Beware the greedy state legislator

If you survived the Great Recession of 2010, a state legislator near you wants your wallet.

That's "the plan" from California to Maine as politicians scratch for more spending money like a junkie sniffing the carpet for drug residue from yesterday's binge party.

Allow me to use my home state of Nevada to illustrate. But rest assured, these pearls of wisdom apply to any state you choose.

Let's review current events.

No state has suffered greater in the ongoing, Obama-prolonged recession than Nevada.

Tourism, once booming, now struggles because of reduced visitor spending. The business model upon which the "smart guys" bet the farm -- a "Manhattanized" Las Vegas Strip with high-priced condos, rooms and restaurants -- now haunts casino balance sheets from faux Venice to the faux pyramids of Egypt.

The once-vaunted Vegas real estate market stands disrupted. Home loans are difficult to come by. Construction is moribund. Bankruptcies and unemployment are at highs no one could have imagined.

The proverbial good news/bad news goes like this: The good news is that, despite the economic carnage, many businesses survived. The bad news is the carnage ain't over.

So, what do you get for surviving? A respite, perhaps, from legislative money-grubbing?

Not a chance. As legislators convene nationwide -- Nevada's citizen legislators head to Carson City this week for the 76th regular session -- every survivor is a potential source for more easy cash.

This is not to downplay the monumental problem legislators face. And it doesn't hurt to view them with generosity and sympathy for the task at hand. Budgets everywhere look bleak -- revenues down, expenses up. And, as a rule, legislators are good people who put down their jobs as lawyers, bakers and candlestick makers to do the people's business.

But those nice things said, let's not forget this overriding truth: Ninety-nine out of 100 legislators have about as much chance of solving their state's budgetary problems as a chimp has of painting the Mona Lisa.

They possess no grounding in the realities of private enterprise. Far too many are public employees and owe their political lives to greedy public employee unions. And, if I may be even more blunt than usual, when it comes to financial acumen, almost every one of them comes up one taco short of a combination plate. Some legislative leaders couldn't calculate a 20 percent tip on a dinner bill (should they ever have the occasion to actually pick up the tab for their own dinner).

The only group of people less able to solve the problem are the pundits who give them unsolicited advice. (Present columnist excluded, of course.)

For example, consider new Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval. He's grappling with his first budget. To make a dent in the shortfall, he prevailed upon the state's mining industry to prepay some of its taxes. He also called for spending cuts and promised to veto any attempt to take the easy way out and enact new taxes.

A local-yokel pundit who routinely shills for the tax-and-spend crowd advised the governor thusly: If the mining industry "just happens to have tens of millions in cash lying around, maybe (the governor) should have considered the miners can pay more. A lot more."

In other words, let's punish the survivors.

Luckily for the mining industry, taxes for commodities extracted from Nevada are capped in the state Constitution to 5 percent of the net proceeds. So mining is safe from insatiable legislative shakedowns.

Every business should have such protection. Unfortunately, they don't. Their protection comes only in the hope for a strong chief executive like Gov. Sandoval, who hit nail on the head when he said:

"There are a lot of constituencies out there that say we need more money. But ... where are you going to get it? Who are you going to tax? Are you going to tax Nevada families when we lead the country in unemployment?"

I'm sorry to tell you that most legislators, along with many pundits, would answer that question with a big "yes."

Sherman Frederick (sfrederick@reviewjournal.com), the former publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and a member of the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame, writes a column for Stephens Media. Read his blog at lvrj.com/blogs/sherm.