NM Advocacy Organizations Urge Legislators to Pursue Alternatives to Budget Cuts

Fourteen diverse advocacy and union organizations, including Democracy for New Mexico, sent a letter to New Mexico legislators yesterday urging them to pursue creative alternatives for generating funds to address what the groups termed a "revenue crisis" in the state. The groups take the view that it's insufficient revenue generation -- not overspending -- that's creating the state's budget shortfall at a time of global economic crisis.

In the letter, which you can see (doc), the groups ask lawmakers, Gov. Bill Richardson and Lt. Gov. Diane Denish to take another look at ways of generating funding that may have been overlooked or dismissed as politically difficult in the past. The organizations are urging that drastic cuts in the areas of social services, health care, public education, the arts and public employee salaries and benefits be avoided this year and in FY 2010.

Instead, the groups are recommending that decision-makers look at measures like TIDD reform, combined reporting of corporate taxes, rolling back tax cuts for the wealthy, enacting surcharges on high personal incomes and revising penalties on oil and gas pollution to increase revenues.

The primary goal of the recently passed stimulus package is to save and create jobs. If states dramatically cut jobs and spending, especially in service areas that are key to their citizens, it will surely undercut the effectiveness of the stimulus. We can't afford that at a time like this, particularly when there are readily available mechanisms for raising additional funds to plug the gaps. Let's urge our lawmakers to take the wise way out of our budget crisis, not the easy way.