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May
25, 2005
Vol. 1, No. 14
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Courtesy,
Nevada Taxpayers Association
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Class War
Wall
Street Journal
By Philip K. Howard
Something’s amiss when a girl in
kindergarten, all of 40 pounds, is led away in
handcuffs by police.
That’s what happened a few weeks ago in St.
Petersburg, Fla. Equally strange, the whole
episode was taped and shown on national TV: a
little girl, hair neatly braided, methodically
destroying her classroom.
The
assistant principal, arms outstretched as if in
a linebacker drill, circles the child but avoids
contact. (Is the child a hemophiliac?) The child
is steered into the principal’s office, where
she continues her destruction. Eventually the
police arrive and handcuff the five-year-old.
The tape ends.
For as long as there have been schools, teachers
have had to deal with unreasonable
five-year-olds. But calling the cops isn’t the
time-tested way. Let’s rewind the tape and
think.
Problem: Temper tantrum in kindergarten
classroom. Solution: Ask child to stop tearing
up classroom. When she refuses, hold her by the
arm, preventing more destruction. If necessary,
take her to another room until she calms down.
But the teacher can’t do this. Taking hold of
the child’s arm is verboten, a violation of the
child’s rights. Touching is taboo, except to
prevent harm to others. Doing that could get you
SUED. So the five-year-old ends up in handcuffs.
WSJ.com -
Commentary: Class War*
This article will be available to
non-subscribers of the Online Journal for up to
seven days after it is e-mailed.
In Defense of Employment-
at-Will
Ludwig von
Mises Institute
by Arthur Foulkes
Over the
past few decades the traditional
prerogative of an employer to fire an employee
"at-will" (that is, for any reason whatsoever)
has come under legal assault in the United
States. Judges in nearly all fifty states have
ruled in favor of employees claiming "unjust"
dismissal, forcing companies to rehire the
employee or pay damages.
Yet despite the emotional appeal of preventing
employer "abuses," there are compelling reasons
to fully restore the so-called
"employment-at-will" doctrine.
[continued]
NYC
charter schools break out ahead of other public
schools
New York Sun editorial
The
dramatic rise in New York City's
fourth-grade reading scores - the highest
one-year increase ever achieved by the city's
public-school pupils on the state English
Language Arts exam - will no doubt serve as
vindication of Mayor Bloomberg's management of
the public-school system. But it's worth noting
that the city's charter schools led the testing
gains, achieving even higher scores than public
schools overall.
[continued]
Our
Constitution Faces Death by ‘Due Process’
Wall Street Journal
By Lino A. Graglia
The
battles in Congress over the appointment
of even lower court federal judges reveal a
recognition that federal judges are now, to a
large extent, our real lawmakers. Proposals to
amend the Constitution to remove lifetime tenure
for Supreme Court justices, or to require that
rulings of unconstitutionality be by more than a
majority (5-4) vote, do not address the source
of the problem.
WSJ.com -
Commentary: Our Constitution Faces Death by 'Due
Process'*
This article will be available to
non-subscribers of the Online Journal for up to
seven days after it is e-mailed.
Forbes: The Tax World Gets Flat & Happy
Apologies to Copernicus and the rest, the
world is flat. At least, the tax world. Flat-tax
momentum is the big fiscal-policy story of the
year in much of Europe, with potential fallout
in the U.S.
Temp CEOs
Strategy+Business magazine
With
forced turnover up 300 percent since
1995, business has entered the era of the
short-term chief.
That giant sucking sound heard in the business
world during 2004 was the extraction of chief
executives from seats of power.
[continued]
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WHY
BusinessNevada
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Analysis
The Ongoing Assault
The Nevada business community must
organize for political self-defense.
By Steven Miller
BusinessNevada
After some
700-plus pages examining 20th Century
Communism’s amazing record of mass-murder and terror,
the distinguished European scholar-authors of the
international bestseller, The Black Book of Communism,
ask the simple question: “Why?”
Their answer—the fruit of a long trek through recently
opened Soviet-bloc archives covering over seven decades
of Communist crimes—has significance for contemporary
Nevada.
“The real motivation for the terror,” wrote the Black
Book’s authors, “… stemmed from Leninist ideology
and the utopian will to apply to society a doctrine
totally out of step with reality.” And Leninist ideology
itself, they make clear, was little more than the desire
to use lethal force against people to mold them into
forms dictated by crackpot economic and social theories.
Speaking of utopian schemes totally out of step with
reality, let’s now move our attention to Assembly Bill
322, sponsored by Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins and
passed out of the Legislature’s lower chamber April 26.
