The legislature starts next week with Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Jan. 19 giving her annual “bright and shiny” speech before both the House and Senate.
She released her $7.3 billion budget Monday, so things are bright and shiny as far as gross receipts tax, fees and oil and gas revenue. On main street, which has taken the brunt of the governor’s hard-line approach to controlling the virus, things aren’t as bright and shiny. It’s tough to support her approach when you look at other states that took a softer hand toward businesses doing much better in virus infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
The state received $1.5 billion in federal funding during 2020. A lot of that trickled down to these hard-hit businesses and expanded unemployment benefits. This played a large part in that money slowly coming back to the state in the form of income taxes and Gross Receipts Taxes. Federal stimulus packages also got people back out on the road, buying gasoline, New Mexico’s favorite addiction.
The incoming U.S. president is threatening yet another stimulus package, which may make Grisham’s budget feasible. Without adding another trillion or two to the federal deficit, now about $30 trillion, we’ll be hard pressed to squeeze a tax of any kind out of most businesses. They’ve got to be making money to be taxed.
The dynamic will be quite different in the secretive budget process this session. Our drunken sailor spending had been kept in check by former senator John Smith. He was ousted in the June primary and all of the committee chair positions will be in play next week.
Without a parent in charge of the purse, progressive Democrats that replaced several moderate Democrats, including Smith, will be pushing for yet more money for education. We’ve not the space nor inclination to again discuss the poor use of funds by our state’s failed education system.
Our own school board, instead of taking capital spending seriously, is more interested in paying teachers more. Higher teacher pay will not get your children a better education. Never has, never will. But it makes the far left feel like they did something of substance.
It’s good to see the governor is making an effort at bringing our sorely lacking broadband infrastructure into the late 20th century. The many band aids we see different government groups apply is testament to the lack of cohesion in attacking this problem. Putting aside the inability to attract business to the state, those impacted the most are of course people in poorer, more rural areas. It’s going to take more than the $20 million she’s budgeted to move the needle one megabit on the broadband problem.
At this time of online “teaching,” education and broadband go hand in hand. You can pay teachers more, but a $200,000 a year teacher can’t teach a class whose students can’t see the teacher, nor follow the lesson plan because possibly the teacher’s and students’ internet connectivity is based on 1955 phone lines.
After all the fighting and spending is done and legislators go home in March, look for situation normal, with no new business plan to slowly work the state off the oil teat and the lower paid population carrying most of the load.