Ad hits Roberson on taxes

Editor’s note: This post has been altered from an earlier version to correct an error.

State Sen. Michael Roberson, R-Henderson, has essentially been ignoring his Republican primary opponent, the former Ron Paul Nevada operative Carl Bunce. But a non-profit group is trying to make that strategy a bit harder for Roberson to pull off with a new ad aimed at calling the senator out on taxes.

It was just more than a year ago that Roberson was proudly touting taxes in the Nevada Legislature, much to the consternation and surprise of Democrats and Roberson’s fellow Republicans. Roberson and a few members of his caucus ensured that a constitutional amendment to remove the tax cap on the net proceeds of minerals taxes was on the November ballot. And he even proposed a concomitant tax on mining that would have served as a legislative alternative to The Education Initiative, to the chagrin of some more conservative Republicans in the Senate.

Feckless Democrats, previously content to the let the mining tax proposal die a quiet death, went along with the former, but balked at the latter.

These days, Roberson doesn’t talk much about taxes. (A recent email for comment on news that gold prices had fallen and mining revenues to the state were down went unreturned, for example.)

But that doesn’t mean no one is talking about it. A group calling itself “Team Nevada Engaged,” a non-profit corporation that lists Robert Tyree as its founder and only officer, paid for an ad attacking Roberson. Here’s the text, with some analysis from me:

“Aren’t you tired of the Legislature promising no new taxes, but raising them anyway? Then you should be angry at Michael Roberson. Roberson voted for higher gas taxes, higher sales taxes and voted three times to implement Obamacare, which increases spending and taxes by more than $1 trillion.”

The truth is a little more complicated than that: Roberson did vote to authorize the Clark County Commission to index the county’s fuel tax to inflation, which some other counties in the state already do. It was the commission that actually raised that tax. Ditto for the sales tax increase for the More Cops program, which the county has failed to enact thus far.

And while Roberson — along with most of the rest of the entire Legislature, Republican and Democrat alike — voted to give tax breaks to businesses to implement the Affordable Care Act, to hire facilitators to help people sign up for insurance and for a state budget that expands the Medicare program — the trillion-dollar reference is to the national act, not Nevada’s share of it.

“That’s Michael Roberson. He signed a promise not to raise your taxes, but he did it anyway. Call Michael Roberson. Tell him to stop breaking his promise to Nevadans, and stop raising our taxes.”

Here, they’ve got Roberson fair and square. Roberson did sign the Americans for Tax Reform pledge in 2010 not to raise taxes. (He actually kept that promise in the 2011 Legislature, refusing to go along with Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval’s budget that included an extension of expiring taxes.) But he broke that promise in 2013, with votes on the budget (which included that same packages of supposedly temporary taxes) and in advocating for repeal of the mining tax cap, a mining tax and tax-authorization votes.

The moral of the story? Sign the tax pledge only if you know for sure you will never, ever vote for a net increase in taxes, because if you break it, it will come back to haunt you.