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Welcome to
the e-Voices MONDAY MINUTE, your weekly email newsletter from New
Mexico Voices for Children. Please take a minute to add your voice
to the pressing issues of the day. Also, tell us what issues you'd like
to know more about so we can tailor the MONDAY MINUTE to your interests.
Thanks! June 12,
2006 We may have a government by the people and for the people, but rarely does the government actually ask for its people’s opinions. Now they are. Between now and August 31, 2006, the feds want to know what kind of health care system you think this country should have.
When the Medicare prescription drug bill passed, it required the creation of an independent, nonpartisan group to visit the country and talk with Americans about health care. Not surprisingly, the Citizens’ Health Care Working Group found that, by and large, Americans want health coverage that doesn’t leave anyone out.
The group then came up with six recommendations, which are posted online. Among them: that all Americans have affordable health care and be guaranteed financial protection from catastrophic health care costs.
What You Can Do:
Message Received
Last week we asked you to tell your Senate representatives to vote against repealing the estate tax. Thanks to your efforts, the vote to repeal the estate tax won’t happen any time soon. That’s because on Thursday a vote to proceed with the repeal failed.
This doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that the issue is gone for good. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist vowed to bring the repeal up for consideration again before the year is out.
To keep that specter at bay, take a look at a new report by Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ). “How the Federal Estate Tax Affects New Mexico” shows how many New Mexican estates were subject to this tax in 2004. Just 100. That’s out of 14,805 deaths in 2003 – or less than 1 percent of the population.
The American
Nightmare The CTJ report goes on to note just how wide the wealth gap has become in this country and quotes this ugly stat from the Federal Reserve Bank: “the richest 1 percent of Americans now own more than 33 percent of the wealth nationwide.” To read
the whole report visit: http://www.ctj.org/pdf/estnm.pdf Unconventional Wisdom
Speaking of the wealth gap, a story in last week’s Economist magazine took a look as studies showing that the countries that spend more on programs to assist their poor have less persistent poverty than countries – like the U.S. – that are spending less and less. Seems that the old ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ notion is just that.
To read the
story, which requires a paid subscription,visit http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6972486. New Mexican Children Left Behind
A bit closer to home now, Part 1 of the National Indian Education Study (NIES), done by the National Center for Educational Statistics, was released late last month and indicates that a lot of New Mexico’s Native children are being left behind. The report looked at how Native children in grades 4 and 8 are doing in reading and math. Among other findings, the report shows that 8th grade American Indian students in New Mexico and South Dakota have lower math scores than their counterparts in the rest of the nation. It also shows that it’s time we gave our Native communities the resources and support they need to educate Native children. To read the whole report go to: http://www.nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/nies/ Your financial support is critical to our work. Please consider making a contribution today at http://www.nmvoices.org/donate.htm
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