It seems that every week there is a new story in the newspaper showing the consequences of choosing tax cuts for the powerful over public investment. One of the most egregious, which has a huge impact on public safety, is the backlog of thousands of rape kits with DNA evidence that have not been processed.
With our schools, health care, courts, and infrastructure already cut down to the bone, and the state still short on money, there is no better time than now to evaluate every dollar spent on tax breaks to make sure they’re having the impact their proponents claimed. To be the New Mexico we wish to be, we simply can’t afford to do less.
If we’re going to be successful in fixing this thing before it crashes and burns, we need to look at the other failing pieces. Namely, that the state hasn’t been collecting enough money to cover all of our important expenses like education, health care, and public safety. We’ve been passing big tax cuts since 2003. Income tax cuts have been thrown at profitable corporations and the people earning the most money. These tax cuts were supposed to “create” jobs. They didn’t.
As the nation’s consumer habits shift from brick-and-mortar stores to online outlets, states like New Mexico will see more than job losses as those shops shutter. We’ll also lose the tax revenue generated by those sales. While the Internet is the problem, it can also be the solution—but only if policymakers act.
Students at UNM will see another increase of about $280 in their tuition and fees next year. That may not seem like a huge amount to some, but it’s enormous when you look at it this way.
There are only a couple of realistic choices when the state is short on cash: provide fewer services by cutting spending or raise more revenue by increasing taxes.
This revenue free-fall has hardly come out of the blue. We’ve been cutting taxes for well over a decade in the hopes that somehow jobs will materialize and we’ve created so many exceptions to our gross receipts tax that it’s got more holes than Swiss cheese. This one-sided approach to economic development has put us too much at the mercy of oil and gas revenues to pay the bills.
The Gila River diversion is not only bad for the environment, it’s a terrible way to invest such a big chunk—as much as $1 billion—of taxpayer money. There are better ways to meet our state’s water needs and much more important investments to make with those public funds.
State income tax cuts for the wealthiest—like those enacted in New Mexico more than a decade ago—do not create jobs. Still, lawmakers continue to slash taxes—along with spending for critical services like education, and public health and safety.
The notion of “paying it forward” is a popular one, and while we may not think about our income taxes as a form of paying it forward, that’s exactly what we’re doing. The public works that we all depend upon today—roads and highways, schools and parks, telecommunications and electrical grids, even courts and prisons—were made possible in part by taxes paid by past generations.