If a large company in New Mexico were to suffer financially like UNM is suffering right now, Martinez would be there in a heartbeat offering incentives and tax cuts to see them through the storm. But this most worthless Governor in our state's modern era is no where to be seen in helping out our institutions of research and higher learning. It is almost criminal.She sits by in her dogma, while New Mexico's economy runs in reverse. We are about the only state suffering this way, and much of it is due to her inaction on important economic and government development. Will the public ever wake up?
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In the Martinez era, state support for higher education has declined 37.6 percent, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, which looked at all states. That's a liberal think tank but if you don't believe them the Chronicle for Higher Education found a similar trend a couple years earlier.
http://tinyurl.com/qyjrhql
http://chronicle.com/interactives/statesupport
Students are left to pay most of the costs of college, which is probably why fewer are enrolling, which, along with the declining support from the state, is why UNM is eliminating 100 positions. As Jim suggests, UNM's decline has many consequences for the state economy and will for a long time. A highly educated workforce does the research and development, figures out the logistics of supply, production and transport and in many other ways contributes to the productivity that lifts an economy. Along with education comes the higher salaries and consumer demand also needed for an economy to prosper.
The Martinez and current Republican philosophy, which Democrats all too often go along with, is to increase profits largely by taking from workers through lower salaries and benefits and from moving production overseas, a certain downward spiral. Government is seen as providing a hand with the transfer of wealth upward. The lost tax revenue from repeated corporate tax cuts is made up for by us in more ways than one. We pay more of the tax burden and get less from government in return, including from public education.
We haven't even discussed the loss in the overall intellectual capacity of the population that the founders saw as critical for a functioning democracy and that any of us can appreciate as we look around at the nativism, racism, homophobia, sexism and violence that infests the culture and threatens the political process. UNM isn't turning out the people who put the Martinezes and Berrys in office and who think we can solve our problems by denying drivers licenses to illegal immigrants.
but hey, she sold the state plane!!!! give her SOME credit!?
......or not! disgusting!!
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