investment in industrial projects.”

In February, of 20,775 projected jobs, 13,441 — 64.7 percent — were slated for right-to-work (RTW) states:

The results for non-RTW states were better than usual last month, but employment was boosted by two investments planned to create 2,000 jobs each: Amazon in California and Blue Apron in New Jersey.

As for the sub-metrics the Foundation scrutinizes:

* Ten domestic companies based in non-RTW states announced investments in RTW states. Five announcements went the other way.

* RTW prevailed in foreign direct investment, too. Eight projects are headed to RTW states, with three to occur in a non-RTW state.

Marquee RTW investments included:

* Intel announced its intention to complete its Arizona-based “Fab 42, which is expected to be the most advanced high-volume semiconductor factory in the world” (3,000 jobs)

* Nestlé’s American headquarters fled California for Virginia, choosing to spend $39.8 million on the relocation (748 jobs)

* Connecticut-based Pratt & Whitney picked an existing facility in Georgia to “increase the production of parts and maintenance services and reduce costs for new and existing engine programs” (500 jobs)

Methodological specifics:

* All job estimates — “up to,” “as many as,” “about” — were taken at face value, for RTW and non-RTW states alike.

* If an announcement did not make an employment projection, efforts were made to obtain an estimate from newspaper articles and/or press releases from additional sources.

* If no job figure could be found anywhere, the project was not counted, whether it was a RTW or non-RTW state.

* Non-border-crossing relocations were not counted, border-crossing relocations were.

This article has been updated (as of 3/3/17) based on conversations w/ the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce

Government-mandated price floors are bad public policy. Minimum wages fall into the same category even though they are often popular with those who think wage mandates come with no cost.

But why in the world would the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce actively support a $9.00/hour minimum wage?

Notably, Albuquerque already has an $8.80 minimum wage, but most areas outside the Rio Grande Corridor are at the currently-mandated $7.50 an hour. This legislation will hurt businesses and low-skilled workers in those areas of the state while barely impacting Albuquerque. It would be better if the Albuquerque Chamber just stayed out as this really doesn’t affect them.

No matter what the motive, too many Republicans who should know better are falling for the deception. SB 386 just passed out of the Senate on a 24-6 vote. That means bipartisan support. Hopefully House Republicans better appreciate the perils of government-wage mandates. They may lose, but at least fight the good fight. As for the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, it may be time for members to give their leadership an Economics 101 lesson.

New Mexico is in a recession (at least). The Bureau of Economic Analysis has the latest GDP “growth” (3rd quarter of 2016) data for each state. Per the usual these days, the data are not good for New Mexico (see below). New Mexico was one of two states (Alaska being the other) to see a decline in GDP. Neighboring states like Colorado, Utah, and even oil-producing Texas raced ahead with growth rates exceeding 4 percent.

What does this mean? Well, it is a small sample size. Quarterly growth is volatile, but we know that New Mexico is in bad shape economically. Basic economic theory (as expounded upon nicely by President Obama) also tells us that tax hikes in bad economic times aren’t the best idea. So, what is our Legislature doing?

According to the ABQ Journal, the Senate Finance Committee voted to raise taxes. Unlike some votes, this was a bi-partisan vote with Republicans (minus Sen. Carroll Leavell) voting to raise taxes. It places these Republicans and any others voting to raise taxes uncomfortably to the left of President Obama (who at least claimed to oppose raising taxes during a recession) on the issue of taxes.

Let’s all hope for the best for Sigma Labs. The Santa Fe-based firm “has uplisted … to the NASDAQ,” according to Albuquerque Business First. Under CEO Mark Cola, Sigma “develops and engineers advanced, in-process, non-destructive quality inspection systems for commercial firms worldwide seeking productive solutions for metal-based additive manufacturing or 3D printing, and other advanced manufacturing technologies.”

But there’s a dark cloud to every silver lining, and the company’s status shift is a reminder that New Mexico is woefully bereft of investable enterprises. The state does have a smattering of publicly traded corporations, but Sigma joins PNM Resources — a regulated monopoly — to comprise the only state-based companies listed on major stock exchanges.

