You’re not
dreaming
Nevada
businesses
are
being
set up for a big new hit.
By Steven Miller
YOU'VE GOT THIS recurring nightmare.
You have a zillion things to do, but nevertheless find
yourself stuck out in the middle of heavy traffic.
You know it’s dangerous. You’re carrying scars from earlier
collisions.
But now, once again, hurtling at you are a couple of big new
rigs. And the drivers clearly intend you harm.
At the same time someone is yelling out at you from the
roadside. However, they’re not telling you to get out
of the way.
Instead, they’re shouting, bizarrely: “Don’t try to get
out of the way! Worry about … unintended consequences!”
You want to wake up.
But you’re NOT dreaming: You’re just another Nevada business
person in a “nightmare” that really IS happening again and
again in the Silver State!
Those big rigs coming at you? They’re the massive, rigged
political assaults that—legislature after legislature—get
dreamed up and launched, with daunting force, directly at
Nevada business.
In 2001 through 2003, it was the phony Governor’s Task Force
on Tax Policy. Produced by strategists for Nevada’s
left-liberal Assembly and resentful elements in Big Gaming,
the Task Farce blatantly cooked its forecasting books—analysis
later showed—in order to justify huge, unneeded 2003 tax
increases that the gamer- union coalition wanted general
business to bear.
In 2005, the left-liberal Assembly leadership concocted
another doozy. In a session supposedly aimed at providing tax
relief for property owners, Majority Leader Barbara Buckley &
Co. held homeowners for ransom until limp leadership in the
state senate folded, allowing an unconstitutional split-roll
property tax to be foisted on Nevada businesses.
These are the past “big riggeds” that, in the last two
legislatures, have hurt Nevada businesses. For the 2007
session, Buckley & Co. have more socialist vehicles already
lined up, their motors running. One is an allegedly
house-trained version of former Assembly Speaker Richard
Perkins’ infamous AB 322, which sought to commandeer the
budgets, staff, investors and operating direction of major
Silver State hospitals and turn them all into Soviet-style
state property.
Another is a deeply corrupt “educational adequacy” scheme,
where—just as with the 2002 Task Farce—the fix has been in
even before the bogus “study” was commissioned. Authorized by
the 2005 Nevada Legislature, its job is to determine what
humongous new taxpayer sums might finally, produce “adequate”
public schooling in Nevada—while still allowing
dog-in-the-manger education bureaucrats and the teacher union
to continue blocking real reform.
The aim is to, first, intimidate lawmakers into flushing even
bigger truckloads of taxpayer money down the same old musty
gopher holes—while continuing to evade the real reasons most
Nevada government schools fail. Should lawmakers balk,
however, then the union—as it’s doing in 45 other states—can
go the lawsuit route. In other words, sue before
some activist judge who’ll attempt to force Nevada
voters into the same wasteful spending they rejected on 2004’s
ballot.
In 1985 in Kansas City, a federal judge did precisely that,
mandating $2 billion in new taxes. Though the educational
results were dismal—test scores flat, an unchanged black-white
achievement gap and even less integration—it taught looters
everywhere a brand new way to pillage taxpayers. Revealingly,
Buckley & Co. have selected the very same consulting firm that
was used in Kansas City—Augenblick, et al—to do Nevada’s
study. Augenblick has made a 22-year career out of providing
tax-consumer interests with custom-fitted justifications for
ever-higher government-school spending and the mandated tax
increases to fund it.
If these are the “big riggeds” now bearing down on Nevada
business people, how can firms avoid disaster?
A first step might be to notice an important merit of the
Angle Property Tax Restraint Initiative: that it would end the
2005 Legislature’s unconstitutional split-roll property tax
and reduce business property taxes from 8 percent to 2
percent—the same rate as residential homeowners. Yes, some
organizations argue against Angle’s Prop-13-style measure,
noting that California lawmakers, after Prop 13, proceeded to
hike other taxes and fees on business. But that argument
ignores the rest of Angle’s program: passage of Tax and
Spending Control for Nevada (TASC)—preventing such wholesale
new taxes onto business.
This brings us to those suits on the side of the road yelling
at you to stay still and worry about “unintended
consequences.” On the big tax fights, they have a perfect
record of ultimate failure.
Plus, their litany about possible “unintended consequences”
ignores two things: First, life is unintended
consequences. Second, really damaging consequences are
coming right at you.
And they’re definitely intended.
<748 words>
Steven Miller is editor of BusinessNevada and policy director
for the Nevada Policy Research Institute.
