The Rhyolite plan

Like a rider kicking his dead horse in the desert -- hoping against hope that he can get the overburdened beast to rise and carry him just a little further, as it always did before -- so do those who believe big government could still solve our ills if only we weren't so "greedy," refuse to believe there's any limit to the taxes and mandates they can load onto the backs of struggling citizens.

Ayn Rand parodied the attitude 50 years ago in her great novel, "Atlas Shrugged," when industrialist Hank Rearden -- presented with the latest in a long line of government schemes to seize more of his profits and use them to prop up his failing competitors -- finally asks: "How do you expect me to produce after I go bankrupt?"

" 'You won't go bankrupt. You'll always produce,' said Dr. Ferris indifferently, neither in praise nor in blame, merely in the tone of stating a fact of nature, as he would have said to another man: You'll always be a bum. 'You can't help it. It's in your blood. Or, to be more scientific: you're conditioned that way.' ...

"Then Lawson said softly, half in reproach, half in scorn, 'Well, after all, you businessmen have kept predicting disasters for years, you've cried catastrophe at every progressive measure and told us that we'll perish -- but we haven't.' "

Nevada's Legislature last month increased the state's payroll tax from 0.63 percent to 1.17 percent for non-financial institutions (banks already pay 2 percent) with annual payrolls of more than $250,000, after deducting the cost of health insurance -- a scheme designed to punish businesses that fail to offer health coverage.

The lawmakers then lowered the rate for businesses with payrolls under $250,000 per year from 0.65 percent to 0.50 percent, allowing the schemers to claim they "cut taxes for 74 percent of businesses."

This is an old redistributionist trick. Even if the 76 percent figure is accurate, the 24 percent of businesses which will pay the higher rate already pay the lion's share of the tax, meaning the firms that employ the majority of Nevadans are now instructed to kneel down like trained beasts of burden and get more logs laid across their backs.

Those hikes will slow business growth, says Assemblyman Ty Cobb, R-Reno, one of a handful of Republicans who backed Gov. Jim Gibbons in his opposition to the big tax hikes.

"I think we in the Assembly Republican Caucus estimated how much more it (tax increases) would cost businesses, and we thought it would cost 10,000 jobs," Mr. Cobb said last week.

But Assemblyman Richard "Tick" Segerblom, D-Las Vegas, scoffs at such estimates.

Oh, he doesn't argue that a very small number of firms may choose not to move here as a result of the increased payroll tax, which is estimated by the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce to cost about $216 extra per year for each employee making an average salary of $40,000 at a company with a total payroll of more than $250,000.

But Nevada doesn't need that type of firm anyway, Mr. Segerblom declares.

"Nobody will be laid off because of the payroll tax," Mr. Segerblom sneers. "We are talking about a couple hundred (dollars) more for each employee a year. Any business that doesn't want to pay that, I don't want in the state."

Spoken like a true member of the coddled, hereditary government elite.

In a time when many a mini-mall in this town has at least one if not two business locations suddenly vacated, their empty black windows staring out like the glazed-over eyes of that dead horse in the desert, this one should surely go up on the wall, in third place under the response of the queen of France when told the people had no bread, and of first lady Hillary Clinton's exasperated reply when told many small businesses could not afford to provide the employee insurance coverage mandated under her doomed Hillarycare scheme, that being: "I can't go out and save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America."

And then as a topper, Mr. Segerblom asserts Nevada is still a business-friendly state, certainly better off than it would have been under Gov. Jim Gibbons' proposal that state government simply be downsized to live within its current income, which Mr. Segerblom characterizes as the Republican governor's "plan of gutting the state."

Why the half-measures, then, Mr. Segerblom? Why be such a piker? If Nevada is more "business friendly" today, with a paltry additional $1 billion in taxes on the books, think how private-sector employment would blossom if we raised the state sales tax to 10, 15, 20 percent, and added a 40 percent corporate income tax on top of that!

We could call it "The Rhyolite Plan." Time's a -wastin'!