Editorials

Talk about moving the goal posts. City Hall is determined to subsidize a downtown soccer stadium the public doesn’t want to pay for. So determined, in fact, that city officials are actively working to deny voters the opportunity to kill the project.

Gov. Brian Sandoval and the Legislature can go beyond education savings accounts to promote universal school choice in Nevada. Many families, especially low-income households, will need funds beyond what ESAs can provide to pay for the best educational fit for their children.

It can’t be said enough: Money alone will not improve K-12 education in Nevada or anywhere else. Reforms to public education systems have to be part of any plan to raise student achievement and better train future generations of workers. And no reform is more important or effective than promoting educational competition through school choice.

Since the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, in which 32 students and faculty members were killed and an additional 17 were wounded, gun-rights activists have pushed to allow concealed carry on college campuses. Unfortunately, that push has been widely lambasted by the media and ignored by lawmakers and higher education officials — while shootings in gun-free zones continue at schools large and small.

Public employee unions look out for their members’ financial interests, not those of the public. So why are taxpayers stuck paying the salaries of union leaders who are hostile to them?

One of the great travesties of modern policing is law enforcement’s ability to lawfully steal the property of individuals without making an arrest or even writing a citation.

Bill Foley is a very rich man. The billionaire is chairman of a title insurance and mortgage company and the owner of 14 wineries, a cattle ranch and a golf course community. You don’t build that kind of wealth without doing loads of due diligence, figuring out what people want and whether they’ll pay for it.

The Public Employees Retirement System of Nevada requires major reforms because the state’s pension plan, for too many people, is not a retirement program — it is a wealth generation system. PERS provides former government employees with benefits that are unavailable to the taxpayers who fund the system at great expense. And some PERS perks are immune to IRS rules that sock it to citizens who attempt to access retirement funds.

We know the Public Employees Retirement System of Nevada provides retirement benefits to people who aren’t retired. But did you know the taxpayer-funded pension plan also provides disability benefits to former government workers who aren’t disabled?

It’s not enough for the Nevada Legislature to change retirement benefits for future public employees. The state’s pension plan provides perks and payouts so absurdly generous that some of them need to be dialed back right away.