Budget
New tax a wrong turn for Nevada
Lawmakers fail to anticipate unintended consequences
Have you, like many Nevadans in the past few years, bought a house that was significantly overvalued when you purchased it? Imagine what the consequences would be if the state legislature tried to prop up the value of your home by declaring, through legislation, that your home is worth at least 95 percent of what you paid for it. Would this attempt at price fixing have any effect on what others are actually willing to pay for the house should you try and sell it?
A slap in the face
Legislature’s new taxes will exacerbate recession
State lawmakers have known for a year that tax revenues were in decline. A year. For a year they have known that they would face tough choices between implementing meaningful reform to control government growth and imposing the largest tax increases ever on a populace that is already reeling from economic recession. Yet, they procrastinated and avoided those choices.
Voodoo economics don’t hold water
Keynesian ideas are politically convenient, but they don’t spur recovery
On Monday, Mark Zandi, a chief economist at a website division of Moody's Analytics, addressed a group of Las Vegas conventioneers and told them that pervasive government intervention into the marketplace — through record spending, artificial money creation, high taxes and indebtedness — will be a boon to the economy and will cause the recession to end by October. It's too bad the Keynesian ideas expressed by Mr. Zandi have never worked despite the many times they have been put into practice.
The one-way bet
State budgeting process: Heads they win, tails you lose
Ever made a dream list of all the things you'd like to have? Politicians do this all the time. Unlike the rest of us, however, they then proceed to buy everything on their list — with our money. One way they get away with it is by wielding a boring and dry-sounding accounting term that puts normal people to sleep: "baseline budgeting." When they utter it, people think the politicians are watching spending — when they're actually increasing it.
NPRI's Transparency Project on the LVCVA: May 19, 2009 update
LVCVA vice chair ducks advance payments issue
Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority Vice Chairman Keith Smith is refusing to answer questions about the authority's long-standing policy of advancing millions of dollars in interest-free operating funds to Airwave Productions, an affiliate of the authority's advertising firm, R&R Partners.
ABCs of S-P-E-N-D-I-N-G
Legislators taking the wrong approach
Remember playing with blocks as a child? You had to find the correctly shaped peg to go through the corresponding hole. Most people do this in kindergarten. Our elected officials do it in the Nevada Legislature.
Your move, Carson
Alternative budget shows tax hikes are unnecessary
For months we've heard legislators, lobbyists and union officials decrying the impact that the economic downturn might have on their wallets and not ours. In order to prop up government spending, many legislators have spent the past few months privately, but not publicly, discussing a range of ideas for increasing taxes on families in Nevada who are already reeling from the impact of economic recession.
Funding Fantasies
Nevada K-12 education spends more than you think
In the debate over Nevada's education funding, a fundamental question remains: How much are Silver State taxpayers actually spending on the education of their youth?
Legislature’s dirty little secret revealed
Backdoor spending is the norm
For decades here in Nevada, the caterwauling from tax-consumers and their political allies has been loud and constant: Silver State budgets, they wail, are much too tightfisted, "selfish" and "unprogressive." What they haven't been telling you, however, is about all of the spending state lawmakers have been perpetrating through the back door – after the biennial budgets are approved – in a practice that's been going on for at least 30 years.
NPRI's Transparency Project on the LVCVA: Apr. 20, 2009 update
LVCVA's financial float documented
Millions of dollars in advance payments from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to a company owned by R&R Partners CEO William Vassiliadis would not be allowed under state procurement regulations, a state purchasing official said Wednesday.
