Sounds great.

>average annual family savings of $12,000 per child.

How is NM paying for this? They currently have a 'D' grade from Truth in Accounting[1] with a $9.8 billion debt burden driven by unfunded obligations of pension and retiree health care

[1]https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/NM-2020-2pa...

child care policy frees labor capacity for work that is more likely to earn a slice of the national income. It’s almost certainly going to result in greater economic activity for the state. In the immediate it is funded from two existing funds.

This is actually kind of smart: any other kind of social welfare like free housing or free healthcare could be gamed by people moving in state to exploit it without providing much in return. But free child care...this could genuinely attract jobs and people to work them for the benefit of the state as a whole.

They already have an income limited program. This is just going to cover the remaining kids. Honestly, programs like this are usually a net benefit for the entire state. Just like public schooling, housing, and transportation programs.

I wouldn't take these Truth in Accounting reports too seriously. They're linked to ALEC and take a very hard-right stance on fiscal issues, and in particular, this report on NM (which is also nearly five years old) seems to ignore the permanent funds---as best I can tell they are lumping them all under "restricted" and ignoring them, even though the land grant permanent fund, the largest of them, is totally at the discretion of the legislature and the others are very broad. The permanent funds are also now significantly larger than that report shows.

While NM has debt it has been servicing it fine and state revenue has increased year over year pretty much since that report was produced in 2020 (either 2020 or 2021 were the worst years for the state's financial position). It's projected that 2025 will close out with nearly $3.5 billion in unspent revenue, and the state has about $50 billion saved in various permanent funds. The state's financial situation is currently so good that it has allowed things like universal free college tuition in a largely revenue-neutral way due to the significant balance of the invested funds.

One of the main criticisms you will hear of the NM legislative on the fiscal front is that they are too hesitant to spend money, since NM has serious issues with underperformance in areas like education while also having billions of savings that could be spent down in an effort to address those issues (and in fact the state supreme court more or less mandated the state to start doing so several years ago). However, since NM's revenue is so tied to the oil and gas industry and its boom-and-bust nature, the legislature likes to keep a substantial cash reserve to manage the bust years. That may be particularly important right now as the Trump administration is radically reducing the amount of federal funding that NM receives, which has always been a critical revenue source due to the state's high level of poverty (third highest in the US or so, depending on year and how you measure).