A Reminder: Sign Petition to Support Albuquerque Businesses!
A few weeks ago, we at the Rio Grande Foundation started circulating this petition in response to the unfair attacks upon them by the Los Angeles-based Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters. The union is stationing small numbers of “protesters” in front of local businesses with banners stating “Shame on…” for something the business is doing that the union doesn’t like. The Rio Grande Foundation is urging supporters to actively visit businesses that have been targeted by the Union.
Please sign the petition, send it to your friends and other concerned citizens, and send the names of locations of businesses that have been targeted and thus deserve support to info@riograndefoundation.org. The current list of businesses is available here.
Was NM’s Budget Mess Inevitable?
I enjoy picking up The Alibi, particularly when Jerry Ortiz y Pino’s columns run. For starters, Ortiz y Pino provides a good window into the thoughts of New Mexico’s left-wing progressive/socialist community. In the past, it has also given me some nice fodder for letters to the editor. I was a bit disappointed in this week’s missive from the good Senator, however.
In his column, Ortiz y Pino simply resigns himself to the “unhappy compromise” that is the recently-passed budget. As a reminder, that budget included the following tax hikes which are estimated to raise the following amount of revenue:
$.75 cigarette tax hike: $31.3 million;
Reinstate part of the gross receipts tax on food: $70 million;
.25% increase in GRT: $60 million;
Eliminate an income tax deduction for taxpayers that itemize: $66 million;
Clarify that the compensating tax applies to most goods and services purchased by New Mexico businesses: $12 million next year.
So, why am I disappointed in Ortiz y Pino? Well, the left which supposedly stands up for the poor, willingly increased taxes on the poor in a regressive manner (cigarette taxes, the GRT, and the grocery tax are all regressive). I wish Ortiz y Pino had stuck up more for his beliefs or maybe admitted that they were wrong to spend $500+ million on the Rail Runner, $80 million annually in film subsidies, hundreds of millions on the Spaceport, and $36 million on a supercomputer.
Most of these spending items have little positive impact on the poor (or on New Mexico’s economy as a whole), but the left seems all too willing to go along with higher taxes on the poor. Who is the “progressive” now?
Did the Bailout Work? A Response to Winthrop Quigley
Winthrop Quigley of the Albuquerque Journal claims to be a “free market fan” in his column in today’s paper. He then spends 800 words defending the various bailouts passed under both President Obama and Bush. Worse, Quigley makes no serious arguments in defense of massive government intervention. The best he can come up with is the fact that the recession supposedly ended in the middle of 2009.
To say the least, I find his arguments dubious. Kind of akin to the Aztecs sacrificing a virgin to the gods for a good harvest and believing that sacrifice to be effective when the harvest turns out well. Quigley essentially admits this at the end of his piece.
I believe that government policies have actually exacerbated the current crisis and sown the seeds for an even greater future crisis. This has been the case historically as the “too big to fail” Long Term Capital Management and the pumping up of the housing market through Fannie and Freddie are two major policies that sowed the seeds for the current crisis.
The market –even a heavily-regulated one like we have now — is more resilient than Quigley seems to believe. If the big banks, AIG, and even the automakers had failed with no bailouts, the US economy would emerge from this crisis in much better shape than before with more responsible, less corrupt companies coming in to replace those that failed. Better still, the federal government would not be burdened with trillions of dollars in debt that Bush and Obama gave us. As this article from Reason Magazine argues, the economy is getting worse, not better thanks to these federal policies. Only time will tell, but I find Quigley’s arguments unconvincing.
RGF in National Review Online on EIB
Given the huge impact that the regulations being considered by the Environmental Improvement Board could have on New Mexico, I felt that it was important to alert a national audience to the issue and the possibility that similar actions could be undertaken in their state. Check out my National Review Online article here.
The Human Right to Home School
The left loves to talk about various “rights,” particularly the supposed right to health care and other economic rights that are not really rights because they involve infringing on others’ rights. But how about the right to home school one’s children?
Thankfully, despite efforts to limit home schooling, particularly in California, most US states are willing to leave home schoolers alone. That is not the case, specifically in Germany, where home schooling is illegal. According to the article, the parents, “music teachers, left Germany because they didn’t like what their children were learning in public school.” The family decided to move to the US “in 2008 after he and his wife had accrued about $10,000 in fines for homeschooling their three oldest children and police had turned up at their doorstep and escorted them to school.”
I am proud that, despite its many flaws, the states of the United States by and large stay out of the way when parents wish to home school their children. It is a freedom to be jealously guarded. I hope our government bureaucrats see fit to give this family — which is clearly fleeing persecution at home — asylum.
