I remarked the other day that Amy Oliver and Michael Sandoval of our Energy Policy Center have been doing some fantastic work lately. Not sure why energy policy doesn’t get as much play as other policy areas but I certainly think energy is sexy. Their latest article scrutinizes the Obama administration’s love affair with China. The relationship is not simply a trade friendly “I give you something, you give me something” type of deal. It has more to do with China’s rare earth minerals and the ability of said minerals to produce “renewable” energy – which Amy and Michael once again prove is anything but green (and often times deadly).

We just released a new Issue Paper that tackles the perennial question: how much are we taxed here in Colorado? Many on the Left presume it’s not enough. When our researcher Anthony Gonzalez really dug into it and looked at the whole picture (state AND local taxation), Colorado it turns out sits right in the middle of the nation at 26th. Take a look at our first Issue Paper of 2012, How Colorado’s Tax Burdens Rank Nationally.

In his latest blog post, our Constitutional scholar Rob Natelson shares his thoughts on the recently signed into law National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Many believe the NDAA codifies the Executive Branch’s ability to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial. What does Rob think? Check it out here.

Keep your eyes on this developing story: Democratic lawmakers are putting RTD’s toes to the fire on building out the Northwest corridor. RTD made a promise many years ago and the folks up in the Longmont area have been paying for a rail system that has yet to be delivered. How long can RTD hold out? How long will the Northwest corridor take it? Time will tell…

Finally, there is a really cool economics fundamentals class being held at our building this Saturday the 11th. I encourage all of you to take a look at the details here. For those still not on Facebook, here is some information:

Are you a liberty activist who loves free markets, capitalism and limited government – but have a difficult time describing its myriad benefits and merits when talking with others?

Then this is the educational training course for you!

Liberty on the Rocks is looking for leaders in the liberty movement (current or future) who are interested in obtaining insights into the basic fundamental principles of free market economics by attending a half-day educational course in Denver. **Tickets to attend are $10**

On Saturday, February 11th from 1:30-6:30pm, Liberty on the Rocks will present an exclusive hands-on, discussion and activity-driven economics session. During this half-day course, attendees will learn and/or better understand:

-The role economics plays in the advancement of liberty

-How to make the case for freedom from an economic and philosophical perspective

-How prices work in a market place

-Different ways of looking at public policy from an economic perspective

-The essential arguments for why socialism can’t work

RSVP today by purchasing tickets at: http://denver.libertyontherocks.org/economic-freedom-session/

Email Amanda Muell for even more info.

When we embarked on our Citizens’ Budget project two years ago, we wanted it to be a big deal. It had to be, it was an enormous undertaking. We wanted to leave no stone unturned in our quest for a fiscally sound Colorado state budget. The project ended up requiring months of time from our most dedicated researchers and writers. In the end, we had a 170 page document that touched on all areas of our budget and offered sound solutions to our most urgent needs. Additionally, we made a 6-page executive summary of our findings for those who don’t want the big kahuna.

When the Citizens’ Budget first dropped, we found it was extremely popular with the Tea Party and limited government crowd. We ordered hundreds of physical copies and could hardly keep those puppies in stock! But when it came to our state legislature, there was hardly a peep. 2011 came and went and we wondered why no legislators jumped on any of our suggestions. Yeah, some of them are politically unpopular, but many of them are not. What gives?

But now in 2012 some brave state legislators have taken up the cause for fiscal responsibility! For a great overview of 3 bills working their way through the legislature thanks to our project, look no further than Wayne Laugesen’s editorial in today’s Colorado Springs Gazette. Wayne praises our Citizens’ Budget and goes on to explain how our suggestions to shore up the Public Employees Retirement Association (PERA) made their way into 3 bills thus far.

The first is a bill carried by Rep. Chris Holbert of Parker. The bill “would cap the health benefit for early retirees at $230 a month and eliminate health care payments for retirees who have reached the age of eligibility for Medicare.” Secondly, we have Senate Bill 119 carried by Sen. Tim Neville of Littleton. His bill “would force the board of directors of PERA to adjust benefits in order to “maintain the long-term actuarial soundness of each trust fund.” Our Fiscal Policy Center director and lead author of the Citizens’ Budget Penn Pfiffner gives a great explanation of exactly what that means,

“Today, the PERA board tells state government to get the money it needs. This bill says they have to adjust benefits accordingly. Once taxpayers have made their contribution, it will be up to PERA to make it work. We would no longer be responsible for how PERA handles the money.

Finally we have a Senate Bill 82 carried by Sen. Ted Harvey of Highlands Ranch. His bill “would increase the age at which new public employees would be eligible for retirement benefits.” For example, today some new hires can plan on retiring at 58 years old thanks to PERA. Sen. Harvey’s bill would increase the age to 68 – the same as Social Security.

