Brian Greenspun on how the R-J shortchanges the very people it should be serving

Sunday, July 1, 2007 | 7:04 a.m.

It is enough to tax the patience of a saint.

I am talking about the folks at the Las Vegas Review-Journal who, for some reason, love to pick on me. Admittedly, I like to take a shot or two of my own, but not when it comes to matters of such seriousness as how we get to and from work without wasting hours and hours of our lives sitting in traffic, how we get 40 million tourists to and from Las Vegas without causing them to think twice because it is so difficult getting here, and how we provide parks, schools, health care and other quality-of-life services to our residents that are the envy of the rest of the country rather than the objects of ridicule and derision.

I want so badly to spend the rest of this column tearing Sherm Frederick a new ---- but I won't. I won't make it personal as he did two weeks ago to me. What I will do, though, is give lie to what he and his newspaper have been trying to feed the people of Las Vegas for so long that we are practically choking on the bile his brand of government has afforded the people who live here and call this place home.

It didn't occur to me just how stupid we have been in Nevada for listening to the "no tax" mantra of the Review-Journal and its minions in state and local government - guess who they are - until I was playing golf with a man from Southern California. Yes, I am guilty of playing golf now and then.

The discussion centered on the condominium projects going up in Las Vegas and who was paying all that money for them. He suggested that most of the people buying the condos were folks from out of state who wanted to claim Nevada as their residence so they could avoid paying income tax. Nevadans put a prohibition against income taxes in our Constitution a few years ago, making this a tax haven for people looking for ways to avoid paying for government services where they live.

I agreed that many of the buyers he was talking about are tax avoiders. But, I told him, that is not the problem. The problem is that the people who are using Nevada to save money are the same people who vote "no" on anything and everything that has to do with quality of life here. Why? Because they really don't live here in the way you and I do. We are the folks who have to drive the roads at 10 mph, send our kids to overcrowded schools and live with the ignominy of the rest of the country knowing we are right smack at the bottom of every quality-of-life list there is - and damn proud of it!

His question to me was, "How stupid are you people? You are a young city, you have seen the mistakes we have made in Los Angeles and, yet, you refuse to invest upfront to avoid the problems we experience every day and probably can never fix?"

I got stuck on the "how stupid are you" part of the question because I know what gridlock looks like in Southern California and I know how frustrating it is for everyone there because there are no easy, inexpensive or responsible fixes. And I see it happening here and nobody seems to want to do anything about it. Unless you consider "letting the other guy pay for it" wanting to do something.

And what is a major reason why people go along with the timid, ignorant or ideologically paralyzed politicians who refuse to lead us forward and are content to preside over our race to the bottom of the heap of quality-of-life issues? One of them is that newspaper that is delivered with the Las Vegas Sun. Yes, the Review-Journal has done and will do anything it can to foster the fantasy that Nevadans are too highly taxed to part with one more dime for school books, police presence or health care for indigents. Yes, they will even lie.

In the middle of Sherm's rant two weeks ago he wrote that, "According to the Tax Foundation, Nevada ranks fifth in the percentage of individual income confiscated by local, state and federal taxes." That was supposed to be the signal to Nevadans that we are not only overtaxed, but someone must be doing something dramatically wrong with all that money because we don't have very much to show for it. So, don't allow the bums one more cent of our hard-earned money. So sayeth the Review-Journal.

What that propaganda sheet across town doesn't say - never says - is the truth when it comes to taxes. While I was doing my own research on this issue, so was Leonard Rutkin, who is a financial consultant from Henderson. No tax-loving liberal by any stretch of the imagination - he has been a registered and mostly voting Republican for 47 years - he learned the same thing I did. As he said in his letter to the Review-Journal earlier last week, "Let's take a clearer look at what the Tax Foundation really says: 'During the past two decades Nevada's state and local tax burden has consistently ranked among the nation's lowest. Further, the best states in the Tax Foundation's 2007 State Business Tax Climate Index are as follows: (1) Wyoming (2) South Dakota (3) Alaska (4) Nevada.' "

Which one of those states do you prefer to live in? Rather than tell his readers the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the Review-Journal publisher is content with a half-truth - we call it a mostly lie - so he can continue to profess his anti-tax mantra that serves the greedy few in this state and the greedy many in other states, including the people who sign Sherm's paycheck who take more money out of this state in a month than they have given back to this community in a decade.

Mr. Rutkin writes further, "Clearly taxes in Nevada are regressive, impacting most low - and middle - income residents. The lack of adequate tax revenue is the root cause of most of Las Vegas' problems, ranging from inadequate schools, road congestion, the manner in which local streets are built and then rebuilt, and rebuilt again, the lack of traffic lights resulting in unnecessary deaths and countless accidents, and continually and rapidly increasing crime, to name just a few."

The fact is that on a per capita basis, Nevadans do pay a higher federal income tax than most states. The reason is simple. There are so many multimillionaires living here, and even more claiming residency here to avoid taxes in their home states, that when you divide the total taxes, including federal, paid by the relatively few people who live in this state, the per capita number is high.

By the same token, the state and local taxes paid by Nevadans on a per capita basis are at or near the bottom of the list, which means we pay very little for the services we demand of government, and we have the unenviable results to prove it.

That is the truth you won't read in the Review-Journal, which is one of the best reasons why Las Vegans are fortunate to have the Las Vegas Sun delivered with that other newspaper. They can read whatever Sherm and his gang want to write - and those who want to believe it can and will. And, then, they can read the facts in the Las Vegas Sun. It is a kind of fantasy world meets the real world all in one package.

I don't know about you folks, but I prefer a city in which the traffic flows smoothly, the kids are educated at the top of their game and the rest of the government services we demand are delivered in a quality way. I also prefer a newspaper in which the truth is paramount.

You, too, can have both. You can read a good newspaper like the Las Vegas Sun and you can demand that the answer to my friend's question, "How stupid are you?" is "Not very stupid at all, anymore."

For that second part, though, you have to stop believing everything you read in the Review-Journal. And you have to demand that the politicians stop believing that nonsense, too.

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