Hefty Nevada tax increases essential

Wanted: a Nevada politician with the courage to tell voters that taxes must be raised steeply and why. The state can no longer bumble along with nickel-and-diming while rending the social fabric.
For years Nevada boasted that it had no corporate, individual, inheritance and gift taxes. It is this free-lunch mentality that rightly enrages education Chancellor Jim Rogers. (Rogers has become a common scold but he is so often so right.) In a recent report, Rogers said:
“Monies generated by newcomers created a Ponzi-scheme economy. Those coming in subsidized those already in Nevada. Over time, neither long-timers nor new residents were required to pay any substantial taxes, causing necessary services, including education, to suffer.”
Gov. Jim Gibbons has proposed a devastating budget: cutting higher education by 36 percent, reducing salaries of state workers 6 percent and slashing state employee health benefits. To call this shameful is putting it mildly. It is nothing less than the destruction of higher education.
The need for a state income tax has been apparent for two decades, long before the new Depression pummeled Nevada. The state is facing a grim $2.4 billion budget deficit in the next biennium.
This is the 21st century but Nevada remains mired in the 19th. It relies heavily on the sales tax, an unreliable source of income.
The sales tax is regressive, the poor paying proportionately as much as do the rich. An income tax would be--or should be--progressive. Wealthier people would pay in proportion to their income.
Another urgent need for Nevada is a great increase in casino taxes. Nevada’s tax on the gambling industry is pitiful, the lowest in the nation. It has a maximum tax of 6.75 percent. In Michigan the rate is 24 percent, Missouri 20 percent and New Jersey 9.25 percent.
Mining too is getting away with grand larceny. CityLife of Las Vegas revealed that industry revenues have been up 13 percent in the past three years yet it has a maximum tax rate on such windfall profits of just 5 percent.
CityLife columnist Hugh Jackson noted that gold mining corporations made $25.5 billion from 2000 to 2007 yet paid taxes to Nevada of just $125.3 million, a gross tax rate of one-half of 1 percent.
The tax code is riddled with mining deductions. The Grant era mining law supports land grabs and giveaways. A corporate profits tax would do wonders for the state’s budget.
A third important source of income would be a state lottery. Yes, administrative costs can eat up to 70 percent of the take. But the 30 percent gained is a boon to straightened state budgets.
A lottery is painless. Say the supermarket bill is $120. It’s so easy to spend another dollar--or five--for a lottery ticket. People nearly never win but it’s an affordable loss. Hope springs eternal. It’s the hope that counts far more than payoffs.
Forty-two states and the District of Columbia have lotteries. But the Nevada gambling industry always defeats lotteries, pretending that a lottery would be unbearable competition. All three of these revenue sources are ignored because no politician has the courage, integrity and vision to campaign for them.
Nevada now has a one-note governor: no new taxes. Never. Ever. His head-in-the-sand adamancy could get him re-elected but it is not governing, it is not leading.
The gambling industry rules the state, getting what it wants, defeating what it does not want. It is concerned solely with its own profits not the good of the state.
This is a vast disservice to Nevada citizens. But the state has no political figure with the guts to say that the state must have hefty new sources of revenue—immediately.
Raising taxes is doubtless a losing position politically. But it is far better to lose over a matter of profound principle than win by being unprincipled, by showing an unconcern about Nevada’s desperate plight.
Everyone wants essential services but no one wants to pay for them. So Nevada is stuck with an archaic system. Education is suffering terribly. Social services have been cut severely. The infrastructure is deteriorating badly.
The state is already near the bottom in things that matter: 44th among the states for student proficiency in reading, math and graduation rates, and failing grades in higher education.
But the governor doesn’t care that Nevada is backward. He will increase that backwardness.
The Nevada Sagebrush, student newspaper at the University of Nevada, Reno, has called for the impeachment of Gibbons. Such feistiness is marvelous. But the Nevada Constitution gives just two grounds: misdemeanor or malfeasance. Maladministration and blockheadness do not qualify.