State legislators must shed the partisanship for profound changes
What makes anyone in their right mind think we can keep using our state’s budget as a surrogate for our ingrained political intransigence without actually raising some welts and doing some permanent damage? This time it’s education; next time, who knows? The political lines in this battle were drawn a long time ago and in a galaxy far, far away. Unfortunately, that galaxy’s gravitational pull is not reality-based. It’s a place where political ideology rules and common sense is anything but common.
Of course I’m talking about the Legislature, the place where pragmatism and bipartisanship go to die and that seems to have embraced Einstein’s definition of insanity (doing the same thing over again and expecting different results) as its motto. The legislators are locked and loaded, and so is the governor. While there may be some compromise in the wind, I’m reminded of President George H.W. Bush when he said, “Read my lips. No new taxes.” And what happened? New taxes. That is not to say that he didn’t mean it at the time, it’s just that events overtook him, just like our balanced budget requirement has a way of forcing compromise at the eleventh hour.
Our budget is just a reflection of our state’s unhealthy fundamentals, and we all know what they are by heart: overdependency on the Feds and the oil and gas industry, to name the top two, but then there’s the halfmillion New Mexicans living at or near the poverty level, the 25 percent of our population that don’t even have health insurance or unemployment insurance. They’re way beyond thinking about balancing their budgets. They’re already under water with no hope of a life preserver in sight.
On a general revenue versus expenditures level, nobody should even contemplate placing a greater burden on taxpayers already suffering under sales taxes, escalating county property taxes, a state income tax, the letting of state contracts to out-of-state companies, not to mention the princely salaries of some university sports coaches and vice presidents with dubious portfolios earning in excess of $200,000 per year. The latter is the tail that is wagging the public sector dog. We used to call it featherbedding, and New Mexico’s administrative academics have found the brass ring of cushy lifetime employment and are dug in while small-business owners are desperately trying to survive in an uncertain economy. Many of our seniors are faced with a “Sophie’s choice” of buying food or medicine while we’re worried about our institutions of higher learning. I have great empathy with our leaders, but this game of fiscal “chicken” can simply not be replayed, year after year, like a rerun of the movie, Groundhog Day.
Every citizen wants safe streets, affordable services and, of course, good schools and universities, but we must face facts — we will not be able to afford them unless we are prepared to shed our partisanship and make some profound changes in the way we do things. We must come to grips with our present fiscal situation, first. Next, we need to decide what we want to be when we grow up (fix the fundamentals) and do a cost-benefit analysis of “the plan,” which includes an assessment of what’s needed to run our universities’ administrative departments in a costeffective and fiscally defensible manner. Then, and only then, can we move confidently towards the future. Our government owes us this at the very least.