Budget Deficit Easily Solved
By Alexander Marriott UNLV Rebel Yell: December 2, 2002

Kenny Guinn's tax commission has, (surprise!), suggested a tax raise to combat the budget crisis in the state, caused by too much spending and not enough money to pay for it by the state government. I love how it is now our fault that the state doesn't know how to balance a budget and the new legislature will be battling it out as to whether they should cut spending, a modern political heresy, or whether they should raise taxes, never popular in America (except in Massachusetts and California.) Kenny Guinn, of course is far from an inspirational leader who could lay out the case for why a tax raise oughtn't to be our course as it will only make the budgets of the future have further problems plus the fact that it's wholly immoral to be expropriating money from businesses that are making the quality of life here so swell and not the government as they always try to take credit for.

I want to know what the state of Nevada is blowing so much money on. The Millennium Scholarship program is supposedly being paid for with the tobacco settlement money, and the crummy services the state offers, and shouldn't even offer to begin with, can't cost that much money until you figure in the labor cost. But the most recent money pit the State of Nevada has come running to and embraced is the legal and political fight against Yucca Mountain. It's amazing what kind of stupid issues will get attention for the sake of scoring political points.

Yucca Mountain is probably to most misunderstood and propagandized issue in the history of this state, and no one, from the Governor on down, will expend the political capital to undo the misinformation out there. Added is the fact that the biggest fighters against it - Richard Bryan, Harry Reid, and their ilk - have spent their entire political careers asserting the ultimate supremacy of the federal government to do whatever it wants at the expense of individuals and the states. Then when the government follows their advice and does so, they get pissed off. If one wants to stop a Yucca Mountain one would first have to oppose all such Yucca-like actions every time they come up and make sure the government does what its constitutionally mandated to do, not just irrationally opposing the one government incursion that pisses your voters off and then advancing all others. That's just suicidal and idiotic.

If Guinn wished to come up with money he could drop his opposition to Yucca and negotiate a cash deal with all the states that wanted to send their waste to our desert wasteland outside of Vegas, and voila, solve this current budget crisis. But he won't because boldness has never been a word that anyone has ever put anywhere near the career and personality of Kenny Guinn, so my guess is that he'll waste more money and ask dumbly for more taxes, not knowing what to do and never able to figure it out.