That red laser
dot on your forehead …
Nevada's tax-hungry left is again
targeting business
By Steven
Miller
Looking in the mirror
lately, Nevada gaming companies are again catching
sight of red laser dots dancing across their foreheads. At the
other end of the sniper scope this time is a known eccentric,
one Tony Dane. His brilliant idea? Take gamers’ revenue and
give it to somebody else.
While Dane calls himself a Republican, his scheme is mere
wealth-redistribution socialism. And though his antics are
ham-handed, he’s actually stumbled onto the master plan of
Nevada’s Left. Namely, pick some politically vulnerable
business, concentrate your forces, and then pick their
bones. Notably, the Nevada Left is again whining about the
plight of its always-failing socialized education and health
care sectors—and starting to finger its carving knives.
In 2005, if you recall, it was the state’s entire business
community that the Left successfully targeted. “Property tax
limitation”—promised by the Nevada Legislature—turned out to
mean the imposition of a new, unconstitutional split-roll
property tax on businesses throughout the state. The wink-wink
nod-nod going on among lawmakers? That businesses would not
dare take an admittedly corrupt law to court since homeowners,
the story went, would be enraged.
In 2003, events weren’t dissimilar. The looting frenzy in that
Legislature—proved later to have been entirely
unjustified—ended up subjecting the whole business community
to new payroll taxes. Singled out for especially high levies
(and demagogic smears) was the state’s banking sector. The
payroll tax imposed then, economists note today, is a de facto
personal income tax— notwithstanding the explicit prohibition
of such a tax by the Nevada Constitution.
Some major Strip casinos in 2003—misled by skewed political
advice coming from hard-core Democrats like Billy
Vassiliades—sided with the socialist left’s bid to increase
taxes on the general business sector. But while some business
people may look with glee on Dane’s scheme for the gamers as
karmic payback, the general business community was not
blameless in the 2003 debacle. For too long it had been
content to remain unorganized and allow the state’s most
prominent sector fight the Left alone. Eventually, some gaming
executives switched sides and sought a separate peace.
However, it didn’t work: Big Gaming ended up with not only the
new payroll tax, but also higher gaming levies and a live
entertainment tax. When given the chance to soak Big Gaming,
the latter’s professed allies on the Left revealed they simply
could not restrain themselves. And in many executive suites on
the Las Vegas Strip, that lesson has not entirely been missed.
|
The Fable
of the Frog and the Scorpion
A
scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and
the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on
the frog's back.
"How do
I know you won't sting me?" asks the frog.
"Because if I do," answers the scorpion, "I will die
too."
The
frog is satisfied, and they set out. In the middle
of the stream, however, the scorpion stings the
frog.
Feeling
the onset of paralysis, the frog starts to sink.
Knowing they both now will drown, he gasps out:
"Why?"
"Sorry," says the scorpion. "This is just who I am." |
|
What the Dane filing reveals—as does the 2003 Legislature—is
that the gamers remain just too inviting a target for Nevada’s
avaricious demagogues to leave alone. Which means that the
self-protection strategy recommended to gamers by
establishment Democrats and squish Republicans is, as it has
been from the first, fundamentally bankrupt. Furthermore,
since always-higher taxes remain at the heart of the Left’s
long-term political agenda, it follows that it’s only a matter
of time until the Left again seeks to raise Nevada business
taxes. Consequently, the only natural defense available to
gamers in the long run is to make common cause with the broad
mass of tax-resistant Silver State taxpayers, and the larger
business community generally.
It shouldn’t be that difficult: Increasingly Nevada’s major
tourism resorts themselves are becoming more generalized
businesses. As the Las Vegas Review-Journal noted last
Sunday:
“It’s no mystery why visitor counts for Las Vegas
hotel-casinos stayed high heading into the holidays. More
visitors come not to gamble, but for the entertainment, dining
and shopping. And record numbers of visitors here told market
surveyors ahead of the holidays they were in Las Vegas to do
their Christmas shopping. No other place in the United States
compares when it comes to high-end retail in a compressed
shopping area. Not even the famed Rodeo Drive in Beverly
Hills, Calif., of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.”
For at least two decades Nevada’s tax-dependent special
interests—primarily the state’s legally privileged
government-employee unions and the government bureaucracies in
cahoots with them—have regularly perpetrated the same
well-choreographed ritual. About one year before the next
Legislature, they begin ginning up media stories on how some
kind of crisis looms because all the tax revenue already in
the pipeline is insufficient.
Remaining thus on permanent offense, they set the scene for
the next Legislature—and for the next phase of higher taxes.
The stories to structure the context of the 2007 session are
already starting. Nevada’s entire business community needs to
unite and intelligently, for once, organize.
<750 words>
Steven Miller is editor of BusinessNevada and policy director
for the Nevada Policy Research Institute.
