'Colorado's two most pressing needs are in transportation and energy infrastructure," Gov. Bill Ritter said at a National Governors Association meeting in Philadelphia this week. Which explains why his tax proposal this fall was designed to pay for them, right? Actually, no. Those were college scholarships he wanted to fund with a hike in the severance tax, not the state's "most pressing needs."

Ritter has never asked Coloradans whether they want to spend more on transportation and energy infrastructure. But he's perfectly willing to offload the tab to the nation's taxpayers - in the name of economic stimulus, of course. He and most of his colleagues in the governors association are pressing president-elect Barack Obama for $136 billion for highway and public works projects that the chairman of the governors, Edward Rendell of Pennsylvania, claims are "ready to go."

Meanwhile, according to The New York Times, House Democrats are talking about a potentially much larger package for the states - every dollar of which will amount to new debt that will have to be paid off by younger workers and kids who haven't even entered the labor market yet.

To be sure, the federal debt may be devalued somewhat along the way if the government's profligate stimulus policies spur a bout of damaging inflation.

"You can't allow the financial system to collapse," economist Tucker Hart Adams told The Denver Post the other day. Still, she said, "I'm concerned they're creating huge problems down the line . . . The potential for inflation is enormous."

Margaret Thatcher once called inflation "the unseen robber of those who have saved." It would debase the retirement accounts of thrifty Americans just as surely as the recent stock market crash.

But hey, we've got pressing needs to fund, so let's not quibble over the long-term consequences of our public-works wish lists. Your kids won't mind paying higher taxes, will they? And you, of course, won't mind working into your 80s.

Those pesky facts

Remember the outrage surrounding last year's decision by the University of Denver's Graduate School of International Affairs to present the Newmont Mining chairman with an award? Why, activists and a number of professors were livid.

Associate professor Tom Rowe got so worked up in writing a diatribe against Newmont for The Denver Post that he referred to allegations involving the company's activities in Indonesia without bothering to mention that Newmont and its local executive had been acquitted of all charges in an Indonesian court. Nor did he mention that some of the claims had been exposed as hoaxes.

That legal case, by the way, was bumped up to Indonesia's supreme court, so the company is not out of the woods yet despite a strong array of studies and facts on its side. Indeed, it would be particularly ironic if Newmont found itself back in the dock after a recent report by The Jakarta Post concerning residents of Buyat Bay, the site of lurid claims involving the health effects of a nearby Newmont mine.

The article tells how Buyat residents felt manipulated by anti-corporate activists, who persuaded many to relocate to another community. These people are now returning to Buyat Bay, even though in some cases they had "burned their homes, after being lured by the promise from activists that they would be provided with fully furnished homes in Duminanga."

But here's the most damning sentence in the Jakarta Post article: "The Buyat residents said they were even required by the [rights groups] to claim they had contracted various illnesses from tailings dumped by gold mining company PT Newmont Minahasa Raya into the bay area."

These residents are by no means the first protagonists in Newmont's Buyat Bay saga to retract their claims, although whether that country's high court takes notice remains to be seen. We can be sure, though, that the Newmont haters on our campuses will be unmoved by the revelation - as facts have never enjoyed a prominent role in their thesis.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.