‘New’ report?

This merciless recession has made everything old in progressive thinking new again.

At least, that's what those on the left who fancy themselves big thinkers would have us believe. Sure, they were pounding the table during the flush years, demanding higher taxes for schools and mass transit boondoggles, greater restrictions on automobiles, growth, development and energy and resource use, and more policies to transfer wealth from the upper and middle classes to the unskilled poor.

But on Monday, the short-term memory set unveiled a "major new report on growth and sustainability in the Las Vegas Valley, with conclusions and recommendations that need to be taken seriously if the region is to avoid a repeat of the catastrophic and ongoing economic collapse that began in 2007."

This "new" report from the Sonoran Institute of Arizona, funded by its like-minded friends from the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, the Sierra Club and the Nevada Conservation League, essentially holds that if only we'd had the higher taxes and burdensome regulatory structure to crush job growth and investment in the first place, we never would have fallen so far.

So naturally, the best way forward for this battered economy is an inclusive approach, one that allows the region's various "stakeholders" -- namely, people like them who want governments to follow their instructions in telling other people what to do with their own property and money -- to lay a new course for the valley. One that places limits on how quickly we can grow, packs us into our cities like sardines and has us sweating at bus stops all day.

Unless, of course, illegal immigrants want to come here, in which case we should provide them with detached housing and free health care. The "major new report" recommends that we "increase investment in the public education system and improve access for Hispanics and other recent immigrants" and encourage the federal government to grant amnesty to illegals everywhere.

Not to mention tax subsidies galore, when governments are already broke. That doesn't sound very sustainable to us.

The report is an 80-page cure for insomnia, rehashing every pipe dream of the "I know best," interventionist, social-justice crowd in their own soul-crushing, feel-good lingo. It's fascism with a smiley face. It's the wrong approach.

And there's nothing remotely "new" about it.