Press Releases & Media Statements

Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman notes that New Mexico could save $38 million annually on incarceration costs and crime-related expenditures by boosting the high school graduation rate of male students by just 5 percent. If that same 5 percent also went to college at the same rates as typical male high school graduates, their cumulative income would be $20 million higher than if they hadn’t attended college.

—While New Mexico’s Hispanics have a lower unemployment rate than Hispanics nationally, their rate is still more than double the unemployment rate for New Mexico’s non-Hispanic whites. This means that, well into a national recovery, nearly one in 12 Hispanic workers continues to be unemployed. Those are the findings of a report released today by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC.

New Mexico has lost 42,700 jobs since the Great Recession began, but the state’s jobs deficit is more than double that number. That’s because the state should have added 58,300 jobs since the recession began just to keep pace with population growth. Taken together, those two numbers show that the state is short 101,000 jobs—more than the entire working populations of Las Cruces, Belen, Deming, Grants, Roswell, Española, and Farmington combined. The jobs deficit is one of the focus areas of the report “The State of Working New Mexico 2013,” released today by New Mexico Voices for Children.

The omnibus tax bill signed into law today will cost the state of New Mexico at least $100 million dollars by fiscal year 2017 and is not likely to create any jobs. That’s the conclusion of a report by New Mexico Voices for Children on HB-641, the bill that was haphazardly passed in the final minutes of the 2013 legislative session and signed into law today.

Lawmakers cut the state’s top personal income tax rate in half in 2003 with the expectation that the big tax cut would draw companies to relocate their corporate headquarters here. That didn’t happen. Nor did the other five states that cut their personal income taxes in the last decade see any job growth as a result.

No state has made deeper cuts than New Mexico to its investment in public universities and colleges. New Mexico cut funding for higher education by $4,775 per student when adjusted for inflation—the largest spending drop in the nation—according to a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That’s a cut of 37 percent compared to the national average of 28 percent.

An increase in the statewide minimum wage—from $7.50 to $8.50 an hour—would put $105 million in new wages into the hands of low-wage workers, who would spend the vast majority of it here in the state. That new spending would increase the state’s gross domestic product by $67 million and create 590 new jobs.

New Mexico’s lowest-earning families pay state and local taxes at a rate more than double that of the highest-earning households. That’s according to the report, “Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of Tax Systems in All 50 States,” released today by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).

New Mexico Voices for Children released its annual New Mexico KIDS COUNT report today as part of Celebrating Children and Youth Day at the state Capitol. The annual report tracks child well-being by providing data on important indicators such as child poverty, child maltreatment rates, math and reading proficiency, teen birth rates by race/ethnicity, and more.

New Mexico Voices for Children’s executive director Dr. Veronica C. García released the following statement regarding Governor Martinez’s decision to expand Medicaid as provided for in the Affordable Care Act: “The right decision was made today for New Mexico’s families, children, and economy. The Medicaid expansion will do much more than provide health coverage for some 150,000 low-income adults who currently have no insurance.