Several of the Land of Enchantment’s other public corporations have been de-listed, while others (Santa Fe Gold, Net Medical Xpress Solutions) trade on the over-the-counter market. No offense — and as a reminder, Errors of Enchantment is not an investment-advice blog — but shares for the OTC firms are in the penny-stock range, and demand is rather limited.

For a state that prides itself on high-tech “investment” from Washington, it’s really appalling that PNM and Sigma are all we’ve got. New Mexico’s deep-in-denial pols can continue to ignore reality, but all the big-brained men and women working on nuclear-weapons systems at Los Alamos and Sandia aren’t entrepreneurial types. As Greg Mello at the Los Alamos Study Group noted in 2012: “It’s simply a fact that the economic standing of the state has not tracked lab spending. If anything, our standing relative to other states has declined as lab spending has increased.”

New Mexico is not the place for red-hot tech companies, explosive IPOs, and instant millionaires. Maybe D.C. dependency isn’t the best route toward STEM-based economic development?

SB 429, sponsored by Sen. Mary Kay Papen (D-Las Cruces), is titled the “Spaceport Confidential Records Act.” The bill would make “sensitive and proprietary private entity customer information” maintained by New Mexico’s spaceport authority — proprietor of “Spaceport America” — exempt from the Inspection of Public Records Act.

Given how little activity is occurring at New Mexico’s boondoggle-in-the-desert, the legislation seems rather unnecessary. With zero launches in all of 2016, and nothing headed for space so far in 2017, it’s not likely that many launch companies are concerned over prying eyes using New Mexico’s freedom-of-information law to ferret out trade secrets.

Meanwhile, the space industry stubbornly refuses to come to New Mexico to put its payloads in orbit. Recent developments at other facilities include:

* World View Enterprises opened “its new Global Headquarters campus, collocated with Spaceport Tucson,” calling it “the world’s first purpose-built commercial gateway to the Stratosphere.” For years, Spaceport America bureaucrats mentioned the company as a potential tenant. WVE decided otherwise, picking Arizona “after a rigorous nation-wide search and negotiations with multiple state agencies.”

* The FAA continues to evaluate LauncherOne’s proposal to place small satellites in orbit from California’s Mojave Air and Space Port. Virgin Galactic, the company that was supposed to start sending tourists on suborbital flights from Spaceport America years ago, owns LauncherOne.

* Way up in Canada, Maritime Launch Services, “a newly registered company in Nova Scotia with roots in the U.S and the Ukraine,” is looking to send medium-class payloads into orbit from the Maritime province.

* Way down in New Zealand, Rocket Lab is conducting “pre-flight tests and checkouts” for the inaugural launch of its Electron rocket. In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that the startup firm’s facility, located on the Mahia Peninsula, has locals sensing “an opportunity for jobs and rocket tourism in their new but still alien industry, with plans to build holiday units and offer bus rides to starry-eyed space tourists.”

Maybe instead of drafting legislation that doubles down on New Mexico’s dismal “investment” in Spaceport America, Sen. Papen should work with Sen. George Munoz (D-Gallup) to offer the white elephant to the highest bidder.

I sat down with KOB TV to discuss the gap between taxes owed in New Mexico and taxes actually collected. This is based on a report from the Legislative Finance Committee which claimed that New Mexico is missing out on nearly $600 million in tax collections.

See the story which aired on the 10pm news on February 27 below:

An excellent KOB TV story recently highlighted problem of rural health care in New Mexico including Harding County which doesn’t have a single dentist practicing within its borders. The good news is that we have the solution. HB 264, the “Access to Dental Care Act” would create a new level of mid-level dental providers (dental therapists) that would put a serious dent in this problem. By creating a new subset of providers who don’t have to take on dentist-level-debt, but could provide basic procedures, we could see great benefits in our rural communities.

