A look at MLG’s Proposed budget

01.12.2022

You can find the full budget here. It represents a 13.5% annual increase over the prior budget. There is not a whole lot to get excited about for anyone who cares about economic (as opposed to government) growth, but here are some interesting items:

  1. She doesn’t explicitly discuss her small GRT cut in her budget. I went back and found an old Bill Richardson budget online and you can bet HE mentioned cutting taxes! With the State experiencing banner growth in the budget thanks  to the oil and gas industry (and Washington money-printing), cutting taxes SHOULD be a much higher priority.
  2. In her budget,  Lujan Grisham claims, “This administration has created more jobs during the pandemic than the prior administration created in eight years – roughly 40,000.” She provides ZERO footnotes or citations for her assertion which is made on page IV of her budget. We used data from Bureau of Labor Statistics and found a very different story. Using the “total civilian labor force” for the beginning/end/most recent month available (November 2021) we see that the number of jobs grew by 5.3% under Martinez while Lujan Grisham is at-1.5 percent since the start of her term.  It is hard to tell how Lujan Grisham justifies her claim aside from absolving herself from ALL jobs LOST during the pandemic and then taking credit for ALL jobs CREATED since its darkest days.
  3. Lujan Grisham’s budget request includes $2.5 million to create a 15-person “Climate Change Bureau.” (page XIX). The newly-created bureaucracy would cost taxpayers more than $166,000 per employee and would give the Gov. a paid group to push her radical environmental agenda.
  4. Finally, while there are many items contained in the budget to take issue with, Gov. Lujan Grisham proudly repeats one of her most disturbing lines. On page III she touts “a cradle-to-career education system for all New Mexicans.” You don’t have to be a raging libertarian to be skeptical of a government that pushes its long tentacles into the cradle.

UPDATED: 1/25/22