Sen. Tom Udall visited the Rio Grande SUN April 6 following his town hall meeting. It’s not often you get to sit down one-on-one with a U.S. senator, much less one with Udall’s experience.
We were encouraged that Udall was genuinely concerned about the fate of the newspaper business. He realizes the best journalism comes from the print sector, with radio and television stations reading the papers to listeners and viewers.
However, he stopped short when we asked for a million dollar bailout for the SUN. He thought we should remain the strong independent news collecting business we’ve always been. We were eyeing big bonuses for management.
He danced around some of the tough questions like: How are we going to pay for everything? Aren’t we going to have to raise taxes? Where is all the social security money and how and when will we repay that?
That last question used to send former Sen. Pete Domenici into absolute fits. He always insisted the money was there. It’s not. It’s been borrowed by your government and there’s a great big IOU in its place. IOUs eventually have to be paid.
Remember everyone laughing at Al Gore in the 2000 election when he kept saying, “locked box” during debates. He was referring to leaving social security alone and he really had a point.
Udall contends the expiration next year of the Bush tax cut on the wealthy will help a lot and the sundown clause being removed on the estate tax (death tax) will help even more. After 2010 there will be a $3.5 million deduction per person or $7 million per couple. Udall said the new law will only affect 100 New Mexicans.
What Udall did share with us is that he’s encouraged Los Alamos National Laboratory director Michael Anastasio has increased the lab’s non-nuclear mission by 12 percent. That’s good news if the Lab is going to make itself indispensable in these tough Washington budget times. Many in the Valley worry annually about the fate of the Lab’s big budget. With a shift toward new energy and science, the Lab will be in a better light come budget time.
Oh, and he hated that word shift, or switch, or change when discussing the Lab’s mission. The verb is diversify. The Lab needs to diversify its mission.
There are going to be some changes if they’re going to diversify, though.
He also said Democrats have made great strides in changing ear marks. Those are the pesky things senators tag onto the end of a bill in the middle of the night in a closed conference committee. It’s where we get these multi-million dollar studies of bovine methane or the color of spawning salmon or the infamous bridge to nowhere in Alaska.
Under the old rules ear marks equaled 5 percent of the total budget and could be added or struck without notice and senators were stuck with a budget bill in the light of day that they could not vote down. So they had to approve the budget, ear marks for bovine gas studies and all.
Now ear marks will equal 1 percent of the budget. Udall said he put his requests on his web site for all to view ahead of time. Additionally, subcommittees can add or strike ear marks and so can committees. It’s supposed to be a much more transparent process.
We also discussed tribes around the state disclosing how they spend federal money, like the FEMA money Santa Clara received for the Cerro Grande fire. Then there’s the issue of the United States Postal Service not releasing bids for the new post office, soon to open. He thought they already were public record.
We tried to explain the process whereby one of our lawyers argues with 20 of theirs and eventually two years later you get two pages of a 100 page package. And those two pages have black magic marker through anything of interest.
Udall said he’d check on that federal spending information.
It’s a different environment in Washington now, he said. That’s evidenced by the change in earmarks. Then there’s the recent memo from the Obama administration to federal agencies stating they must release public documents to the public. Cuban-Americans can now travel freely between the U.S. and Cuba and send money whenever they’d like.
We hope Sen. Udall will visit us more often and that we’ll get those federal documents long before he returns.