It is to be heard in the House State Government, Veterans, and Indian Affairs Committee on Tuesday, February 28.

Milan Simonich recently lamented that despite the state’s fiscal woes, “many legislators still introduce unnecessary bills that waste time and staff resources.”

No kidding. Simonich cited SB 99, which “would make it a crime for a prison inmate to possess a cellphone,” despite the pesky fact that the “Corrections Department already prohibits prisoners from having cellphones.” Another bill would “make the green chile cheeseburger the official hamburger of New Mexico,” while HB 204, which “should be called the Sore Loser Initiative,” mandates that “candidates for president … provide copies of their last five federal income tax returns to qualify for the ballot in New Mexico.”

Errors of Enchantment has a few “silly billies” of our own. Near the top of the list is HB 252, which seeks a $125,000 appropriation “to educate the people of New Mexico about the missions of the nuclear-powered submarines USS New Mexico, SSN-779, and USS Santa Fe, SSN-763, and the effort to retire the USS Albuquerque, SSN-706.” The money’s also to be spent on recognizing “the state’s naval junior reserve officers training corps” and lobbying to “name a navy warship after Los Alamos county.” We’ve got nothing against the fine men and women of the U.S. Navy, but perhaps $125,000 would be better devoted to addressing the state’s dire fiscal condition.

Are New Mexico educators engaged in an orgy of shaming students who have deficits in their school-lunch accounts? Errors of Enchantment can’t find any evidence of such abuse, but that didn’t stop the drafting of SB 374, the “Hunger-Free Students’ Bill of Rights Act.” It directs schools not to “publicly identify or stigmatize a student who cannot pay for a meal or who owes a meal debt by, for example, requiring that a student wear a wristband or hand stamp.”

No, that’s not a joke.

The good news is that the deadline for submitting bills, memorials, joint memorials, resolutions, and joint resolutions has passed. So there’s no way for the list of time-wasters to grow any longer.

There is no clear definition of what causes an economy to go into a “death spiral,” but declining revenues leading to tax hikes which lead to businesses and productive citizens leaving which in turn leads to declining revenues is the one I would put forth. To be sure, Forbes named New Mexico the #1 “death spiral” state in the nation (by a long-shot).

We’ve known about the declining revenues and young people leaving for a few years now, but it looks like the tax hike phase of New Mexico’s death spiral may be here. Democrats in the Legislature just passed a budget that includes tax hikes (although they will likely be vetoed by the Gov.) Even more troubling is that the largest County (by population) in our State is looking to pass major tax hikes.

As the Foundation has pointed out in the past, the GRT in Albuquerque has risen more than 20% since 2000 and Bernalillo County just increased the tax in 2015. Adding another tax hike (or hikes) on top of those already-rising rates may not seem like a big deal, but it may also be the thing that pushes more businesses and people out.

Larry Barker’s exposé of the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR) is sure to be trumpeted by supporters of an ethics commission in New Mexico. The bureaucracy awarded a contract for veteran outreach to Clarence Gallegos, whose wife was a manager at the Public Education Department, which oversees the DVR. Gallegos, who had “no college degree, experience, or training,” then won a no-bid renewal of his deal, despite his failure to fulfill his obligation to hold “a minimum of two town hall meetings.” Contract #3 was awarded around the same time Gallegos wound up in jail, and … read KRQE’s coverage for the whole sordid, sorry tale.

There are currently two bills before the legislature to establish an ethics commission in New Mexico: SB 218 and HJR 8. Both would subject elected officials, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and contractors to scrutiny by a seven-member board. Civil penalties/sanctions would be imposed on offenders, and possible criminal activities would be referred to, as the House bill puts it, “the appropriate prosecutorial authority.”

The proposals have many similarities — seven commissioners, four-year terms that are staggered at the entitiy’s founding, an executive director — but some significant differences as well. SB 218 would let the state’s chief justice make an appointment the commission, while its counterpart in the House wouldn’t. The latter requires a five-member majority to act, the former doesn’t. SB 218 requires that the commission’s chairman be a retired judge, HJR 8 is silent on the issue. Most importantly, the Senate bill establishes the ethics commission by statute, while the House’s proposal submits the matter to the voters for possible addition to the state constitution.

