Posted by Webmaster on April 7, 2009 under News, State Government
Great Review Journal editorial today:
…despite the fact both population growth and school enrollments have leveled off — even the “maintain services at current levels” spending Carson City Democrats apparently consider “as low as they’ll go” represents 17 percent more spending than the budget enacted by the Legislature two years ago — 26 percent more than actual spending of about $6.3 billion.
For months, the bureaucrats and Democratic legislators have been making a show of tearing their hair, weeping and moaning about “cuts,” lambasting Gov. Gibbons for submitting a budget that will supposedly leave schools and hospitals no choice but to close their doors, leave children and old people to starve in the streets, etc.
What cuts? Where are the cuts? Most Nevada taxpayers are figuring out how to tighten their belts and live on less. But a 17 percent spending increase — a revenue increase of 37 percent over what’s now flowing in to state coffers, new or increased taxes to generate an extra $2.16 billion, to a new record income level of $7.96 billion — is the minimum lawmakers will consider?
Yes, state government’s general fund actually spent $6.3 billion from the GF over the last two years, but the revenues were only $5.8 billion. Incidentally, that is just about the same amount of revenue we received in the prior biennium. For the coming biennium, the latest estimates (which are unofficial guesstimates from the Legislature, who has a long history of manipulating guesstimates for political purposes) say we will collect $5.1 billion, plus about $250 million from the new room tax, and about $400 million from the federal stimulus money.
So the actual revenue decline (assuming the federal stimulus and room tax) with no further tax increases is less than 1%. Those are the facts, pure and simple. Our population is barely growing now and the CPI is also very low.
To say a 37% increase in revenue is imposing harsh cuts is only possible in the delusional world of government spending. The problem centers on the fact that the government (particularly the state legislature) increases spending on autopilot by granting raises and expanding benefits every year, and any reduction in those automatic increases is falsely described as a draconian cut. The majority of the political media – Ralston and Sebelius – make no bones that they passionately desire more government, so they repeat the false descriptions from legislative leaders, and portions of their audience too lazy to check the math buy into and repeat it.
So now legislative leaders say it’s a cut if further increases are not implemented. There are a lot of private businesses that would be real happy to have only a 1% reduction in revenues and the spending adjustments needed to balance the books would be much easier than what they are facing now.
Oh, did we mention 20% of the employees at the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce just LOST THEIR JOBS!
Posted by Webmaster on March 18, 2009 under News
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…
Posted by Webmaster on March 18, 2009 under News
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.
Posted by Webmaster on March 12, 2009 under News
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.
Posted by Webmaster on February 27, 2009 under Economy, News
Two more Nevada businesses closed down yesterday… Desert Dodge, Security Bank. Yet Legislative leaders still want to raise taxes.
Posted by Webmaster on February 27, 2009 under News, 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.
