‘Everything’s going well in Nevada’

Speaking before a carefully hand-picked audience -- most of the 500 tickets to the gathering in the Lawlor Events Center at the University of Nevada, Reno were distributed through the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid -- Vice President Joe Biden assured Northern Nevadans on Friday that the Obama administration's $787 billion economic stimulus plan has started to move the nation toward economic recovery. Mr. Biden went on to say that Harry Reid has made sure Nevadans are getting their share.

As evidence of economic recovery, the vice president mentioned that stocks have risen by 35 percent since January, with the Dow Jones industrial average topping the 10,000 mark last week.

"It is the beginning," Mr. Biden said. "It is restoring the savings of middle-class families. We were in free fall in this economy. Everyone forgets that."

But is the market recovering due to the success of the Obama initiatives, or because the Democrats' carbon-trading, "cap-and-tax" boondoggle appears dead? And those savings are denominated in dollars, of course. What the non-stop running of the Washington printing presses is going to do to the purchasing power of the dollar remains to be seen.

Mr. Biden stressed Nevada would have a hard time being "serviced when you don't have a senior senator." Retaining Sen. Reid in office is the "lifeblood of getting any blood to Nevada," he said.

Interesting. So it's the vice president's position that voters in the 25 states whose senators enjoy below-average seniority should expect to get the shaft? Where's that leave tiny Delaware, which presumably got a new senator to replace Mr. Biden just this year? More on that in a moment.

Both Mr. Biden and Sen. Reid declared that 4,000 Nevada teaching jobs have already been "saved" by stimulus funds; the vice president further vowed that on Oct. 30 he will announce just how many jobs, total, have been saved or created by the stimulus plan.

That will surely be welcome. Only three days after the pep rally in Reno, the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation announced Nevada joblessness rose from 13.2 percent in August to 13.3 percent in September, and that the jump in the Las Vegas market was even more severe -- from 13.4 percent to 13.9 percent in the single month.

"Everything is going well in Nevada," Sen. Reid insisted last week, reporting that real estate agents in Las Vegas tell him they see signs of economic recovery, and that Las Vegas hotels remain full on weekends. "We're doing fine," he emphasized

A sunny disposition isn't all bad. Las Vegans certainly are doing their best. But Sen. Reid apparently hasn't had the experience of driving to his favorite Las Vegas pizza joint or insurance or travel agency, only to find the storefront suddenly empty.

The national unemployment rate is 9.8 percent -- bad enough. But in Las Vegas, more than 135,000 people are out of work. Unemployed people don't eat out, or buy much in the way of new clothes or cars. And so the spiral continues.

Back in February, when Sen. Reid was helping to enact the huge, special-interest "stimulus" pork bill, Nevada's unemployment stood at 10 percent. At that time, he promised the Democrats' massive spending bill "would create three and a half million jobs across the country, including 34,000 in Nevada."

Are they hiding all those new jobs up at Area 51?

On top of that, on the very day Sen. Reid and Mr. Biden were engaged in their mutual back-patting at UNR, the Treasury Department revealed the federal deficit had surged to an all-time high of $1.4 trillion -- higher than those of the final four years of the Bush administration, combined.

As for the notion that Sen. Reid must continue in office to ensure Nevada keeps receiving adequate federal support? The Review-Journal reported in February that Nevada's per capita haul from the stimulus plan was $560 per person, second lowest in the nation. Mr. Biden's home state of Delaware, on the other hand, received ... $1,360 per person, highest in the nation.