How State and Local Government Spends Your Money
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Tax policy can impact jobs. Nevada became one of the only US states to tax payroll on an unlimited basis in 2004. Less than two years later, 500 call-center jobs were moved out of state as a "business decision."
Here is the Tax Foundation's "State Tax Policy and Data" page.
The Council For State Governments West found our tax structure one of the most stable in the United States...
The American Legislative Exchange Council ranks Nevada #1 for highest taxes outside the core set (income, property & sales taxes). Here is just the Nevada summary page. The Nevada Policy Research Institute also looked at this topic recently.
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.
PLAN has ranked Nevada’s elected officials. The average grade is a D. Here’s the full story.
ALEC – the American Legislative Exchange Council – has released a new study that completely discounts the Ralstonian math oft cited by socialists who want more government and less private sector.
Here’s the complete study, and here are some important highlights:
Ralstonian math doesn’t consider government spending a valid measure of government (!). Instead, it only measures how much taxes residents pay. By that measure, Nevada fares poorly.
And that’s the continual harping you’ll hear from those who use Ralstonian math – mostly government unions, socialists and people who curry favor with elected officials in order to trade political influence for a living.
(Full disclosure: ALEC named the webmaster one of a handful of its “State Legislators Of The Year” a couple of years ago).
So-called “progressives” are fond of rebuking critics of their fascist ideas by suggesting they are all wealthy people or their advocates, complaining that they don’t want to pay more taxes. And of course, the mainstream media generally trots right along, since it is dominated by “progressives.”
Conservatives, on the other hand, understand that you cannot tax wealthy people, business owners, or businesses. Their positions of success gives them the ability to shift the cost of higher taxes onto others – either their employees (by not granting as large a pay raise, or moderating benefits, when it’s time to counter inflationary creep) or their customers (by raising prices) or their renters (by raising rents) or… well, anyone but themselves.
At the end of the day, the cost of tax hikes are borne by people who can least afford it.
Conservatives understand that.
So it’s a surprise only to California’s “progressives” that low and middle income people are leaving California faster than high income people (although all categories are leaving almost as fast as new rubes move in from foreign countries, folks who apparently are making their migration decision on the basis of a thirty-year-old marketing brochure). Here’s a sample of the news coverage – from the newspaper in California’s far-gone state capital…
The states without personal income taxes, such as Texas, Nevada and Florida, are the most likely destinations for high-income families and individuals leaving California. However, those states are also among the most frequent destinations of low-income families as well.
Strangely, California’s “progressives” are reacting to the news as if they are vindicated – it’s okay to raise taxes on the wealthy in order to help the lower and middle class after all, they say.
Ironically, the Las Vegas Review Journal ran a letter to the editor on the same day that this news broke from a woman who noted that her and her family’s favorite fast food breakfast went up in price by one third the same day the Nevada Legislature’s latest record tax hikes AND the minimum wage hike went up.
New census data says Southern Nevada local governments have exaggerated their growth to the tune of about three years worth of our current growth rate.
The Las Vegas Review Journal reports the story…
The Census Bureau says the Metro area hit 1.866-million last June 30, vs. local government estimates (passed up to the State Demographer before becoming “official”) that had us at just under 2-million. The difference is more than six percent, equal to three years of our current pace of 2% annual growth.
Cities and Counties in Nevada are incented to exaggerate growth because each jurisdiction’s population is a primary factor in determining how much of the state’s “Consolidated Tax Distribution” they get.
CTX, as it is known in government finance circles, is a complex formula that divvies up a group of state taxes including the car registration tax, liquor taxes, and cigarette taxes.
If Henderson, for example, has more people than North Las Vegas, then Henderson gets a bigger piece of the pie and North Las Vegas gets a smaller piece of the pie. As a result, all local governments exaggerate. Every ten years, they have to drop down to the official census count.
The unfortunate side effect of exaggerating growth is that anti-family lawmakers point to the exaggerated population counts and claim they need to raise taxes on existing Nevada families in order to provide government services to pretend people.
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.
Nevada News Bureau