Update: No love for taxpayers in state budget

With yet another mammoth budget surplus ($3.4 billion) facing New Mexico’s Legislature next week when it convenes for a 30 day session, there will be plenty of new spending. Sadly, neither the LFC nor the Gov.’s budgets  have any tax reductions/reform or even rebates.

The LFC is the slightly more reasonable budget with “only” a 5.9% annual increase. Unsurprisingly, MLG’s budget is more aggressive with a 10% annual increase.

Updated item: The LFC has $200 million for some kind of tax policy reforms and the Gov. has $500 million, but we have no idea what those set-asides will contain at this point. 

Since Lujan Grisham’s first term in office in 2018 (passing the FY 2019 budget) New Mexico’s budget has grown from $6.3 billion to (a proposed) $10.5 billion. That’s growth of 66.67% or 9% annually. During that time the State’s myriad “permanent” funds have grown dramatically, but taxpayers have received minimal tax relief and no significant reforms have been adopted.

The John Trever cartoon below highlights the situation nicely although Republicans have negligible power in the Legislature.