Is Voices for Children coming around to our perspective?

For as long as the Rio Grande Foundation has been active in New Mexico our ideological opponents (in the think tank world) have been New Mexico Voices for Children. They might summarize it differently, but our view is that they have always sold the proposition that New Mexico is one more government program away from success. That’s why this recent opinion piece from the organization is quite interesting.

It has a lot of the same old, but it has some new statements that we’ve never heard before like “New Mexico has made historic investments in children. But investments are promises, not outcomes.” In other words, spending money and achieving positive outcomes are two different things.

The article further states, “The standard by which we judge our government’s effectiveness should be: Are children and families better off because of the follow-through on investments?” We agree!  

Will Voices ever come around to the view that New Mexico’s welfare programs are generally ineffective in fighting poverty? We doubt it. Will they advocate for sweeping tax cuts or reform of New Mexico’s gross receipts tax? Not likely. Will they enact policies (including but by no means limited to: the Mississippi Model for education reform, school choice, and work requirements) in order to boost New Mexico’s abysmal workforce participation rate? We wish.

But, it IS interesting to see for the first time a far-left organization actually talking about outcomes rather than just more inputs in the form of taxpayer dollars for more government programs. We’ll see how the upcoming election impacts Voices vision. Haaland will undoubtedly have a lengthy agenda of new government programs. Hull will likely evaluate those programs carefully while working to return money to taxpayers.