Columnist Erin Neff: Legislative fiasco should give voters new resolve

Erin Neff

Friday, July 25, 2003 | 5:06 a.m.

DESPITE ALL the talk about letting voters rule on everything from the legislature's two-thirds majority requirement to recalls of state Supreme Sourt justices, the most important sections of next fall's ballot will be the old mainstays -- the Assembly and Senate races.

The 63 lawmakers this year turned in what was arguably the state government's worst performance ever. With the state in financial crisis, they cobbled together a tax plan so frought with loopholes that few believe the revenue number is attainable or that the plan will actually stabilize the economy.

It's not so much a missed opportunity as a complete meltdown.

You can blame leadership, blame the lobbying teams or blame individuals who stalled and stymied the process with no intent on creating anything worthwhile. But ultimately, voters must look inward at the decisions they made on ballot's past, and vow not to err that way again.

The tax plan that was ultimately approved is little more than the Band-Aid economists, political consultants and educators feared would get slapped onto the big wound only to lose its adhesive at the first sign of a lawyer.

Attorneys will have a field day with the tax plan. Not only are there loopholes, there are so many questions about some of the proposals that lawmakers sheepishly admit in their own bill draft that the Taxation Department will have to sort some of it out.

Way to craft policy, guys.

Instead of a once-and-done solution -- a significant business tax that would help right a ship leaning hard to the gaming side of our economic waters -- they remained obsessed with simplistic counting.

The taxes they passed count things like this -- each employee, each bank branch, each ticket to a concert, each bottle of booze, each pack of cigarettes.

Sure, the Legislature isn't compensated enough to even be able to ask if you want fries with that, but somebody has to be able to do more than preschool math with the state's economic system and the future of its children.

The payroll tax is a joke that no one in business finds funny, save for the large retailers who escape the responsibility of contributing serious revenue to the serious financial strains they help create.

Take Target or Home Depot, for example, companies who pay up to 15 times more in taxes to our neighbors such as Arizona and California but charge us the same prices on goods.

Under any business tax on gross receipts or on a company's profits, these businesses would begin to help support the schools their employees' children attend and maintain the roads that traffic clogs on the way to their stores.

As it exists, the payroll tax is little more than a nuisance increase in what was the business license tax, and for some business owners the new per-employee tax is even easier to get around than the old one.

Sole proprietors are supposed to pay the payroll tax, but if I ran a business, I just wouldn't give myself a salary subject to the levy, I'd draw from the till when needed.

Banks complained for the entire legislative process that they couldn't be taxed like other businesses, but then said a tax on banks was unfair.

Lawmakers, of course, exempted banks from the payroll tax. But the excise tax they slopped together puts the whole banking industry -- from giants like Wells Fargo and Citibank to small community banks in the sticks -- into the same category.

How is that equal or fair?

By ignoring policy in favor of politics, lawmakers avoided responsibility and again left Nevada screaming for leadership.

And it is clear that only voters will be able to answer the call, when they go to the polls in November 2004.