When you think about the governor signing into law tax breaks for incoming corporations and vetoing a dollar hike in the minimum wage, and add to that the more than 13 % tuition hike passed by the UNM Regents yesterday, you get the feeling that reality has slipped a cog in our poor state, the poorest per capita in the nation according to Census Bureau data released in January.
We’re in terrible straits. Childhood hunger, for instance, devastates so many New Mexican families that it’s probably the number one cause of academic failure here. Some 30 percent of New Mexican kids are poverty stricken, says Kids Count. And so are their parents, most of whom make up the great body of the working poor in our state. It’s so bad the governor has put together a task force to study the childhood hunger epidemic. There will be noble talk, I’m sure, but where’s the money coming from, where’s the food? If there’s no new revenue anywhere, all they can do is gab about it.
Leaders in New Mexico seem to be confused about basic issues of fairness.
I know many Democrats join Republicans in thinking that giving potential corporate employers tax breaks to lure them to our state is a good plan. I don’t think it is. Corporations don’t come to a state to hire people, they come to make money. We give them tax breaks and other incentives with absolutely no control over how they hire, or if they hire our people at a decent wage. Nor is there any oversight or protection possible when it comes to these corporations running New Mexico companies out of business.
Corporations are not “all bad.” That’s why I shop at John Brooks and Costco when I can and not at Walmart or Sam’s Club if I can help it – it’s about how they treat their employees. But corporations are by definition not job makers. They are profit makers. And luring new manufacturing to New Mexico with tax breaks doesn’t really make much sense from the get go. Manufacturing doesn’t require as many human workers as it used to because of robot workers. Those big corps make more money by cutting labor, not by expanding it. It’s the same reason private education companies promote computer use. It’s to drastically cut overhead and dramatically increase profit.
And then there’s the strange matter of New Mexico badmouthing its own work force, complaining about how ill prepared we are, and poorly educated our work force is, basically damning our own people, who work hard and extremely well under terrible conditions here, just to get some corporate stranger in here to pay us less than we deserved, if it can get away with it.
And what’s the final result of corporate tax cuts? Less money, maybe “tens of millions of dollars less for education, public safety and health care,” said Gerry Bradley of New Mexico Voices for Children last week in the Santa New Mexican.
And now the University of New Mexico Regents, many of them appointed by the governor, jacked up the tuition rates on one of the poorest groups of people in our state -- students. And they have actually made the hike a form of penalty for not taking enough classes.
Granted UNM’s tuition is low compared to many schools. But this is, after all, the poorest state in the country, with many rural people making only $7.50 an hour minimum wage, and 30 percent of children going hungry!
A student pays tuition of $6,050 a year now. The hike has them paying almost a thousand dollars more if they take 12 hours or less, that’s four classes or less. Most UNM students work, of course, and many of them for minimum wage. It’s extremely hard to take more than four courses a semester and hold down a job, or maybe two.
But if they manage to take 15 hours a semester the increase in their tuition would be some $250 less a year. If you can’t manage the 15 hours, that’s a lot of money to be forced to pay for someone who makes $300 a week at minimum wage.
Basically, this tuition scheme rewards, once again, people who can afford to take 15 hours a semester, and penalizes those who are not well-off enough to forgo employment for classes. The Regents tell themselves that the hike is an incentive system, not a penalty system, for people to graduate faster. That’s fine for kids with money, but there’s not a whole lot of those any more.
This is where we’ve come in thinking about fairness in New Mexico.
I wonder if those new tax-break corporations will be penalized if they don’t hire student workers, if they don’t give them time to take 5 classes, and if they don’t really come up with the “good” jobs they’re supposed to provide us? Penalties for corporations? Ha. Fat chance!
Punishing poor students with a higher tuition because they have work? Of course. That’s what passes for fairness in America’s poorest state.
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