If you think this budget ‘crisis’ is bad, just wait two years

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

— H.L. Mencken, columnist for the Baltimore Sun

It just doesn’t get any clearer than this. We can write thousands of words, snap hundreds of photos and draft dozen of graphs and tables. Bottom line is bottom line, and there it was on the cover of the paper.

For years the booming economy of the state of Nevada kept the state bureaucrats fat and happy. For every dollar earned by the citizens and businesses, the state got a healthy slice. The more earned, the bigger the slice. The gravy train kept rolling.

But suddenly the economy tanked. The state slice was less. While the citizens cut back, stopped buying, did without, because they had less, the bureaucrats would not. Their slice must grow even if it meant the citizens would be left with even less. Their programs must go on forever. Their pensions must be funded, while the taxpayers have to look up the meaning of “retirement” in the dictionary. Their raises must continue, while the voters are laid off, work fewer hours or take pay cuts.

(A classic example came in a story a couple of weeks ago, in which a boat dealer explained that when he sells a $60,000 boat, he nets $2,200 in profit but the state gets $4,500 in sales tax.)

According to all the projections back when the loot was rolling in, your earnings and spending would have provided enough to let the state government budget keep growing and growing. Instead, your income and spending fell.

Take just the numbers on the front page today. The bureaucrats thought you’d be able to provide them $6.8 billion for the general fund, but you can’t. You can only come up with $5.3 billion, meaning your private economy has fallen 22 percent.

But the bureaucrats’ servants, otherwise known as the state Legislature, have decided they need every bit of that money and will take more to make up for it. They’ve decided to raise sales taxes, payroll taxes, car taxes, room taxes and business license fees — more than $1 billion.

The trouble is they can’t handle the concept of elasticity. Those tax hikes will only generate that much if the economy turns around. If people buy less, if payrolls shrink, if room rates fall, if those out-of-state companies that license here flee, that $1 billion suddenly becomes $700 million or $500 million. How do you think we got where we are now?

Then there are those revenue enhancements — $350 million federal stimulus money (our newly minted money) and taking $156 million from Clark and Washoe counties (also our money). That is one-time money. Two years from now the bureaucrats will have spent it and be wondering why the revenue projections are not sufficient to continue all their precious programs and salaries and benefits.

We taxpayers will be called shirkers again for failing to generate enough money for the mawl of government. A bureaucracy is a force of nature. It wants to grow. Look at your own company. Don't you want to grow your division? To do better and bigger? But if you fail, you fail. Government has no failure option. It has no natural predator. It will suck so long as the host can bleed.

They in Carson City are simply biding time until they declare the next crisis. Wanna bet?