Unanimously in favor were the Assembly’s 26 Democrats;
unanimously opposed, the chamber’s 16 Republicans.
In AB 322, Nevada’s would-be Governor Perkins advanced
the novel proposition that, because major Silver State
hospitals are of great importance to the health of
Nevadans, their property rights should be voided and
their investors and operating personnel legally reduced
to state servitude.
“Each major hospital,” says Sec. 7, paragraph 1, of
Perkins’ bill, “shall … For the fiscal year beginning on
July 1, 2006 and for each succeeding fiscal year,
provide community benefits and charity care, in that
fiscal year, in an amount which represents at least 4
percent of the total operating revenue of the major
hospital for that fiscal year.”
[continued]
Trade group: Nevada
business can expect
property tax shift
A national
business tax organization has evaluated the
Nevada Legislature’s 2005 property tax legislation and
concluded that Nevada businesses can expect higher
property-tax burdens in years to come.
The Council on State Taxation (COST), a nonprofit trade
association consisting of approximately 570 corporations
engaged in interstate and international business, says
that the result of Assembly Bill 489, signed April 6 by
Gov. Kenny Guinn, is that in Nevada “the property tax
burden is likely to shift from individuals to business
over time.”
COST also, in a new study, reported that in the years
from 2000 to 2004, total state and local taxes paid by
business in Nevada increased by 29.3 percent, while
total state and local taxes paid by everyone increased
by 24.7 percent. The total business share of tax revenue
growth was reported as 52 percent.
Nationally, total state and local taxes paid by
businesses increased by 17.1 percent, according to the
study, while total state and local taxes paid by
everyone increased by 13.7 percent.
Doug Lindholm, COST’s president and executive director,
says it has become fashionable over the past several
years to allege that business are not paying enough
taxes to state and local government. But as the COST
study shows, the reality of business taxes is quite
different than the perception.
In Nevada, the total business tax burden was reported as
31.7 percent property tax; 28.2 percent sales tax on
business inputs, 14.9 percent excise and gross receipts,
0.0 percent, 7.3 payroll tax and 17.8 percent licenses
and other taxes.
The COST Special Report on state and local business
taxes was authored by Ernst & Young analysts Robert
Cline, Tom Neubig and Andrew Phillips, with William Fox.
Co-author Bob Cline is National Director of State and
Local Tax Policy Economics for Ernst & Young.
To download the entire 21-page report, click
here.
Wynn: 'Just a stack
of hotel rooms'
Las Vegas Business Press
Steve Wynn
defended his $2.7 billion Wynn Las Vegas last
week in a speech to an overflow crowd attending the
American Institutue of Architects convention.
Wynn's megaresort has been criticized in recent weeks by
writers from the Wall Street Journal and Los
Angeles Times, whose architecture critic,
Christopher Hawthorne, characterized the property as a
"mid-rise office tower in Houston, circa 1983."
[continued]
Where
does the
room tax go?
It goes to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors
Authority, which then uses it to often compete against
the firms that produced it
An In Business Q & A with Richard Heller,
president of the Sands Expo and Convention Center
Interview
by Richard N. Velotta
InBusinessLV
Richard Heller
knows how to keep customers happy because he used
to be one.
Heller, president and general manager of the Sands Expo
and Convention Center, formerly was vice president of
trade show operations for the Needham, Mass.-based
Interface Group, which owned the Comdex computer trade
show.
As the owner of Comdex, Heller knew what it took to keep
the show coming back to Las Vegas year after year. Now,
the head of the Sands Expo Center sees things from the
other perspective, knowing that he has competition that
can undercut him in the local market.
Heller has no qualms talking about what he considers to
be an unfair playing field and did so in an interview
with In Business Las Vegas.
[continued]
CCSN-Regis deal
sparks more talk
Las Vegas Business Press
A new agreement
allowing the Community College of Southern Nevada
to funnel students into Regis University needs some
reworking, particularly a provision that would see the
Denver-based Jesuit university use publicly funded
community college classrooms to educate students, said
Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for the Nevada
chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
"If you have a public taxpayer-[supported] institution
giving away space to a religious one, it could be a
problem," says Lichtenstein. "Nothing is spelled out."
The deal signed by higher education chancellor Jim
Rogers and others would see the community college steer
its graduates into bachelor's degree programs offered by
Regis.
As a part of the agreement, Regis' former community
college students would be required to take six credits
of religious studies classes to receive a degree. The
program is scheduled to begin this fall.
Community college President Richard Carpenter has
defended the program saying that his ex-students who
attend Regis would not have been likely candidates to
attend the state's two major universities -- the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas and the University of
Nevada, Reno.
[continued]
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