But while no one would question that corruption is a disturbing reality in the Land of Enchantment, it’s not at all clear that creation of an ethics commission would, as Common Cause put it, be “a critical step in rebuilding voters’ trust in our system.” Some of the cleanest state governments in the nation — e.g., Idaho, Vermont, and Wyoming — have no such entities. And many corrupt-as-they-come states — e.g., Illinois, New York, and Louisiana — have ethics commissions.

You can’t have big corruption without big government. The best tool to combat fraud, greed, and sleaze remains state officials, whether elected or appointed, who understand what the “public” sector should and should not do — and prefer liberty, opportunity, and prosperity to ever-metastasizing government.

The Rio Grande Foundation has yet to score the ethics-commissions bills in our Freedom Index. What do you think? Would a new oversight body fight malfeasance and graft in the state? Or is an ethics commission just more wishful thinking by left-leaning proponents of “good government”? Let us know.

KOB TV reporter Caleb James did an in-depth report (including a trip to Colorado) on marijuana, what legalization could mean for New Mexico, and how much revenue is leaving our state. Check out the story here (RGF president Paul Gessing is featured prominently in the 2nd half of the story):

Democrats in the House of Representatives have approved a General Appropriations Act for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins on July 1^st. The media are covering the plan’s spending priorities, and wonkier Errors of Enchantment readers can view the 191-page legislation here.

But one aspect of the budget is being ignored, though, and it’s a reality that should terrify the state’s taxpayers. The table above is taken from HB 2’s fiscal impact report. It shows that revenue from the federal government — the same government that has tens, if not hundreds, of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities — pays for a disturbingly high portion of state expenditures. Here’s how much D.C. covers spending in several major categories:

* Health, Hospitals, and Human Services (primarily Medicaid): 72.7 percent

* Transportation: 46.1 percent

* Other Education (regional education cooperatives, the Public Education Department, the Public School Facilities Authority): 22.6 percent

* Higher Education: 20.8 percent

So four of the General Appropriation Act’s accounts get at least a fifth of their revenue from the feds. (Agriculture, Energy, and Natural Resources just misses the cut, at 19.2 percent.) The biggest cost category, which includes healthcare coverage for the “poor,” is subsidized at a rate of nearly three-quarters.

That’s a fiscal relationship that cannot be sustained. Given the results of the 2016 presidential election and the makeup of New Mexico’s congressional delegation, don’t look for Trump administration officials and Republicans in Congress to be keen to subsidize the state at the rate to which it has become accustomed. All the more reason why the Land of Enchantment, at long last, must implement an economic-development strategy that fosters a vibrant, dynamic private sector.

Happy Washington’s Birthday! Or Presidents’ Day. Or President’s Day. Or Washington’s and Lincoln’s Birthday.

Whatever you call it, the holiday offers a chance to check in with liberals’ targeting of the Electoral College. There are four bills before the legislature that would hand New Mexico’s five EC votes not to the candidate who garners the most support in the Land of Enchantment, but the victor in the national contest for votes.

SB 42, SB 54, and SB 102 make the adoption of the “Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote” statutorily, while SJR 7 submits the idea to voters for possible addition to the state constitution.

There are plenty of strong arguments against electing the nation’s chief executive by popular vote. Probably the best criticism is that those pushing to do so today are solely concerned with politics. The GOP’s nominees in 2000 and 2016 lost the popular vote, but won the EC, and Democrats don’t like that — thus, their push to change the rules of the game. But the nation’s demographic profile is changing rapidly. The citizenry is aging, the birthrate is cratering, the South and West continue to draw refugees from California and the Northeast, and the future of immigration is anyone’s guess. The popular-vote advantage Democrats enjoy today might not last. Why let the vicissitudes of short-term politics usurp a provision enshrined in the U.S. Constitution?

