Vogel notes “Nevada delivered a balanced budget while taxes stayed the same” but can’t fail to note that both candidates for Nevada Governor last year promised that they would not renew taxes scheduled to automatically expire. The promise – which appears to have been what most Nevadans wanted, if the polls that drove the major candidates’ campaigns were right – was not kept.

Check out this report/proposal from the Nevada Policy Research Institute. It concludes Nevada’s tax structure is, in fact, too volatile, and recommends fixes other than simply increasing taxing and spending. The study suggests a flat consumption tax encompassing all transactions, at a lower rate, would reduce volatility, and also recommends some common-sense measures to make Nevada local government unions more interested in the mission of government.

Nevadans saw their personal income decline more in 2009 than residents of any other state, a new report from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis found.

Residents’ personal income in Nevada fell to $102 billion in 2009, down 4.8 percent from $107.1 billion in 2008. That’s not only the worst performance in the nation in 2009, it’s also the second-biggest decline among the states since 1969, the bureau said. Total personal income gauges the combined earnings of all residents in the state. Nevada has always had one of the country’s lower overall personal incomes, because it’s one of the country’s smallest states.

It seems a classic “killing the golden goose” scenario.

Nevadans’ personal income falls with the loss of jobs. Jobs are lost when employers close, move away, or shrink. Is the creation or elimination of The question that seems to drive many spirited discussions is how the imposition or removal of taxes impact the creation or loss of jobs.

While someday it might be true, it doesn’t appear to be true heading into the spring of 2010.

Most everyone agrees that the professors and teaching staff are enjoying a healthy increase in their income this year. It’s the “classified” staff that’s gaining sympathy through doe-eyed looks and cooked books. As it turns out, they generally get an automatic annual pay hike that exceeds any proposed cost of furlough.

Classified Salary Schedules and furlough information:

• 2009-2010 Employer Pay (employer pays 100% of retirement contribution)
• 2008-2009 Employer Pay
• 2009-2010 Employee/Employer Pay (Employee pays half of retirement contribution)
• 2008-2009 Employee/Employer Pay
• Classified Employee Informational PowerPoint: [BCN - TMCC] [UNR] [WNC]
• Archive: Recorded Furlough Informational Session at UNR
• How will the unpaid leave be calculated and affect my paycheck?
  A: Your gross earnings will be reduced by either 2.3% or 4.6% depending on your election. Your base salary and retirement contributions will remain the same.

Teaching Faculty:

• PowerPoint: Administration of Unpaid Leave and Workload Increase Program
• Academic Salary Schedules

The Classified Salary step increases (the pay increase for being there an extra year, excluding increases for promotions and CPI increases) range from a low of 3.3% to a high of 4.6% per annual step. For some reason the highest paid get the biggest percentage step increases. The furlough plan reduced pay by 2.3% per year and the schedule reflects a very small pay decrease (about 0.5%).

The good news for the employees, then, is that they don’t have to work as much and their base pay is not affected; after the furlough is over pay pops right back where it was. The employees can elect to take the furlough at 2.3% a year for FY 10 and FY 11 or get full pay in FY 10 and take 4.6% furlough in FY11. So the furlough offsets most of the classified step pay increases. If someone was at the top of the salary scale, then they wouldn’t get a step increase so for those few employees there would be a small pay reduction (2.3%) to compensate for the fewer hours worked.

Secondly, as previously stated none of the tenured professors were required to take any furlough and thus saw zero pay reduction. The employee’s benefits are also not reduced, just their hours of work.

For an example, picking someone in the middle of the schedule (step 40-1) where the employer pays the full retirement: They were making $51,364.80 in 7/1/08. In 7/1/09 their salary would be $53,452.80 (having moved a step by being there another year). As a result of the furlough, they get approx. an extra hour off a week (taken as a periodic day off without pay). This would reduce the employee’s $53,453 salary by 2.3% to compensate for the time off, reducing her pay to $52,223.

The bottom line for this employee? She is making about $858 a year more than he was the previous year and had to work 2.3% less. This is not ideal, but I find it hard to see how it is some kind of tragedy – certainly not by private industry standards. The tenured profs naturally fair much better than this.

Note that this example is before the special session so it is possible (but not certain) the changes implemented by the Board of Regents following the session will result in a small pay decrease for this employee.

So while a few NSHE employees will see a very slight drop in pay in direct relation to not having to work as much, most will see an increase in pay for not having to work as much.

This is in direct contrast to the biased pablum served to us each day by our TV stations and newspapers. They see the taxpaying private companies as under-taxed and believe increases are needed to pay the public employees what they believe they are due, so they present their viewpoint as fact.

In defense of NSHE classified employees, they correctly point out that their increases over the past decade have trailed those of other government workers. Does that make them poorly treated, or their richer employees of other branches and agencies shameless pillagers of the public trough?

The UNLV student government members who spent University dollars driving to and shacking up in Carson City to plead poverty at the Legislature must be terribly embarrassed.

As Nevada’s politicians gear up for a special session to reduce its plans for government spending down to the level of its tax revenue, the Las Vegas Sun this morning profiled politicians who want to raise taxes. Assemblywoman Peggy Pierce told the reporter:

We have the smallest government in the country and it’s not even close.

This is a whopper of a lie. Nevada has an average sized state-and-local government, although because it shifts a large portion of its government funding onto visitors, Nevada residents pay less than other states’ residents. But Nevada’s government spending, in study after study, is average.

Assemblywoman Pierce has been lying about stingy government in Nevada since she was elected. That’s not news. The more striking aspect of this story is the question it poses about the media’s responsibility to give Assemblywoman Pierce a platform to lie without any fact-checking.

Should the Las Vegas Sun’s reporter David McGrath Schwartz have corrected Pierce’s prevarication?