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Opinion roybal NEW MEXICANS HAVE GOTTEN PAST TOUGH TIMES BEFORE |
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
New Mexicans Have Gotten Past Tough Times Before
By David Roybal
For the Journal
No one ever made a dime betting against America, Bill Clinton said while out on the political trail earlier this year as serious signs of the nation's economic catastrophe first began appearing.
The reassuring note rings true for so many Americans who have been around for a while.
Longino Vigil, an apple farmer in Nambé, helped build the reputation alluded to by our former president. “I'm still 60 percent disabled in my feet from cold weather in Germany,” Vigil told me a while back, recalling bitter times of World War II. “All of my fighting in Germany was in the mountains. I had only summer combat boots and no gloves to hold my machine gun. At night, we'd sweep the snow with our little shovels then we'd cover ourselves with evergreen branches.
“When I'd come home on furlough, my dad always needed help. He'd send me to round up livestock around the Truchas Peak area to keep them from crossing over to Pecos Baldy. Instead of a welcome home party, I stayed mostly in the mountains working the cattle.”
The nation was in the grip of hard times.
Louis Tafoya, who lives on the West Side of Albuquerque's metropolitan area, recalls his family battling through hard times of the Great Depression — along with political favoritism that compounded troubles for some. “My grandfather was originally from Chimayó, but he was a Republican and because of that, he couldn't get work in the area,” Tafoya said. “He was always away from home herding sheep or working mines in Montana, Wyoming and Utah.”
Money was difficult to come by, and it is again. Stunning conditions have prompted not only Clinton but many others to step forward with reminders that we've made it through very demanding periods before. “This isn't a time for panic; this is a time for resolve,” Barack Obama told New Mexicans in September while campaigning for the presidency. “Our history isn't written for us; it's written by us.”
Our history-making efforts, indeed, will need to be at their very best once again because it seems we've managed to fall into every economic ditch in sight. Forget, if you can for a moment, the mind-boggling disaster rooted in Washington and New York that has Obama and his aides working overtime even before their new administration has taken over. Here in New Mexico, some of our leaders have steered us into serious trouble all our own.
Consider this lead paragraph in an Associated Press report by Deborah Baker in December 2006: “New Mexico lawmakers will have an unprecedented $720 million available to spend next year on beefing up the state budget and cutting taxes.”
Baker wrote of so-called “new money,” revenue that wasn't available when legislators last approved a state budget.
Two Decembers later we're told that those same lawmakers have to scramble to make up an estimated $500 million deficit in this fiscal year's budget.
That's a turnaround of more than $1.2 billion.
“It's very difficult for us to try to contain the appetite for spending, both by the executive and the Legislature,” Rep. Luciano “Lucky” Varela, D-Santa Fe, told Baker at the end of 2006. Still, said Varela, state leaders needed to ensure that New Mexico wasn't left in a squeeze should the healthy flow of state revenues slow.
State government enjoyed a huge surplus two years ago because of money it collected from oil and natural gas sales in what was then a soaring market.
Working as Senate President Pro Tem, Democrat Ben Altamirano of Silver City warned at the time against spending nonrecurring revenue on recurring expenses.
Sen. John Arthur Smith, a Deming Democrat who was preparing to take over as Senate Finance Committee chairman, also warned against over reliance on unpredictable energy revenues while locking in long-term state expenditures.
Varela, without holding the Legislature blameless, has been more vocal than most Democrats when it comes to linking Gov. Bill Richardson's administration to aggressive spending. Richardson fires back, saying legislative leaders of his own party aren't always good at setting priorities.
Republican Sen. Sue Wilson Beffort of Albuquerque suggests few can justify running for cover. “I hate to point the finger at the Democratic leadership because everybody votes on the budget,” she told me last week. “It's almost a godsend that we've got this shortfall because you can't keep expanding government endlessly and assume that we're always going to have the money to pay for it ... Gas and oil prices go up and down.”
The smart money says that both New Mexico and our nation will recover. Long from now, stories will be told how it was done. Wisdom would keep us from traveling this way again.
David Roybal can be reached at 505-351-4053.
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