Fiscal
Running in circles
Imagine a dog chasing its own tail. Why does it do that? Does it actually think it will catch the tail? Now imagine 150 of Southern Nevada 's top political and economic leaders running in circles, chasing their own tales of woe and the wonders that could be – given enough tax money. It's an image that gets you to the essence of the recent forum hosted by UNLV and the Brookings Institute in Las Vegas to consider recent a Brookings policy report.
Read moreImagine ferocious spending of your money
Brian Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, is one of 50 trustees of the Brookings Institute, a center-left think tank in Washington D.C. On Sunday, a story on the front page of Greenspun's insert ballyhooed the arrival in town of a Brookings expert to lead an invitation-only "get-together" of 120 Southern Nevadans with U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Tuesday.
We told you so
"Credit is frozen." "Interbank lending has frozen." "The government must do something to free up credit." "The bailout will free up credit and get this economy going." We have heard it all. And we at NPRI warned it was all bogus.
Facts are meaningless
Homer Simpson, a sage for modern America (as sad or as promising as that might be) once said, "Facts are meaningless; they can be used to prove anything." If one's facts are sourced from Nevada's own government, then Homer may be more correct than we would hope.
A tale of two graphs
It was the best of graphs, it was the worst of graphs. Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley has graciously sent NPRI the data set she used to generate a graph showing Nevada's general fund revenue per resident for FY 2009 will be below the 1996 level.
Ranking Nevada's Education
According to a recent study by the Tax Foundation, Nevada's resident tax burden ranks 49th in the country. According to Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, that low tax burden correlates to low government funding and, as a result, Nevada ranks 44th in education funding per student.
Will Buckley support the gold standard?
In attempting recently to dissect Barbara Buckley's general fund revenue per capita graph, we were only able to ascertain that she adjusted for inflation back to 1996. When trying to "reverse engineer" her graph (we took her 1996 per-capita amount and adjust it to 2008 dollar values to create a starting-point comparison between her graph and ours), it appears as though she is using the population estimates for the beginning of the fiscal year for her general fund per capita calculation.
Greenspun's socialism
Brian Greenspun's Sunday opinion column in the Las Vegas Sun illustrated good intentions, but ultimately dangerous and misguided thinking. In calling for government to take the reins of Wall-Street investing – supposedly in the interest of the taxpayer – Greenspun calls for a new kind of socialism for America's future economy.
The anatomy of a crisis
Nevada's economy faces more trouble than does that of any other state in the country. Rising energy costs, a severe stock market slump and a total collapse of the housing market have led to lower profits, less disposable income for tourists to spend and lower tax revenue.
Bailout up, market down
After the first attempt at a bailout failed on September 29, the Dow Industrial Average dropped about 780 points. Newspapers, politicians and pundits across the country took it as a sign that we needed the bailout. Voting "no" had caused the "largest" single-day fall in U.S. history, we were told.
