What the Ledge
Hath Wrought
By Steven Miller
The challenge
the Nevada Legislature faced on the property tax front was not
that difficult.
As the Las
Vegas Review-Journal pointed out editorially, “All that
was needed was a straightforward plan to reduce government
revenues to what’s needed to fund minimum required
functions—or at least to freeze taxes until such a plan could
be devised.”
Legislative
leaders, however, right from the beginning ruled out such a
modest approach. Its fatal defect was precisely that it was
straightforward. It did not serve what the evidence
increasingly shows, session after session, to be the primary
goal of this current crop of lawmakers: putting an ever-larger
share of Nevada’s private-sector resources—of your
resources—under their control.
So the Nevada
Legislature is doing as it has done every recent session:
Faithfully serving the wishes of the well-organized
tax-consuming special interests that regularly place it in
power and desire ever-expanding power and scope for
government.
The “3
percent, 8 percent” formula that Gov. Kenny Guinn signed into
law Wednesday allows every aspect of state or local government
that runs on property tax revenue to continue to batten
significantly upon the damage inflation does to home and
property owners who don’t want to sell. This was the situation
before AB 489 became law, and it still is; the pols in the
Legislature simply agreed to “moderate,” for the moment, what
is a transparently institutionalized state and local
government mechanism that uses the speculative phase of the
business cycle for the financial rape and pillage of property
owners.
Media folk,
naturally enough, have been focusing on the huge bullet that
many property owners feel they dodged: the reported 50-to-300
percent property tax increases. But lawmakers were never going
to permit such a development. It would have guaranteed
a revolution—a wholesale statewide housecleaning of elected
officials, plus constitutional amendments depriving the
state’s political class of much of its power to continue
commandeering your money. True, the crisis did make
legislators focus, but in due course they arrived at their
calculation: only modest looting at this juncture—the
better to loot more later, when the electorate has,
they expect, gone back to sleep.
Thus, much of
what involved lawmakers up to April 1 was a discussion
of—indeed, even an exact calibration of—just what degree of
disdain for voters was most appropriate. Or, to say it another
way: just how modest the current looting had to be, to
evade the wrath of most 2006 voters.
Where the
Legislature came out was that government spending could
continue to expand at two to three times the rate of
population increase and inflation. It’s a calculation
reveals no respect at all for your continued ownership of your
own money.
Close
observers of the political scene expect businesses to get 8
percent increases every year from now on into the indefinite
future, while homeowners will get 3 percent increases every
year. These numbers are easily high enough to begin driving
businesses out of Nevada, turning what had been an economic
beacon for the rest of the nation into just one more mediocre,
government-encrusted, high-cost-of-living state.
Already, in
merely the last year, the price of lodging and dining in the
Silver State increased 11 percent, according to AAA Nevada.
That figure is over twice the rate of increase nationally.
It represents
the predictable consequence of the legislative and executive
branch sins of 2003.
Steven
Miller is policy director for the Nevada Policy Research
Institute.