As for the charge that the EC is an affront to democracy, the left-leaning Brookings Instruction’s Richard Lempert noted: “Built into our system of checks and balances are several undemocratic institutions, most notably our entire judiciary. Also several procedures, including amending the Constitution and overriding presidential vetoes require supermajorities. The nation seems to have survived these limitations on majoritarian democracy reasonably well, enduring, perhaps in part, because of them.” The Cato Institute’s Roger Pilon, a libertarian, concurred, writing that the Framers “were no friends of direct democracy. Indeed, they feared undiluted majoritarian rule almost as much as royal rule. They put liberty first, with democracy as one, but only one, means toward securing it.”

Diluting the power of large-population states is another reason to eschew EC “repair.” Grabbing big numbers of votes in a few key states might make entire areas of the country irrelevant. (Why bother with the concerns of the Intermountain West, for example, when the region’s eight states have fewer total votes than California alone?) Writing in the The Los Alamos Monitor, Bob Morgan predicted that the end of the EC would encourage candidates to “spend even more of their time and money on the big cities where most voters reside. New Mexico, which has never been more than a quick pit stop on the campaign trail, will become a mere administrative unit in a monolithic national government. End running the Electoral College is another step toward the increasing concentration of political power in the largest urban states, accelerating the decline of the more thinly-populated states into the status of imperial provinces.”

An intriguing final note about the campaign against the EC in the Land of Enchantment: Sen. Pat Woods (R-Broadview) has drafted a bill to adopt the presidential architectures in place in Maine and Nebraska. It would award EC votes by congressional district, with the statewide winner grabbing two EC votes. As Americans currently cast their ballots, the change would benefit the GOP, and thus, skepticism is warranted. (Besides, SB 127 has no chance of passage in a legislature controlled by Democrats.) But it’s an interesting concept — one that makes the EC more democratic, while not turning the presidential contest into a national plebiscite. An opportunity, perhaps, for compromise?

Not much action has been taken on popular-vote legislation so far, but the 2017 session is only half over. As the left’s hatred of “that man in the White House” intensifies, look for at least one of the bills to win approval from both chambers.

Update: Prediction confirmed! SB 42 has passed the Senate, 26-16, on a party-line vote.

There has been a fair amount of media coverage on the sweeping tax reform package introduced by Rep. Jason Harper and two Democrat co-sponsors (Sens. John Arthur Smith and Carlos Cisneros). The bill (HB 412) was introduced last week (but it is  As with any ambitious plan, there are lots of questions and concerns.

Rep. Harper (who calls his studies of New Mexico’s tax code his “second PhD”) has provided a short, but informational white paper on the plan which we have posted here. It beats reading all 347 pages of the bill.

Simply put, we at the Rio Grande Foundation believe that tax reform is a critical step for reforming New Mexico’s economy.  It is widely-recognized that New Mexico’s tax code is broken and it is holding us back (something we wrote a decade ago).

And, before anyone gets up in arms about re-instating the grocery tax as a means of broadening the base and lowering rates, Rio Grande Foundation opposed the reforms that eliminated the tax on groceries more than a decade ago…and so did NM Voices for Children (which now is leading the charge AGAINST re-instating the grocery tax).

Congrats to SolAero Technologies, “one of the world’s leading manufacturers of highly efficient, radiation hard solar cells, Coverglass Interconnected Cells … and solar panels for space power applications.” It is “moving manufacturing operations from California to Albuquerque,” and plans to create “100 new high-tech manufacturing jobs.” In the project’s first phase, “SolAero will invest $10 million to overhaul 40,000 feet of their existing Albuquerque facility to create a vertically integrated solar panel manufacturing facility.”

That kind of news is all too rare in the Land of Enchantment, so let’s stop to savor the moment. But let’s keep things in perspective. Nine states have yet to surpass their peak, pre-Great Recession employment levels.* And New Mexico is second only to Wyoming in dismal job-creation performance.

