Friday, June 20, 2003 | 9:18 a.m.
"STOP IT."
That just about sums up the growing sentiment among parents in Southern Nevada who are up to here with the antics of the Nevada Legislature that soon will go back into yet another costly special session to do the work the people hired them to do in the regular session that they didn't do. Nor did they do it in the first special session, either.
If that is a bit confusing, just imagine the kind of answers many Nevadans are having to conjure up to both outsiders as well as citizens of this state who keep asking the same question. It goes something like this: "What the heck is going on?" I cleaned it up a bit because we are a family newspaper, but you get the point.
I feel not the pain but the punishment that regular citizens must be contemplating in retaliation against their elected leaders for what seems so obvious to most people but eludes a few legislators, who are dreaming about some other time and, perhaps, some other place.
Assuming that Gov. Kenny Guinn continues to do what is right, which means that the budgets that the Nevada Legislature passed in the 2003 session will remain inviolate, then the answer is clear -- taxes will go up to pay for the services that the citizens of this state demand.
So, when I listen to Chad Christensen or Walter Andonov, two new assemblymen from Southern Nevada, trying to cover up for their adherence to their reactionary leadership in Carson City by telling the voters that we don't have to pay for the things for which we have to pay, terms like "voodoo economics" come immediately to mind.
When I hear from veteran state legislators like Sandra Tiffany and Barbara Cegavske that Gov. Guinn is the one who is dreaming because taxes will not be raised and cuts are the preferred method of growing Nevada into a better future, I wonder, like many Nevada mothers and fathers, if they haven't over-served their time in public office and should step aside in favor of more enlightened leadership. Mind you, I am just wondering, not suggesting. That will be done quite forcefully, I suspect, by parents across the state who don't understand the game that is being played. Nor do they want to.
The fact of the matter is that this state, like many others across the country, is in the midst of a financial crisis and, so far, a minority of legislators are preventing the majority of Nevadans from finding a reasonable solution and moving on.
Our economic problems are made worse because our tax structure is highly volatile in that it depends on tourism and taxable sales for its revenues. When tourism is down, people don't gamble and don't buy. That means tax monies do not flow.
Couple that with the fastest-growing state in the union with new people requiring more government services, and the difference between incoming and outgoing only gets worse. The result is called a crisis.
So, how do our legislators handle this crisis? They do nothing. Over and over again. Next week they go back to try it one more time before the July 1 deadline, which will require some government services to start shutting down. And, while the elected officials fiddle around watching Nevada voters burn in anger, it is costing us more and more each day for these fruitless special sessions. The irony is that these self-styled "tax savers" are costing the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars just for the privilege of saying "no."
To all of that, the people responsible for the real people who will pay the price of this inaction and ineptitude -- that would be schoolchildren -- are staying, "stop it."
That's what parents are saying. They are begging those who would rather stop this state in its tracks rather than risk re-election to grow up. Stop, they say, acting like the children you are supposed to protect and start acting like adults.
Stop acting like the future of the free world hangs in the balance and start acting like responsible people faced with a problem for which no easy solution exists. Stop saying no to taxing businesses in this state which pay little or nothing to the state coffers and start saying no to taxing working people beyond their means to pay, as the business folks would have you do.
In short, stop making the rest of us live with your problems. Just fix ours.
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