Recovery or Revival?
As published in the Las Cruces Bulletin – May 15, 2020
by Tracey Bryan
Without question, COVID-19 has plunged us into far more than a health crisis. It has created a tidal wave of change in our daily lives, and, indeed, the “cure” has been painful – nationally, 16 people have lost their jobs for every one person who’s been diagnosed with the virus.
So, while the conversation sweeping across the country is about reopening the economy, returning to normal, resuming our lives as we once knew them, for New Mexico, that’s simply not good enough. This moment gives us an opportunity to think beyond recovery to sparking an economic revival that carries our families from poverty to prosperity.
It starts with doing all we can to help our businesses get back to business. We must have a vibrant and growing business community to generate economic ripples in wages, taxes, investment, purchasing from local vendors, and attracting money from outside the community.
They need us to support them as customers and supply them with the well-qualified staff they need to be successful. If there are employees unable to return to work, they can tap the flood of newly available workforce talent (experienced workers and recent high school, community college, and university graduates) to help them open safely and successfully.
Next – we need to help every single person – unemployed, under-employed, or struggling to make ends meet – acquire skills and training to secure jobs that pay life- and family-sustaining wages that out-earn their need for public assistance programs.
Why? Because these well-intentioned programs have the unintended consequence of trapping people in low wages with annual income limits (usually at 200% of the Federal poverty level) required to receive public benefits: $25,520 for an individual and rising in scale by household size. A family of four, for example, has a limit of $52,400.
According to New Mexico First’s recent paper: Families in Crisis: The Cliff Effects and Churning, more than 800,000 New Mexicans currently receive one or more social supports through Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. New Mexico Child Care Assistance Program, and housing assistance.
The financial “cliff” faced by those receiving assistance is that, if they were to earn more wages through a promotion, a job change, or working additional hours, the increase in their incomes may be offset by a greater loss of the financial benefit of the support. Even before the virus, the cliff effect negatively impacted the earning potential of people.
These programs need reform to support the economic growth of families and allow them to phase out gradually…not an in-or-out approach.
Until that conversation is undertaken in a meaningful way, education, entrepreneurism, and economic development must drive the economic freedom of families. Fortunately for us, we have everything we need here to be successful.
- Strong leadership in our school districts
- A community college with a host of credential and degree offerings aligned to high-value careers.
- A first-class university with four-year and higher degree programs and research functions to drive talent development and seed new businesses through the Arrowhead Center.
- The Small Business Development Corporation ready to support the launch of new businesses and support for them while they grow.
- A Workforce Connections system to fund education, training, and job placement.
Beyond that, our economic development efforts can respond to the call to re-shore essential supply chains and draw those manufacturers here, BECAUSE we can generate the workforce talent they’ll need to be successful.
So…what’s it to be? Recovery? Is that enough?
Or, do we seize the moment we are in and take the lead in economic revival here, and let the rest of New Mexico follow?
