Stuck in an economic morass

The bad news keeps coming.

On Thursday, the Gaming Control Board announced that Nevada casinos won 12.5 percent less in July than they did in the same month in 2008.

It was the 19th straight month that their take has declined when compared with the same month a year earlier.

That came just two days after UNLV released the latest Southern Nevada Index of Leading Economic Indicators. Virtually every category remained in the tank in August. Employment, sales tax receipts, new home sales, new residents, new home permits, visitor volume, the median home price -- all slid even further.

The only positive note was that sales of existing homes rose more than 37 percent -- but you can attribute that to the bargains created by the foreclosure mess.

Amid this gloom and doom, Gov. Jim Gibbons on Tuesday publicly blamed lawmakers for slowing the recovery by raising taxes this summer.

"I warned them," the governor said, arguing that the state's 12.5 percent unemployment rate -- behind only Michigan and Rhode Island among the 50 states -- was tied to the $790 million tax package Democrats rammed through this spring over his veto.

One Democrat called Gov. Gibbons' comment a "baseless" remark, but while there are myriad factors driving the state's jobless issue, the higher taxes -- many on businesses, including the casino room tax -- certainly didn't help.

Just one more straw, camel.

Only three months after leaving Carson City, lawmakers must face the reality that the budget they passed won't cut it. The state is already $31.6 million short of the sales and gaming tax revenue projections built into the two-year, $6.9 billion spending plan. And that was padded by big spending Democrats who insisted the governor's proposed budget was too austere.

Some national analysts argue that the states will never again have as much money as they did during the go-go 1990s and the early 2000s when most -- including Nevada -- spent every dime, puffing up baseline budgets to the point where anyone could see they would become unsustainable during an economic downturn.

If that hypothesis is true, fiscal discipline must become more than just an election-year platitude.

Especially in Carson City.