The chart above shows that after Wyoming (down 6.9 percent) and New Mexico (a 4.0 percent drop), the bottom-feeders include Mississippi, Connecticut, Alabama, Maine, West Virginia, Rhode Island, and New Jersey.

Nevada’s experienced a jobs recovery. So have Illinois and Ohio. Arizona’s back in the growth zone. Texas and Oklahoma, like New Mexico, are oil-and-gas states. But they’re on the positive side of the ledger, too. Not so for the Land of Enchantment, which has fewer jobs today than it did in 2008.

SolAero Technologies is to be commended for taking a chance on a state that appears to be wholly committed to making poor public-policy decisions. But we’ll need many more 100-job investments — 192, to be precise — to climb out way back to where we were nine years ago.

* Michigan and Alaska are tough to analyze. Jobs were disappearing in the Wolverine State well before the Great Recession struck. The Last Frontier lost only a small number of jobs in the downturn, then rebounded quickly, but has since fallen beneath its peak, driven by declining petroleum-linked employment.

Source: Energy Information Administration, U.S. Department of Energy

If the 2017 legislative session had a Wishful Thinking Award, it would surely go to SB 312. Backed by Sen. Mimi Stewart (D-Albuquerque) and Rep. Nathan Small (D-Las Cruces), the bill puts the state’s “renewable portfolio standard” on steroids.

The legislation requires “rural electric cooperatives and municipalities” to obtain 70 percent of their juice from politically correct sources by 2040. For “public utilities,” the mandate is 80 percent.

We’re through the looking glass with this one, folks. The chart above reveals an inconvenient truth — that just about every electron used by New Mexican homes and businesses is generated from “fossil” fuels. Skyrocketing the RPS would make the state dependent on expensive and volatile sources for power. As Dax Contreras of The New Mexico Politico noted, “those pushing for renewable sources of energy are blissfully … ignorant of the added costs of imposing such mandates.” For example, the “free” fuel supplied by sunshine and wind is intermittent and unreliable. Back-up generation systems, usually natural gas-based, are a must. And pushers of “green” power never fail to overlook the expenditures (red tape, lawsuits, land acquisition, construction of transmission lines) incurred to move the juice from where it’s generated to where it’s consumed.

The Land of Enchantment’s current RPS, set at 15 percent and scheduled to rise to 20 percent in 2020, is already helping to drive the price of electricity higher. In September, PNM was allowed to raise its rates, and the company is now seeking a new increase. To the south, El Paso Electric “plans to seek a rate hike for New Mexico customers late this spring.”

If SB 312 becomes law, look for rate-hike requests to be more frequent and more severe. Economic-development efforts will be crippled, but New Mexico’s “progressives” can sleep comfortably, knowing that their state gets its electricity from the “right” fuels.

There is a drumbeat emanating from the Capital in Santa Fe, mostly from Democrats, but also from a few Republicans. The message is Our budget is cut to the bone.”

The refrain that New Mexico government is somehow starved for revenue may sound logical, but once you actually look at the data, it falls apart. Check out the charts below which were compiled with data from the website US Government Spending.

As the chart below shows, when it comes to state spending, New Mexico spends more as a percentage of GDP than any of its neighbors. The number is 4th-highest in the nation behind only Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont.

Factoring local spending in to the number to get state and local spending as a percent of GDP only further illustrates New Mexico’s overspending. The Land of Enchantment is the 3rd-highest spending state (only outpaced by Alaska and Vermont) when state and local spending are calculated as a percent of GDP (see chart below).

In other words, policymakers should spare us the bloviating about NM’s budget being “cut to the bone” and just admit that they are unwilling to make needed cuts or stand up to powerful special interests and would instead prefer to stick taxpayers with the tab for their overspending.

Source: “Iowa’s Privileged Class: State-Government Employees,” Public Interest Institute

For some insight into why politicians are afraid to tackle personnel costs, watch what’s going on in Iowa.

