The Wal-Mart of legislatures.

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: Column

THERE ARE NEW YEAR'S RESOLUtions you can keep, and there are those you can't.

I can't make a resolution this year to quit smoking because, after more than 30 years of lighting up, I managed to end that addiction beginning last June. My mid-year/mid-life resolution, as it were, ensures a Happy New Year and, hopefully, many more to come.

A resolution I can keep, however, is that I am no longer going to be a Wal-Mart shopper. I have finally decided that all those low prices--and they are low--still come at an awfully steep price: They cost jobs, they cost choice, they cost competition and, ultimately I believe, they will exact a harsh cost to the U.S. economy.

A resolution I would love to make, but know I cannot keep, is to have nothing more whatsoever to do with the Colorado legislature. I stay as far away from it and its members and machinations as possible but, of course, as a citizen of Colorado I can't escape its consequences.

What I didn't realize until I started thinking about my New Year's resolutions was how the legislature, or General Assembly, and Wal-Mart are very much alike. They share a characteristic of insidiousness. On the surface each institution looks like a great deal and good business, but dig a little deeper and you'll find both are penny-wise and pound foolish, with a little more emphasis on "foolish" when it comes to the lawmakers.

With Wal-Mart, everyone is trying to get their product in there because the chain is the largest enterprise on earth and it can deliver sales, no doubt. And each and every year when a contract is renewed, Wal-Mart demands more for less, a system that, at first, makes the supplier more efficient in how he makes and delivers product.

But over time, this efficiency gets insidious because once you've squeezed every ounce of productivity out of suppliers, they must, to stay in business, cut into bone and muscle. They shift their operations overseas and fire American workers, and while this is going on Wal-Mart has effectively bankrupted its competition. It's no coincidence, for instance, that venerable jeans maker Levi Strauss closed down all of its U.S. manufacturing pretty much at the same time it cut a deal with Wal-Mart to supply a new line of low-cost jeans to the retail behemoth.

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