Supreme Court halts efforts to repeal commerce tax

Of all the issues that bedeviled the effort to repeal the recently passed commerce tax, it should come as no surprise that a sin of omission condemned the entire enterprise.

The Nevada Supreme Court rejected a host of more technical legal arguments mounted by a coalition of gaming, mining, technology and business interests to simply conclude that the petition left out an important material fact: If you repeal the commerce tax, you’re left with an unbalanced budget. This, justices decided, was something that the people deserved to know before signing a petition or voting on repeal.

Practically, this kills the repeal effort. There’s not enough time to re-write the description and start over collecting the 55,233 valid signatures necessary to qualify the measure by the June 21 deadline.

But philosophically, the would-be tax repealers omission is utterly unsurprising. An unbalanced budget that would have required cuts isn’t just a consequence of their efforts, it’s the end goal — and has been all along. These are the people who believe that government must be starved of money like a cancer cell must be starved of blood, with the same intended result.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the Nevada Supreme Court issued a simple reminder: Taxes are the price we pay for living in civilization, and when you cut those taxes, there are consequences. “Yet, even though the tax’s disapproval will necessarily unbalance the budget approved by the Legislature in 2015 … the description of effect makes no mention whatsoever of this critical consequence,” the ruling reads. “Accordingly, we conclude that the referendum’s description is deceptive for failing to accurately identify the practical ramification of the commerce tax’s disapproval.”

Gov. Brian Sandoval put it a bit more bluntly last week, telling reporters who wanted to know where he’d cut the budget if the referendum passed to ask state Controller Ron Knecht, the leader of the anti-tax effort. According to a story in the Nevada Appeal, Knecht replied that he’d presented an alternative state budget in 2015 that would have raised revenue in part by requiring local government employees to pay more to fund their retirement accounts.

(Full disclosure: My wife works for the city of Las Vegas, and participates in the PERS system.)

Sandoval scoffed at that reply, reminding Knecht that the Legislature had dismissed his idea in favor of ultimately passing a tax package that included the commerce tax. Again, the governor demanded, where shall we make cuts?

“I’m going to put together a cut list,” Knecht replied.

Yes, please, get right on that. But where will Knecht find the time, what with writing op-eds for rural newspapers in which he argues that lawmakers can easily deal with the loss of $74.9 million in the 2016-17 budget once they meet in February?

It doesn’t matter to the would-be tax repealers what is cut, only that something is cut. They’re against the commerce tax not because it’s bad policy, or that it pays for things we don’t need, but because it provides the state with revenue. And the nihilist wing of the modern Republican Party wants to starve the beast more than it wants to do the hard work of overseeing the government to ensure it’s performing its expected tasks as efficiently as possible. And if civilization takes a few nicks from the random swinging of the anti-tax scythe, well, those are the breaks.

Ultimately, then, the surprise isn’t that the commerce tax repeal effort fell victim to a sin of omission by failing to tell would-be signers about a salient fact that might have affected their decision. The surprise would have been if that fact had been included, since Knecht and his crew clearly don’t care about that side of the equation at all.

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist and co-host of the show “PoliticsNOW,” airing at 5:30 p.m. Sundays on 8NewsNow. Follow him on Twitter (@SteveSebelius) or reach him at 702-387-5276 or SSebelius@reviewjournal.com.