Columnist Jon Ralston: Political pandering runs amok

Friday, July 16, 2004 | 4:38 a.m.

Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the Ralston Report. He can be reached at (702) 870-7997 or at ralston@vegas.com.

WEEKEND EDITION

July 17 - 18, 2004

Sometimes I wonder just how gullible voters are. Occasionally I muse about just how low politicians will set the pander bar. And always I marvel at just how spectacularly both groups, either ignorantly or willfully, miss the big picture.

Luckily, election seasons come around to help solve these conundrums.

In Nevada during Campaign '04, where questions lurk about gaming industry consolidation and how government raises and spends money, what are voters most obsessed with and what obsession are politicians most willing to feed?

Property taxes. Yes, property taxes.

As everyone knows, home values have increased astronomically in the last few years and so, concomitantly, have property taxes. And people are furious. And when voters get angry, politicians make promises, no matter how short-sighted.

GOP consultant Steve Wark, who is involved in several campaigns, said during an interview on "Face to Face" last week that property taxes are the No. 1 issue candidates are hearing about at the door. "And it's going to continue to be that way for the next two or three months," he added.

It's no coincidence that one of Wark's candidates, state Sen. Ray Rawson, recently proposed linking property tax rates to inflation. But if you don't believe Wark's polling data, everyone else seems to have a similar idea, including the Democratic legislative leaders who proposed their own plan last week.

"We are totally committed to taking action in the next session of the Legislature to protect homeowners," Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus and Speaker Richard Perkins said in a release last week.

But protect them from what? Property taxes in Nevada historically have been among the lowest in the country. And you might presume that rising property taxes would be a small price to pay for homeowners who have seen their assessed values double and triple in recent years.

This is akin to people getting a raise and then whining that their income taxes just went up. But proportionality has never figured much in political debates.

Indeed the disproportionate number of property tax ideas -- compared to the relative seriousness of the issue -- is astounding. We already have had one initiative (Assemblywoman Sharron Angle's plan to cap increases at 2 percent) and one local elected official propose a plan with a higher cap (County Assessor Mark Schofield says it should be 6 percent). And several bill drafts are in the works by legislators, some of who coincidentally are up for re-election, including state Sen. Ann O'Connell.

But this is an artificial solution to an artificial problem by politicians who will employ any artifice to purchase the one thing they want most: votes. And so, as usual, they operate out of fear and pandering rather than foresight and vision.

Property taxes, unlike many levies, are paid in some way by almost everyone -- even renters because the landlord will pass along any increase. Thus it may be the best political issue of all on which to employ demagoguery because it activates and infuriates everyone, especially ornery seniors whose votes are purchased almost every cycle by politicians who treat old folks as if every one is afflicted with short-term memory loss.

The stench of hypocrisy here is redolent, too. How those who came to Carson City last year intent on showing the need for more money and supporting a billion-dollar tax increase (two-thirds of them) can now puff out their chests about capping property taxes is nothing short of chutzpah run amok. If candidates can get voters to focus on property taxes, maybe they won't remember the largest tax increase in history and, more importantly, legislators won't actually have to explain and defend the package.

Of course, voters are only too happy to be stroked by these candidates who appear to have had simultaneous epiphanies about the importance of property tax reform. All politics is local and nothing is more local than a home. Give me more services and let me pay less -- the voters unrealistically want it and the politicians are only too happy to promise it.

What they won't tell voters is the potential impact on budgets, especially local government budgets. I seem to have missed, however, all the outrage from local government officials at these proposals -- perhaps in their cravenness they just hope it will all go away.

This is all part of the dumbing down of political discourse that continues to devolve every election cycle here and everywhere. Voters, the media and pols are more concerned with trivialities than complexities. And, apparently, vulgarities.

Dick Cheney's vulgarity. Hollywood types and their vulgarity. The vulgarity of rewriting the Constitution to ban gay marriage.

These are the subjects of the elevated political debate in Campaign '04?

Here we have the onslaught of rhetoric on property taxes, the screeching quarrel over public employees in the Legislature and the hackneyed argument over who brought us a nuclear waste dump.

With initiatives bound to handcuff what they can do, turning them into policymakers in name only, state lawmakers are only making their long-term tasks more difficult for a short-term fix to get re-elected.

Now that is worth cursing about.