Promoting Volunteerism
Nothing promotes volunteerism like paying kids to volunteer, no matter how much you drive your grandchildren into debt to do it.
A definition of volunteerism George Orwell himself might have thought up…
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RINOs + Ink-Stained Hands = Really Angry
Bill Raggio, who calls people who don’t want to hike taxes “John Birchers”, is furious. So are all of Nevada’s political media employees.
Governor Gibbons has kept all his promises – he deferred to a vote of the people on a tax hike but refused to actually sign the bill. Tax hikers – the usual gang who believes there’s just never enough government – had been counting on his signature as part of their political cover. “See,” they were planning on explaining to angry constituents, “even Jim Gibbons was in favor.”
And the Media-Socialism-Influence Peddling Complex is very, very angry.
Gibbons: Not So Fast, Feds
Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons is reportedly questioning the wisdom of Nevada grabbing it’s ankles to receive the full thrust of ObPeRe’s stimulus package.
More Private Sector Job Losses
Two more Nevada businesses closed down yesterday… Desert Dodge, Security Bank. Yet Legislative leaders still want to raise taxes.
Great Article On Southern Nevada Water
Never mind that for the second year in a row, snowpack feeding the upper Colorado River is over 100% of normal, Bloomberg News has penned a comprehensive article about water drought in the Southwestern United States. It’s the first mention in the mainstream media of the immense wealth held by the Southern Nevada Water Authority:
The Southern Nevada Water Authority is about halfway through a 30-year, $8.3 billion construction campaign. Last year, 57 percent of the money for it came from a $6,310 fee to hook up new homes. The Las Vegas real estate slump is so severe that total hookup collections dropped to $61.5 million last year from $188.4 million in 2006. Mulroy says the authority actually lost money on hookups in January because of refunds to developers who abandoned construction projects.
As a result, reserves in the construction fund dropped 6 percent in the first six weeks of 2009, to $480 million. Without those reserves, Mulroy says, she couldn’t assure investors the authority would be able to repay the $500 million in bonds she plans to start selling by early fall to complete the Lake Mead project. The authority had $3.9 billion in liabilities on June 30.
The authority also gets money from water deliveries, property taxes and fees from federal land sales. If she has to protect the reserves, Mulroy says, she’ll raise water rates, which total about $21 a month for a single-family home.
She’s asked fellow Nevadan Harry Reid, the U.S. Senate majority leader, for a federal guarantee on the bonds. Reid is exploring how to help big municipal water systems, including Mulroy’s, get easier access to credit, spokesman Jon Summers says.
In February, Mulroy presented such a dire description of the authority’s finances to the Nevada legislature that Jerry Claborn, chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, told her, “You’ll have to do like you did years ago: rub two sticks together.”
Mulroy said afterward she wanted to quash any notion that cash-strapped legislators could appropriate her reserves for some other purpose.
In mainstream media tradition, the reporters got it wrong. The Water Authority has $3.9-billion in assets and $2.4-billion in liabilities, leaving a net worth of $1.5-billion – a half billion of that in cash. And they let Mulroy get away with claiming that she’s “tried everything” to get water, thus her environmentally ruinous plan to drain Lincoln and White Pine Counties.
What’s not been tried is a serious effort at buying water from downstream water right owners on the Colorado River. That makes a great deal of sense because we already own the infrastructure to draw it into Las Vegas, via the water intake system on Lake Mead. Billions of unneccesary construction could be saved, but sometimes the Water Authority seems to try so hard to ignore this common-sense solution that one wonders if there is political (or even financial) gain in spending billions on the pipeline.
Raining Californians Again
The eight states north and east of California are preparing themselves for new record levels of fleeing Californians.
In response to having spent all of their substantial take from taxpayers, a coalition of 76 Democrats and 6 Republicans today passed a $13-billion tax hike. Nevada political pundits jealously coveted the plan’s “stable tax structure.”
The tax hikes include a full percent increase in sales tax, increasing the state income tax to 14%, and doubling car registration fees. The tax hike packages is about 65% the size of Nevada’s 2003 tax hike package, on a per-capita inflation-adjusted annual basis.
Standard & Poor’s has cut California’s credit rating to last place amongst 50 states.
