Hoping Malcolm will like this one better. It’s New Mexico’s unemployment rate over the last 10 years, as compared to the national rate. (Red line NM, blue line national. Data courtesy of St. Louis Fed.)

The data speak for themselves (the data speaks for itself?), but since this is a blog, I have to say something, otherwise you could just go to the St. Louis Fed web page and play with the cool graphs for yourself, cutting out the blogo-middleman. So I’ll point out the obvious: New Mexico, beginning in the late 1990s, saw a shift from significantly higher unemployment than the U.S. norm to a level that, going into the current chaos, was significantly lower unemployment than the national norm. We’ve seen a spike in unemployment, but less of a spike than the national average.