Author Archives: Bill Jordan

New Mexico politics will be getting an extreme makeover this year. It’s not just a presidential year. Four of the five members of our congressional delegation are being chosen and all 112 members of the state legislature are up for election. Nearly 20 current state legislators have chosen to give up their seat this year, [...]

March madness is upon us—and no, I don’t mean the Lobos going to the Big Dance. Rather, later this month the Supreme Court will finally hear legal challenges to the federal health care reform law, aka the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare. Remember the March madness of two years ago when the law was passed? [...]

Taxes matter. Despite the beating they get in public discourse, taxes are not bad. They are not to ‘blame’ for any number of evils. They are simply a tool. Taxes are the pooling of our resources in order to accomplish things collectively that few of us could accomplish on our own. Taxes are how we [...]

Within weeks of taking office, Governor Susana Martinez called for a “substantial redesign” of New Mexico’s Medicaid program—the health insurance that covers one in four New Mexicans, about two-thirds of whom are children. She has repeatedly said that the program is financially unsustainable, even though a couple of studies conducted by New Mexico Voices for [...]

At a time when workers’ rights and even child labor laws are under attack, it is encouraging to see a significant and hard-won victory for farm workers in New Mexico. Just before the holidays, Second District Judge Valerie Huling ruled that farm and ranch workers in New Mexico are entitled to be covered by workers’ [...]

There has been a lot of media attention lately about the importance of Medicare to seniors, thanks to the U.S. House-passed budget proposal that would have eliminated Medicare as we know it. The vast majority of voters would agree that Congress should keep their hands off Medicare. What’s getting less attention is that Medicaid is [...]

For some time now, New Mexico has been in the midst of a child care crisis. A tough economy led to this crisis but a lack of leadership from Santa Fe has made it worse. Over the last year, lawmakers have drastically cut the amount of child care assistance available to low-income working parents, while [...]

So what happened with all that transparency and accountability the new Governor was touting during the campaign? The Legislature stepped up and passed numerous bills that would improve transparency and accountability in state government and the only one she signed required more oversight for the burgeoning film industry. All of the measures that would have [...]