Hood or Robin Hood? State Governments and the Reduction of Poverty

This Rio Grande Foundation study, “Hood or Robin Hood? State Governments and the Reduction of Poverty” compares poverty data to spending and tax data from the 1990s in order to better understand whether high taxes and generous government spending or low taxes and more frugal government reduce poverty more effectively.

With New Mexico having the third-highest poverty rate in the nation, the reduction of poverty should be a top agenda item for policymakers. Unfortunately for New Mexico’s poor, as the data in this study show, the solution to date has often been bigger government which, as our study shows, has actually exacerbated the problem. Click here to download the study in pdf format.