Columns

The League of Women Voters of New Mexico is concerned about the last-minute tax bill slammed through the New Mexico Legislature and the broken process.
HB641, like any comprehensive tax legislation, has many components which will have long-term effects on New Mexico’s economy.
Experts are still debating the overall cost and benefit projections, the challenges for municipalities, the difficulties of implementation, and other effects.
Open discussions on these important matters should have taken place before and during the session. Much more time was spent on congratulatory memorials than on examining the various aspects of this major bill. Committee hearings and floor sessions on many inconsequential matters slogged on for most of the session. In the last few days of the session, legislators had to work unreasonably long hours and vote on legislation that they had never seen, much less studied.
They were under tremendous pressure trying to arrive at a grand bargain that the governor would sign.

When someone else sets up the argument, columnists become happy. A page one headline and story about a new device from Sandia National Laboratories generated happiness. That’s because the device has nothing to do with nuclear weapons, so far as I can tell. Nor is it military. The relationship to national security seems direct, again from this layman’s view, though that relationship travels the public health route, certainly a national security matter.
The argument here is that New Mexico’s federal research sector — Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia, White Sands Missile Range, and other military research and development organizations — is diverse, tackling big science topics well beyond the core national defense-nuclear weapons subjects. The topic was a five-inch cube of plastic called SpinDx designed for field use to quickly test people for toxins, bacteria, or viruses. SpinDx was developed at Sandia’s Livermore, Calif., branch. Collaborators include the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, the Department of Agriculture’s Western Regional Research Center and Bio-Rad Laboratories of California.

Of all the joys spring offers, one of the most troublesome things about this time of year is the increase of insects on our furry friends.
Of all these creepy pests, adult fleas cause the most problems for our pets.
In order to become adults, fleas need warm weather, between 70 and 80 degrees, and around 70 to 80 percent relative humidity.
“Those ideal conditions are usually what we are experience during this time of the year, which is why we generally see more fleas coming out in the spring,” said Dr. Alison Diesel, lecturer in dermatology at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences.
Unlike many geographical areas where seasonal differences occur, fleas can be present year-round in Texas because of the warmer winters.
While many people think fleas are relatively harmless except for making our pets itch, fleas can cause numerous other health problems in our pets.
For example, some animals may react to an allergen found in fleas’ saliva, causing the animal to have an allergic reaction.
This causes the animal to itch and ultimately scratch, which can lead to a secondary skin infection.
If there is a massive amount of fleas, anemia could even become a potential problem, especially with small animals that do not have large amounts of blood.

In our highly partisan environment there seems to be very few issues that Republicans, Independents and Democrats agree on. This partisanship is easily seen in Congress, but is also alive with voters across the country. Small business owners are often no different than their customers in demonstrating divergent opinions on issues depending on their political preferences.
So when we find an issue on which small business owners agree, regardless of partisan leanings, we should take notice. And when that agreement centers on one of them most contentious matters that Congress will soon be addressing, our elected officials in Washington need to pay close attention. Such is the case involving federal tax fairness between small business and large, multinational corporations.
Small business owners are keenly aware that multinational corporations are legally escaping paying much, and often all, of the highly publicized 35 percent United States corporate income tax rate. In a poll released early last year by the American Sustainable Business Council and others, 80 percent of the small business owners surveyed said that U.S. multinational corporations using accounting loopholes to shift their U.S. profits to offshore tax havens is a problem. Seventy-five percent said that big corporations using tax loopholes harms their own small business.