It’s exciting to see that the tremendous work our research team did two years ago is bearing fruit in 2012. We encourage all legislators to read their copy of our Citizens’ Budget (yes, you have one. If you can’t find yours, contact us immediately!) and take on the challenge to strike at the heart of our continued budget deficits. What’s the heart of our budget issues? As Penn Pfiffner says, “it’s a structural problem.” In other words, it’s time we discard all the accounting gimmicks we have to use each year to balance the budget. If the Citizens’ Budget were in charge, we wouldn’t need any tricks to fix a deficit because there wouldn’t be a deficit year after year.

Read more about the Citizens’ Budget project here.

“Hey Jon, what’s going on with energy policy these days?

Oh hey there! I’m glad you asked. Our Energy Policy Center director Amy Oliver has been hitting the energy and environment issues hard lately. You should take a look at our Energy Policy Center’s webpage to stay on top of Amy and Michael Sandoval’s work. For example, when President Obama came to town to talk about his “comprehensive” view of energy, Amy and Michael put together a nice article translating his rhetoric into real life language – that real people speak! Additionally, Amy sat down with my main minion Justin Longo to discuss Obama’s energy policies and figure out how his “green” energy favoritism gets twisted into an “all of the above” approach he claims to have. You can hear Amy translate and discuss Obama’s energy policies here on iVoices.org.

Let’s bring energy policy even closer to home shall we? Amy and Michael also tackled the upcoming energy legislation before our Colorado representatives in this year’s legislative session. What’s some of the good? What’s some of the bad? And you know there’s going to be some downright ugly when it comes to energy policy in Colorado… so what’s that all about this year? Amy gives a run down of some of the more important legislation in this iVoices.org podcast with Justin. You might be surprised at how great some of the good stuff is. (Hint: Rep. Spencer Swalm is on an energy tear this year!) Likewise, the bad will bad and the ugly… expensive.

Our good friends over at Americans for Prosperity (AFP) have a great new project called Monkey Wrenching America. I encourage you to check it out, as it’s the first effort I’ve seen focused entirely on exposing the professional “green” energy agenda. Many groups are taking up the cause of free markets in energy. AFP however is going to tackle exposing the well-paid left-wing groups who use the media, the court of public opinion, actual courts, and the hammer of government to destroy our already beaten down domestic “dirty” energy industries. Here’s how AFP describes their project against monkeying with our energy industry:

Monkey-Wrenching America was created to document the danger professional green extremists pose to America’s economy, limited government ideals and freedom-oriented way of life. The economic, fiscal, judicial and human costs of green monkey-wrenching activities aren’t as well-documented as they should be, because the establishment media becomes an unabashed cheerleader where the environmental movement is concerned. This website, and the stories and reports it hosts, will help document these excesses and bring some balance and reason to the public debate about environmental issues.

Be sure to check out their Wall of Shame. It’s going to be a great way to document the special interest groups who oppose low energy costs.

UCCS Professor Joshua Dunn can’t help himself. He can’t believe the audacity of Denver District Court Judge Sheila Rappaport’s decision in the epic saga we know as the Lobato case. He’s been sounding the alarm on this ruling ever since it came down last month. If you haven’t heard Professor Dunn’s argument yet, here are a couple great resources. First, you can listen to our iVoices.org podcast featuring Professor Dunn and our Education Policy analyst Ben DeGrow. They hit the airwaves shortly after Judge Rappaport’s ruling came down. Additionally, Joshua wrote an op-ed for us that hit the Colorado Springs Gazette’s opinion pages last night. In both venues, Professor Dunn argues that Judge Rappaport disregarded the totality of our state constitution when deciding the Lobato case. Instead, she chose just the sections that suited her worldview and threw out all the inconvenient stuff. Joshua says her decision was entirely political, not constitutional.

AG John Suthers sat in front of the Joint Budget Committee yesterday to discuss the Lobato case and its potential time frame. He indicated that he believed it could be a full year before we’ve reached any resolution. That seems hardly adequate considering we’re dealing with a large chunk of the state’s budget. How can we plan for the future when Lobato threatens to eat away a majority of our general fund?

We’ve all heard about the Solyndra scandal, but have you heard about the Lowenstein Project? Wait, you didn’t know you had the Lowenstein “investment” in your portfolio? Didn’t know you made a loan that was never repaid? Me neither.

In an op-ed the Reason Foundation’s Harris Kenny wrote for us that landed on the pages of the Denver Post, we learn about Colorado’s version of corporate welfare gone crazy. (side note: Abound Solar will be next). Harris describes the filthy process that starts with an idea and ends with taxpayers getting hosed for millions of dollars. I find it odd that politicians discover these great “investment opportunities” and can only come up with other people’s money to use as capital…

Here’s the takeaway:

Government-issued loans are often based on insider favoritism and politics. They rarely fulfill their supposed purpose of the public good. The companies that receive government welfare are given an unfair advantage over those that don’t. Corporate welfare encourages companies to be good at politics, instead of good at business.

