D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February 2010
Editor's Notebook
Page: 2Similarly, enforcement efforts need to rely more on saturation patrols proven to be effective at apprehending drunk drivers, and less on random checkpoints. The whole point of checkpoints — which even the officers involved admit don't catch many actual DWI offenders — is to scare people. But the drivers most likely to drive drunk now, after years of messaging about the evils of DWI, can't be scared sober.
If we concentrate on those — previously convicted or not — at the core of the drunk-driving problem, we'll have the best chance to continue making New Mexico's highways safer.
As a postscript, if Gov. Richardson is truly concerned about public safety, we're baffled by his recently stated opposition to an increase in the state's tobacco tax as one way to help bridge the budget shortfall. Smoking continues to be the number-one contributor to mortality, not to mention a rogue's gallery of health issues. Drunk driving killed 143 New Mexicans in 2008 — too many, but still dwarfed by the death toll from smoking: According to the Centers for Disease Control, smoking kills more than 2,100 New Mexicans every year.
Paging Adam Smith
Infractions against the law of supply and demand.
Daily life here at Desert Exposure continues to remind us that the law of supply and demand we learned about way back in Economics 101 doesn't always work the way the professor taught us. Free-marketeers, catching their breath from having driven the US economy into a ditch in 2008, might want to consider our little local lessons before they next launch into a paean to the eternal wisdom of Adam Smith.
Take gas prices, for example. When one of the Albuquerque TV stations recently promised an answer to the perpetual question of why Silver City gas prices are always so much higher than anyplace else, we were all ears. We'd grappled with this dilemma ourselves back in the August 2007 issue ("Pumped Up"), and frankly we're not entirely satisfied with the answers we got.
Unfortunately but not surprisingly, the TV news did a good deal less probing than we did, satisfying themselves if not their Silver City viewers with a single call to the state petroleum association. Their answer? Gas costs more in Silver City — 40 cents higher than in Lordsburg, at this writing — because of the cost of trucking fuel here, off the beaten track and the interstate.
This prompted us to do a little math. A gas tanker holds about 9,000 gallons, so an extra 40 cents per gallon works out to $3,600 in additional revenue per load. It's about 45 miles from I-10 — where gas costs 40 cents less — to Silver City, so figure a 90-mile round trip. That means it costs $40 a mile to haul gas here, or about $2,400 an hour. Nice work if you can get it.
Somehow, we suspect there's more to the story.
Similarly, every month when the bill for printing Desert Exposure appears in our mailbox, we grimace at the surcharge of several hundred dollars for newsprint. The printer thoughtfully breaks out this amount to remind us that it's merely passing along cost increases imposed by the paper mills. (I might point out here that, despite multiple newsprint price hikes, we have not passed along any of this extra expense to our advertisers in the form of higher ad rates. We understand that the small businesses, nonprofits and other enterprises whose advertising makes Desert Exposure possible each month have plenty of economic challenges without our adding to them in tough times.)
Now, if you've paid any attention to the plight of the newspaper industry, you know that demand for newsprint must be way down. Publications have trimmed their page sizes, thinned their page counts and ceased publishing altogether. Leading newspaper chain Gannett (which co-owns the Las Cruces Sun-News through a partnership deal) says its newsprint consumption is down 30%.
Surely, then, newsprint prices must be plummeting. Sadly for surviving publishers like us, not so. Here, at least in a perverse way, supply and demand is working: The near-monopoly newsprint industry anticipated reduced demand by sharply ratcheting back paper production and closing mills. That wasn't enough, however, to keep Canadian newsprint giant AbitiBowater — formed in a monopoly-strengthening 2007 merger of US and Canadian competitors — from filing for bankruptcy last April. The upshot of the bankruptcy will no doubt be still-higher prices.
So, just to review this vicious cycle: Newspapers cut back, causing newsprint suppliers to cut back even more, keeping prices high so newspapers will have to cut back again. Eventually, it seems, we'll be left with one newspaper printing on a single piece of paper produced by the last surviving mill.
Isn't economics wonderful? At least now, though, when the whole publishing industry goes kerflooey, we have something to fall back on: driving a gasoline tanker from Lordsburg to Silver City. Hey, $2,400 an hour is hard to beat.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.