How State and Local Government Spends Your Money
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Excerpted from a Las Vegas Review Journal article:
According to data provided by the National Conference of State Legislatures, no state budget is growing faster than Nevada's. Between 1994 and 2005, state spending increased by 147.5 percent, easily outdistancing Delaware at 121.9 percent and California at 100.2 percent. If Nevada's 1994 budget is compared with the estimated $3 billion the government will shell out in 2007, state spending will have tripled in just 13 years.
Nevada's spot atop these rankings isn't terribly surprising given the state's nation-leading population gains, but the budget's growth rate dwarfs even the explosive expansion of the Las Vegas Valley. Population growth and inflation justify a 93 percent increase in state spending between 1994 and 2005. Had legislators demonstrated such restraint, Nevada would have fallen to fourth place on this list.
Veteran journalist Ed Vogel wraps up the 2011 Nevada Legislative Session.
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.
It seems every incarnation of the Nevada Legislature complains about the tax structure, then proposes increased taxing and spending. With such transparent and economically uneducated blame being placed on Nevada’s tax structure, it’s difficult to tell if there’s actually a problem.
Check out this report/proposal from the Nevada Policy Research Institute. It concludes Nevada’s tax structure is, in fact, too volatile, and could be made steadier by replacing our current patchwork tribute to short-term political expediency with a flat consumption tax that encompassed all transactions, and also recommends some common-sense measures that would eliminate the public-sector unions’ constant clamor for higher taxing and spending.
The Tax Foundation’s new analysis of the 2010 US Census shows that little has changed – Nevada remains one of the states most successful in shifting its tax burden off of residents and onto non-residents. The new data shows us ranked 49th in the amount of personal income consumed by state and local taxation, but 37th in the amount of total state and local government spending as a percentage of personal income.
People have been moving away from Nevada because it no longer is an easy place to get a job.
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?
Driven by the highest local government (cities, counties) pay in the United States and moderated by less lucrative state-level worker pay, Nevada overall ranks sixth-highest government worker pay in a new study by the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce.
PLAN has ranked Nevada’s elected officials. The average grade is a D. Here’s the full story.
Nevada News Bureau