Christmas is the time of year for giving. For example, I’ve been giving myself seconds and thirds at all the holiday parties I’ve gone to. (I’m still accepting invitations through the rest of this week). Amy Oliver and Michael Sandoval have been hard at work the past month giving the world a much needed dose of reality when it comes to “green” energy. Remember this article and this one? Those were just the tip of the iceberg. Amy and Michael have no plans to stop their crusade to give every green energy advocate a headache for Christmas. Their latest piece on Townhall.com goes further into the wilderness of green energy fallacies with, “Green Technology that Pollutes the Planet.” Turns out, green energy is the gift that keeps on giving.

Keeping with the theme of green fallacies, another great enviro-lie is that hydraulic fracturing is a boogeyman that sneaks into your house at night and contaminates your drinking water. As with all distortions of reality, a lie repeated often enough eventually becomes “true.” The latest opportunity for anti-fracking fanatics to re-tell their scare story came from an EPA report on groundwater contamination in Wyoming. Predictably, the enviros jumped on this AP story and screamed to the heavens, “SEE! We told you fracking is dangerous!!!!”

Umm…. guys, did you read the report?

Unfortunately for the loony Left, our intern Donovan Schafer did. He found that the Wyoming report did not indict fracking as the Left would have you believe, but rather, exonerated fracking. In this op-ed published in the Colorado Springs Gazette last week, Donovan goes into detail how the Wyoming report concluded that fracking is safe. Here’s a snippet,

So was any drinking water contaminated, and is anyone’s health at risk? The results from the 51 domestic wells respond with a resounding “No!”

There you have it folks. A couple more green energy gifts from us at the Independence to you.

Here we go again. The Left’s latest attempt to defame the Tea Party movement appears in the latest issue of Vanity Fair magazine. In the article, “Debt and Dumb,” the authors distort the founding era record and our Constitution to vilify Tea Partiers. As we’ve seen recently, the Constitution is back in vogue and even the Left is using it to further their big government agenda. (”What’d the founders think? Well, look at Hamilton!”)

Um, okay. Let’s look at him.

Rob Natelson deconstructs the Vanity Fair article in this constitution.i2i.org blogpost. As Rob notes, VF does a great job revising history to fit their beliefs. Over on iVoices.org, Rob sits down with one of my minions to talk about the VF article and why it’s dead wrong. Podcast here.

I bet you’ve long wondered how Colorado funds its K-12 education. Well, wonder no more my friends. If you’ve got a spare 20 minutes, I encourage to listen to our Education Policy Center’s Ben DeGrow break the whole thing down here. While you’re listening you can follow along with a PowerPoint presentation as well. Audio alone stinks. Visual alone stinks. Put them together and you get an audio/visual awesome sandwich!

In the constant struggle for taxpayer dollars, there exists one big budget item that tends to get lost in shuffle: Medicaid.

Medicaid plays a particularly cruel trick on state budgets. As the economy takes a turn for the worse, revenues coming into the government decline. Coloradans are making less money and paying less in taxes. In turn, poorer Coloradans means more of us on government rolls – like Medicaid. With more people applying for Medicaid benefits, the strain on government’s smaller revenue stream becomes greater and greater. It’s a vicious cycle that doesn’t seem to excite newspaper reporters like declining funds for K-12 education seems to.

As rare as a good Medicaid lead story is, the Durango Herald’s Joe Hanel did a great job of reporting on what many consider a rather unsexy news story. Here is something to be concerned with,

An extra 281,000 people will join the Medicaid rolls between 2007, when the downturn began, and next year, the state predicts. That’s an increase of 72 percent in just six years.

Ouch. A 72% increase would require some extra funding right Joe?

Although next year’s budget is growing slightly, higher Medicaid expenses will eat up all of the growth and more, putting the squeeze on schools, colleges and the rest of government.

Double ouch! See, it’s a perpetuating cycle. The question is: what can we do about it? Some would suggest more taxes and fees. Some want more taxes masquerading as fees. But that only addresses the revenue side of the equation. And increasing revenues means taking more from the struggling private sector – the sector that actually creates jobs. What about the cost side of the equation? It is here where Hanel quotes our Health Care Policy Center director Linda Gorman,

Also, the state can ask for specific waivers from federal Medicaid rules, Gorman said. In fact, Colorado already has 11 waivers, but they usually let the state expand coverage in a more cost-effective way than federal rules allow, not reduce coverage. Gorman thinks the state needs to be more creative about asking for waivers that would let it run its programs more economically.

To hear more Linda Gorman on the crushing weight of Medicaid expansion, check out my TV show from a few weeks back.