National tax expert dissects NV proposals

The Washington-based Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank, has an analysis on its blog of the tax proposals Nevada legislators are considering.

William Ahern particularly critiques the tiering of the business payroll tax. Taxes on individuals can be made progressive in this way, so that they hit the rich harder than the poor, but the same rationale doesn't make sense when you're talking about businesses, he says. And since the tax is imposed on total payroll, it doesn't differentiate between large and small individual incomes.

"A business is not a person, and the total payroll might be a group of low- or middle-income people," Ahern writes.

He adds, "If Nevada lawmakers actually raise a business payroll tax in the teeth of this unemployment rate, at least they should apply the same rate to all business."