Paul Gessing

It was reported recently that 7 out of 10 live births in New Mexico are on Medicaid.

Astonishing, troubling…arguably, the most painful statistic of all for New Mexicans wondering whether their state truly is in a “death spiral” as some national media have reported.

It’s time to stop the minimum wage madness in New Mexico! Setting price floors for human labor is both bad economics and unfair to the very workers it is supposed to help. Already, Santa Fe has among the highest mandated wages in the nation at $10.29 an hour. Only wealth San Francisco currently has a higher wage.

Albuquerque recently enacted a wage of $8.50 an hour. Now, Bernalillo County may get into the act by adopting legislation that would match Albuquerque’s rate.

K-12 education reform is direly needed in New Mexico. The latest evidence for that is a report from the US Department of Education which studied and ranked 47 of the 50 states’ education systems and found that just 63 percent of New Mexico students in the 2010-2011 school year finished secondary school and the percentages for Hispanic students and Native Americans were 59 and 56 percent respectively.

Those rates earned the Land of Enchantment a ranking of 46th out of 47.

Washington’s “fiscal cliff” has been the topic of much discussion. After more than a decade of out-of-control spending, politicians are finally coming to grips with the need to cut back.

The problem for us in the Land of Enchantment is that our economy has long relied on Washington as a source of income and investment. With the government running trillion dollar-plus annual deficits and having piled up an astonishing $16 trillion in debt, simple math, not ideology, makes cutbacks inevitable.

This could mean tough times ahead for New Mexico’s economy.