Study hall

On Tuesday, the state Board of Examiners, on a party-line vote, endorsed spending $500,000 on yet another study of Nevada's tax structure.

The two Democrats on the financial oversight board, Secretary of State Ross Miller and Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, OK'd spending up to that amount of tax loot. Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons, the chairman and third member of the board, dissented on the grounds that the Legislature's Interim Finance Committee has not yet even chosen a consultant from among eight bidders to conduct the study.

Bids ranged from $32,000 to $900,000.

Actually, those were only the formal bids. At least one local radio host has offered to compile the study for five dollars, presumably by photocopying and collating sections of earlier tax studies the Legislature has largely ignored, those being the 1960 Zubrow report, the 1966 Lybrand report, the 1988 Price-Waterhouse report, the 1990 Assembly Bill 801 report, and, most recently, the 2003 Governor's Task Force report.

Gov. Gibbons' dissent was couched in political terms, but it might have been more useful to vote to allocate the five dollars.

The problem with all such studies is that they amount to hunts for a mythological creature: not the snark, the unicorn, or the phoenix, in this case, but a "stable tax base" that will still bring lawmakers as much money as they'd like to spend to "support bureaucratic services" -- no matter how wasteful, ineffective or counterproductive they may have become -- even during hard times.

Since the well-compensated purveyors of "state services" have never been known to say, "Whoa, that's enough!", even during boom times, it's hard to imagine what such a "stable tax structure" would look like, unless the Legislature proposes to hire Kublai Khan and his Golden Horde to thunder through the Silver State on horseback, looting the villages and burning everything in their path.

It's sometimes implied a "graduated state income tax" -- personal, corporate, or both -- would do the job. Unfortunately, the tax take of states that impose such levies (think New York and California) are so onerous that their residents are now fleeing in droves -- and those governments still hover closer to bankruptcy today than does Nevada.

Guy Hobbs, president of the fiscal consulting firm Hobbs, Ong & Associates, who chaired the previously-mentioned 2003 study, says one approach would be to start applying the state sales tax not just to goods but also to services, acknowledging the shift over the past 60 years from a state economy dominated by goods (70 percent to 30 percent) to one where services now dominate by a ratio of 60 to 40.

We'll bet he'd even tell the Legislature that (again) without charging them the extra five dollars.

Of course, the lawmakers know that. They also have a list of all the goods they've exempted from the sales tax, for one political reason or another.

Fans of ever-increasing government moan that the delegates, concerned about voter ire, "lack the will" to extend the sales tax to cover haircuts, tax preparation, lawn-mowing, bug-spraying, farm equipment, baby food, whatever.

In fact, what the lawmakers really "lack the will" to do is the one thing that would instantly accelerate the state's sluggish recovery from recession: that being to slash or close entire government bureaucracies, enabling the Legislature to immediately reduce taxes across the board.

What do you think the chances are that Carson City honchos Barbara Buckley, Bill Raggio, et al., will hire a consultant capable of coming back with that report?