Time for a cure

Monday, Aug. 3, 2009 | 2:06 a.m.

The biggest problem with Nevada’s government is that it relies on an antiquated revenue system that isn’t broad enough to collect taxes from everyone who should be paying them and isn’t sufficient enough to satisfy demand for essential services.

The biggest problem with Gov. Jim Gibbons and state legislators is that they haven’t had the fortitude to do what’s right for Nevada, which is to find a long-term solution to the state’s revenue woes. Instead, they have taken the cowardly Band-Aid approach by making short-term fixes to the state budget.

Enough already.

Lawmakers should make constructive use of the time they have before the next regular legislative session in 2011 to forge a workable revenue plan that has backing from an array of public and private sector stakeholders. That means scrapping the decades-old tax system that relies heavily on tourists and replacing it with a revenue stream that more accurately reflects the Nevada of the 21st century.

There’s a glimmer of hope that this will happen.

As reported last week by David McGrath Schwartz in the Las Vegas Sun, state Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, D-North Las Vegas, and other lawmakers intend to form a subcommittee today to assess the state’s tax structure. The subcommittee will also examine how Nevada can improve on its poor national rankings in numerous quality-of-life categories.

Those rankings — involving education, health care and other areas vitally important to Nevadans — go hand in hand with an insufficient revenue base that makes it virtually impossible for Nevada to provide adequate levels of service.

We have had enough tax studies calling for a broader-based tax structure, so there is no need for lawmakers to waste any more time identifying the problem.

What Nevada needs instead is for lawmakers to discard the Band-Aids and replace them with a cure. The need is urgent because the temporary tax increases and one-time federal economic stimulus money that bailed us out this session did nothing to address the budgetary problems we’ll face in 2011 and beyond.