#nm usa

[artistic-arteries]

Sunday's paper was folded oddly this week.

I know they didn't intend this

But if that ain't telling how America is these days idk what is

[tyrannosaurus-sock]

I don’t know how many people know about this, but it’s worth knowing about.

New Mexican lawmakers really fucked up with our state budget. We’re like the 6th poorest state in the US and we always kinda struggle with finances. Between that and the economy, someones fucked up along the way and came up with a budget for us that we are hundreds of millions of dollars short in that we have still not figured out how to cover.

How has our republican governor (Susana Martinez), who’s one of those ugly-let’s-privatize-all-schools kinda conservatives, been pushing to solve this crisis? By cutting the salaries of all public school teachers. In teacher salaries, NM is already one of the worst states to work in: we rank 47th for average teacher pay. The salary of our teachers is 15k a year less than the national average. And Gov Martinez has been insisting this is a great idea and the pay cut will return to them basically in social security. The cut is a 3.5% reduction, resulting in a loss of more than $1000/yr in salary. In my most humble opinion, the lawmakers fucked up and they should have been the ones volunteering to take salary cuts.

(Can I take a moment to complain that for the past half a decade or so, NM has already seen an attack on education with lawmakers gradually decreasing the legislative lottery scholarship money and increasing the standards to keep the money that students receive to pay in-state college tuition if they attend college right after school?)

P much everyone hates this idea (and oooooh boy, I cannot wait to finally vote out Martinez). So what is the legislators idea instead? Raise taxes on cigarettes and tobacco in general. Each pack of cigarettes will cost $1.50 more. Each pack. Other tobacco products, including e-cigs, will see a substantial increase in taxes, from 25% to 75%. This has already been approved by our Dem-majority Senate, btw. With pretty much no news on it before it was approved. (I certainly saw no news on it and I catch most things before they appear on televised news.)

That’s right. In a state already full of poor people, we’re now going to make poor people with an addiction pay for the massive fuckup of our lawmakers so we can meet our budget.

Aaaand doing that won’t even raise $100 mill for the education budget. How are they going to cover other budget crisis shortages?

I honestly don’t know. I’ve heard talk of an increased soda tax to help cover budget shortages, but the tax increase there is less even than the tobacco tax increase, so I’m guessing this is just the first in a long line of tax increases. I know that’s how we have to make up for this shortage, but it absolutely should not put the most burden on those least equipped to deal with it. =\

[artistic-arteries]

[artistic-arteries]

Tag this with where you're from and something that people who have never been where you live thought was fake when they saw it on TV