Columns

All this talk about budget cutting conjures up images of Aubrey Dunn Sr. As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee back in the 1970s, he kept a hatchet on the table to remind his committee members – and everyone else – what they were there for.
I’m imagining two ghosts of budgets past hovering over Roundhouse deliberations – Dunn and the equally no-nonsense John Mershon, once chairman of the Legislative Finance Committee and the House Appropriations Committee. Both hailed from Otero County, both were fiscally conservative Democrats.

The Los Angeles Times reported recently on a new study that almost certainly caused a lot of readers to chuckle and say, “Duh.”
It seems investigators have discovered that among the health benefits people experience following retirement is a marked reduction in mental and physical stress, according to the study published last week in the British Medical Journal.
Hello? How could it be otherwise? Name a job from which one might retire that doesn’t induce some measure of physical or mental stress, if not a bit of both.  

Months before the 2008 Presidential race began, I read a poll that predicted who would win the election.  At that time, no one had even formally announced their candidacy, and yet the polls raged on.  I think some guy named Paul Reubens was the leading contender. Polling once again besieged us over the months before the 2010 elections and I found myself unplugging the phone in an effort to ward them off.
Americans are constantly inundated with polls; polls on who will win, polls on who should win, polls on who would leave the country if who wins.  

Sometimes my friends on the right get a little tiresome with the continuing litany that government is bad. That isn’t entirely true. Government does do some good stuff beyond the basic missions of education, health care, public safety and infrastructure.
Nor is it true that when government does something good, such as cut taxes, all is sweetness and light. Here I’m referring to the current argument from Paul Gessing of the Rio Grande Foundation that the Richardson tax cuts explain New Mexico’s climb in state per capita income ranks the past few years.