Brian Greenspun on how our tax savings bought us a dead end

Sunday, Feb. 11, 2007 | 7:15 a.m.

Penny dumb and pound dumber.

If you don't have a clue what I am talking about, you haven't tried to cross town or, frankly, cross the street in your car lately. But, if you are like hundreds of thousands of people in Southern Nevada who have been fighting harder, taking longer and growing more and more frustrated with each blocked intersection, torn up street and nonsynchronous stop light, then you should understand exactly what that means.

But, if you don't, let me make it as clear as a bell. For far too long and from far too many people, the clarion call in Southern Nevada, and throughout the state for that matter, has been "do whatever you want but don't raise my taxes."

And now, my friends, we are paying the price for our gullibility, our naivete, our selfishness and our willingness to listen and believe any politician who told us we could have our cake, eat it and get someone else to pay for it.

Put more simply, we have met the reason for our traffic mess, our lack of government response and our widespread belief that government isn't doing its job. And we, you and I, are that reason.

Actually, I am taking no blame in this deal because I have been writing for years about the public's willingness to listen to political charlatans of every stripe tell us that we could have all we want without paying for it. And, more importantly, I haven't believed any of them when they promised they wouldn't raise our taxes.

I knew they were lying when they made that promise because no sane person can commit such a thing - in the fastest-growing state in the union - with a straight face. I knew they were saying it just so we would elect them because the voters have made it perfectly clear that their main motivator at election time is their tax bill. The pity is that so many people let themselves be taken in by the anti-tax, anti-government crowd that their belief in dollars and cents overcame their responsibility to common sense at election time.

So, now what do we have? According to my friend Steven, who is the definition of a sole-proprietor, small-business owner and all-around disliker of paying taxes down a rathole, the answer is as plain as the traffic jam outside his place of business.

"Where is government and where are our leaders when we need them? I can't even go across town anymore because either the streets are torn up, they don't exist or they weren't built for the traffic. What are these people thinking? What were they thinking? And what on Earth does our governor think he is talking about when he says he isn't going to raise taxes to build the roads and highways we need for the locals to get around and the tourists to get in and out of here?"

That's the complaint in a nutshell. The answer can fit in the same nutshell. Draw your own conclusions as to why.

We can't expect our politicians to tell us the truth about taxes - that it takes money to invest in roads, libraries, parks and other public projects that benefit everyone and help move the lifeblood of our community from here to there - because the moment they do, we vote against them in favor of someone who either lies to us or doesn't care about our quality of life, just his or hers.

Steven got it right. "When the people wake up as they are doing now and realize that our politicians have let us down," he told me, "we will get new ones because we need those roads far more than we need those politicians."

I asked him if he would vote for someone who said that we needed to invest more in our infrastructure and that would mean higher taxes, and he told me that he would if he was told what the money was for, how much it would be and what we could expect when the project was done. Sounds like a reasonable request to me, don't you think?

As for the roads, Steven was even more clear. Those of us who use those roads should pay for them, he said. That means charge whatever it takes as a gasoline tax to pay for new roads, wider roads, repaired roads and whatever else is needed that will allow this community to enjoy life, not curse it.

When the roads are fixed the tax can be removed. Simple solution. Or, we can do what our governor wants. We can drill for water under the highways and, if we find anything, use it to drown in our own self-pity.