Both parties blew the state budget

When pointing the finger of blame, it does make a difference which finger you use.

But beyond that etiquette note, last week's State of the State address from Gov. Jim Gibbons placed the fault of Nevada's fiscal woes where it belongs -- squarely at the doorstep of the 2009 Nevada Legislature.

Now, I know the governor is the political equivalent of Rodney Dangerfield these days -- he gets no respect (largely due to his own libido).

But we ignore the lesson behind his finger of blame at our own peril. Nevada got into this mess because the 2009 Legislature did, in fact, make exactly the wrong move at exactly the wrong time. More importantly, if Nevadans don't flush that bad judgment out of the system, we'll be doomed to repeat it in legislative session after legislative session.

So let's review history: Gibbons' 2009-11 budget called for $6.17 billion in spending -- exceeding projected revenue by $513 million, which he proposed to pay for with a voter-approved room tax increase and federal "stimulus" welfare.

Democrats immediately whacked the governor for failing to provide a "vision" for the state. They settled on spending $6.9 billion, about $700 million more than the governor's proposal. To pay for the increased spending, legislators met in secret for months, plotting to raise taxes. Eventually, the Legislature rammed a treasury-busting budget of its own making into law over the governor's veto. Democrats were at the wheel, but Republican senators gave them the two-thirds majority they needed in the upper chamber. Only GOP Sens. Mark Amodei, Barbara Cegavske, Mike McGinness and Maurice Washington declined to go along.

Kudos to those legislators. But as a whole, a pox on the Democrats addicted to spending and shame on the Republicans who enabled them.

Particularly culpable were Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas; Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas; and Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno.

They knew the state suffered in the grip of a nasty recession. Yet, they increased the spending they authorized in the 2007 budget by $50 million and upped the state's overall tax burden by 19.1 percent. Instead of grappling with the beast, they fed it.

Today, the Average Nevada Joe pays more for less in the form of a higher sales tax as well as greater fees for the privilege of interacting with the DMV.

Visitors pay a higher room tax.

And worst of all, medium to large employers saw the payroll tax increase from 0.63 percent to 1.17 percent, extracting an expected $346 million from a state that at the time experienced 9 percent unemployment. It's now 13 percent, with no end in sight.

Can you spell "job killer"?

Now before I come off sounding completely unsympathetic to the rigors of public service and human frailty, let me say that we all make mistakes. And there are many fine people elected to office who have differing views on proper governance.

Fine.

That's why we ought to remember exactly what happened last year. Spending more and taxing more into the teeth of a recession failed. It was a screw-up. A mistake. An error we should not repeat.

Democrats and Republicans in the Legislature will now trundle back to Carson City on Feb. 23 for a special session. They'll put a bandage on their self-inflicted wound, but the real treatment will have to begin in the 2011 regular session next February.

I don't expect anyone to apologize. But I do hope we'll learn. The fixes are not more taxes and more spending but less of each. Stop budgeting bass-ackwards. Show some fiscal discipline.

Business as usual in Carson City has for too long meant creating a no-lose system for ever bigger government and a never-win deal for what used to be a growing tax base. We can't afford to do that anymore.

That's the hard truth.

Sherman Frederick (sfrederick@ reviewjournal.com) is publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and president of Stephens Media.