NM Economic Development Department responds to billboard campaign

Recently we covered a billboard campaign undertaken by one man in an effort to highlight New Mexico politicians’ failures on a variety of issues relating to crime and education. We happen to not only agree with him, but would add (and have extensively covered the fact) that New Mexico’s roads are falling apart, medical providers are in scarce supply, and that the Legislature and Gov. have failed to effectively use New Mexico’s massive oil and gas largesse in recent years to address these and other issues.

Well, New Mexico’s Economic Development Department responded with their own “campaign.” They are mock ups and they attempt to respond to the billboards. You can see several of them by scrolling through the Department’s Twitter feed. We’ll take several of them on here as of the afternoon of Friday, 10/10/2025.

1. NM has the 2nd largest sovereign wealth fund. Yes, this is true thanks to oil and gas. Why can’t we return money to New Mexico people and businesses in the form of tax cuts rather than government keeping all this money? New Mexico should be in great shape, but it is not.
2. NM is #1 in Family income growth.  We had an awful time confirming this data point because the EDD doesn’t provide a direct citation. One year of good data does not mean much. According to the Census Bureau New Mexico is the poorest state in the nation and nothing dramatic has improved during the nearly 8 years of Gov. MLG’s reign.
3. NM is first state w/ free child care and free college. So what? Has this led to higher incomes, improved outcomes for students/children? Are people and businesses moving to New Mexico for this? (the answer is no). It is time to judge New Mexico policies by their outputs, not their inputs in the form of more money).
4. NM is #1 in R&D spend intensity and PhD’s: Congratulations, we have two national nuclear laboratories thanks to historical accidents and federal taxpayers. The Labs are important to New Mexico, but haven’t gotten the State’s crime rate under control or improved educational outcomes overall.

The best quote comes from the man behind the billboards (keep an eye out for an upcoming podcast with him):

While I applauded everything positive New Mexico does to improve childcare and college tuition- the fact remains that 80% of eighth grader cannot read or do math at their grade level. And overall, our national ranking in education is Last Place— KRQE Facebook page shows over 3,000 likes and 1,000 heartfelt positive comments stating that we need to first admit that we have enormous problems so we can work together to solve them.