The Hawkeye State’s legislators are exploring ways to get spending on “public servants” under control. Rep. Greg Forristall (R-Macedonia) told The Des Moines Register: “The big thing we’re looking for is to give taxpayers a place at the table. That means they have some say in how the money is spent, and that there are safeguards to see that taxes aren’t increased willy-nilly every time there’s a demand from collective bargaining.” Wages and salaries, healthcare benefits, arbitration, the grievance process — reformers believe, based on ample evidence, that the scales have been tipped in “labor’s” favor for too long.

Iowa’s Public Interest Institute has noted a revealing statistic: In 2015, state workers “received an average wage that was 149.76 percent of what the average private-sector worker in Iowa was paid. Iowa’s Pay Gap was larger than that of any other state.” (New Mexico’s gap was a stunning fifth in the nation.) A straight-up, no-disaggregation comparison is of limited value, of course, but even The New York Times has admitted that studies “have regularly found that state and local governments offer more valuable retirement and health benefits than the private sector.”

Predictably, government unions are militantly opposing even the slightest change to Iowa’s collective-bargaining rules. We’ve seen it all before: chanting, sign-waving, predictions of an impending apocalypse. And it’s getting downright nasty. As KCRG-TV9 reported, a “leaked email advises union members in Iowa on how to prank call … lawmakers to push against a proposal to limit collective bargaining rights.” Using language not fit for Errors of Enchantment‘s family readership, the message, sent by a thug from the Laborers’ International Union of North America, advised union members to have “some fun” and provided “bullet points,” such as “Hey! I didn’t hear you campaign on this S***! You lied to me, not a good idea bro!”

Time will tell if Iowa legislators hold firm, and implement the type of reforms that have paid so many dividends in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, in the Land of Enchantment, taxpayers … wait. There’s zero desire in Santa Fe to rein in out-of-control pay and benefits for government employees, even though a 2014 study by the American Enterprise Institute found a 24 percent advantage for state workers when total compensation (including the value of job security) was scrutinized.

New Mexico’s budget has many opportunities for savings in personnel. Too bad lawmakers, both Democratic and Republican, are focusing almost exclusively on finding “revenue to replenish the state’s coffers.”

For almost two decades, the dairy lobby has asked Washington to act on an issue of vital concern to the Republic: what is and is not “milk.”

The Food and Drug Administration has resisted the industry’s pressure, and declined to wade into the smackdown between cows and their competitors, which include “milk” made from soy, almonds, hemp, sunflowers, rice, and macadamia nuts.

In December, 32 fedpols wrote to the FDA, demanding, as Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) put it, that the bureaucracy “basically … enforce its own regulation,” since “regulation defines milk as something that comes from a mammary gland.” If the letter doesn’t work, there’s always the Dairy PRIDE Act — that would be the “Defending Against Imitations and Replacements of Yogurt, Milk, and Cheese to Promote Regular Intake of Dairy Everyday Act.”

No word yet on where the Trump administration stands on “real” milk, but the fight has come to New Mexico, with the drafting of SB 161. Sponsored by Cliff Pirtle (R-Roswell) and Pat Woods (R-Broadview), the legislation makes it illegal to “misbrand” a product as “milk” if “its ingredients do not consist of the whole, clean, lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy mammals.”

Truth in advertising is quite valuable, but one needn’t be a supporter of deceptive marketing to doubt the need for SB 161. As the Good Food Institute‘s Joanna Grossman wrote earlier this month, the bill “not only raises serious concerns in terms of needlessly restricting commercial free speech, but it also runs the risk of being challenged on preemption grounds since state law cannot conflict with federal law (which, in this case, sets labelling standards for a wide range of food products).”

Nannying is another reason to be skeptical of SB 161. Bruce Friedrich, a colleague of Grossman’s at the institute, told The Washington Post that “Americans are savvier and they are better able to digest nutritional information. No consumer buys a carton of almond milk and thinks that there’s cow’s milk in the package.” One online commenter put it more succinctly: “This seems like a solution in search of a problem.”