In: Uncategorized
Alibi Readers Decode Paul Gessing (again)
I remain a hot topic among Alibi readers in this week’s letters pages. Good to see that I rattled some cages among the lefties with my recent article.
Here are some responses to the points made in the letters:
Letter 1: Not sure what the writer’s point is here. He seems to claim that giving a group of people property rights over animals, for example, is a clear sign that capitalism doesn’t work. Not sure if the writer understands that a corporation is merely a legal entity formed by multiple people (typically) to act in the legal and economic spheres.
Letter 2: According to this individual, the sum total of the conservative philosophy can be summed up in one book by John Dean. All of the other sources on conservative and libertarian thought are out the window. This is silly.
Letter 3: The author makes no attempt to respond to my points. Very silly and I don’t know why they printed it at all.
Letter 4: Thanks Bill! Agreed.
Another one bites the dust!
Despite all the tax hikes during the last legislative session, we at the Rio Grande Foundation got some sense of vindication today when yet another pork project that we had outlined in our 2008 Piglet Book (page 13) was abandoned. The latest is the $13 million that the Legislature had set aside for a $23 million equestrian center from which money will be diverted to other, more pressing capital projects.
While this hardly represents a “victory” for taxpayers in light of all of the spending and the general lack of fiscal responsibility among those in the Executive and Legislative Branches who control the process, it is a start. Now, if we’d only abandon (or at least constrain the growth of) programs like the $80 million film subsidies, never have built the RailRunner or Spaceport, and gotten serious about reducing government employment, we’d be dealing with surpluses rather than tax hikes.
Disagreeing with the Experts
Nothing gets the blood flowing like internecine warfare. It is very easy to lob bombs at the left and others who want to “socialize” medicine, but it is quite another thing — a much more difficult one — to disagree with a nationally-recognized advocate for free market health care.
John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a health care expert with far more years in the field than I, recently blogged about some of the ideas put forth by Republicans in their health care meeting with President Obama. The idea that Goodman disagrees so vehemently with is to allow all out-of-pocket spending on health care to be deductible. This, proponents (like me) argue, would ultimately undermine the third-party-payer system of health care in this country because employees would no longer have the incentive to rely on their employers for health care and would instead take the additional pay and enter the individual market, more than likely adapting health savings accounts and other consumer-driven health care products in large numbers.
Goodman argues that eliminating taxes health care expenses would create a situation in which “government would be paying almost half the cost…” With this subsidy, health care spending would rise dramatically. He instead argues for equalizing the tax treatment of health care with other goods — an ideal solution that I agree with — but I doubt that Congress or the American people would go along with such a massive tax hike unless tax rates were lowered…and you get the picture. Very complex and not likely to happen.
So, I remain supportive of eliminating taxes on health care. Why? Well, first and foremost, even if you are being subsidized to the tune of 50% for health care, you still control the money and will work to keep costs down. Pricing will become a part of the health care industry in a way that it is not today because of the third-party system. Also, the individual market will grow, thus making that a more viable proposition and keeping costs down and giving millions of Americans greater control of their health care (no more remaining stuck in a job just because of health care). Lastly, consumer-driven health care like HSA’s will take off and flourish. These all seem like good things to me. Besides, do you really trust politicians to not cave into special interests by exempting health insurance from taxation as we did in New Mexico (NM’s gross receipts tax still hits certain health care costs like deductibles and co-pays).
Ending taxation of health care costs seems to have more benefits than drawbacks. Maybe I’m wrong. What do you think?
Is Toyota’s Failure a Market Failure?
The problems associated with Toyota’s faulty brakes are by now widely known. Many on the left and in government will use this as an opportunity to expand government power while blaming the free market for yet another failure.
But, as this column from the free market think tank, The Independent Institute points out, people (and businesses) are not perfect. Toyota clearly screwed up here and the market (average customers reacting to information) is punishing them. The loss of millions of dollars in sales, not to mention the harm this issue has done to the company’s public image, will serve as an incentive to Toyota not to cut corners next time and a reminder to other businesses — automotive and otherwise — to make sure that their products are ready for “prime time” before they are sold to the public.
In other words, the market is responding quickly to make sure this doesn’t happen again or happens less often in the future. As we see in the field of education, the same cannot be said for government.
Paul Gessing’s EIB Conflict of Interest Statement Footage (and commentary from American Spectator)
Footage of my appearance before the Environmental Improvement Board on March 1, 2010 is now available (below). Also, Paul Chesser over at the American Spectator blog picked up the story and added his own thoughts.
