Columnist Jon Ralston: On how difficult it will be for Beers’ political opponents to take him to TASC on his tax restraint message

Sunday, Dec. 18, 2005 | 7:58 a.m.

Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face with Jon Ralston on Las Vegas ONE and also publishes the daily e-mail newsletter RalstonFlash.com. His column for the Las Vegas Sun appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or through e-mail at ralston@vegas.com.

Bob Beers is on message.

No, the message is not: Elect me governor. The message is: Pass Tax and Spending Constraint.

Whether it is an intended or unintended consequence of TASC that it lifts Beers into the governor's mansion is not a debate for today. His motivations to limit government spending to population growth plus inflation are unimportant.

But what is important -- nay, paramount -- is that people understand how viscerally powerful are the arguments for TASC and how daunting the challenge is for those who oppose it.

After three TASC debates in three days last week, Beers showed that he has the patter down, even if the initiative language is a mess, and that he can blunt arguments, divert discussions and disgorge statistics with the best of them.

Compare the general pitches of the sides in the battle that will dwarf all others in significance in Campaign 2006, including the gubernatorial contest:

The Beers pitch: Put power in hands of the people instead of legislators and special interests. Restrain government spending. Bureaucrats make too much money. Politicians can't be trusted to hold the line.

The opposition pitch: Education, health care and the social safety net will be destroyed! It's the end of the world!

Which do you think is more appealing and credible?

The question is what approach can opponents -- that is, those brave or self-interested enough to stand up and oppose this popular yet toxic remedy -- use besides scare tactics to counter the Beers approach, which is akin to giving candy to the babies. That is, can the public handle the truth?

Consultant Terry Murphy provided some of that truth during a debate with Beers last week, one day after state Sen. Mike Schneider, in another debate with the state senator, frothed that if TASC had been around during World War II, we might all be speaking German.

Murphy deftly parried Beers' populism with real questions about policy, which may have thrilled some in the insider crowd there. But will those work in 30-second TV ads? And will the gamers and others pay for those ads, assuming Beers can find a sugar daddy (or multiple fathers) to fund his media campaign?

In fact, most of the arguments for TASC can be deconstructed easily.

Try just two as a sampling:

Argument: It takes power from the special interests and politicians and gives it to the people.

Counter: I prefer to let James Madison speak here, as I did eight years ago when county commissioners were about to abdicate their constitutional roles: "It is, that in a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents," he wrote in Federalist No. 14.

Or try No. 10: "(Elected officials) refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of the country ... it may well happen that the public voice, produced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves."

This is not one of but the fundamental precept of this country's government structure. Beers insists that the Gang of 63 is not a reliable backstop for runaway taxing and spending -- and the Legislature's behavior helps his case.

But this is clearly a situation where the antidote is much worse than the virus and surely would cause an epidemic that would eviscerate any notion of representative government.

That's not hysteria; that's inevitable.

Argument: Government need not grow faster than population and inflation combined.

Counter: As Murphy put it, this is a "false index" in a world where utility costs, health care costs, even education costs are growing faster than that rate. Why be so arbitrary? Could businesses operate in a cyclical economy with such strictures?

The real issue here is that Beers' solution is simple but also simplistic.

And it's unclear what problem he is trying to solve. He brings up government salaries, but TASC does nothing about them.

He brings up the power of special interests, but this will not restrain them. And he brings up government waste and efficiency, but this does nothing to fix those, either.

TASC also will not give us more thoughtful public officials who make better decisions. It is The Terminator of public policy -- it does not think, it does not react, it simply does. And it will keep on doing it unless someone -- or a lot of people -- are willing to step forward and come up with a message to match Beers.