Don’t look behind the curtain

By Jon Ralston

Friday, Jan. 9, 2009 | 2 a.m.

The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce types have revolutionary ventriloquism skills. Not only can they make the Spending and Government Efficiency Commission folks mouth their policies, they can then transfer their talent and watch the SAGE panel pull strings so Gov. Jim Gibbons speaks the words, too. The chamber folks speak, the SAGE Commission acts and now the governor, the Charlie McCarthy of this piece, will channel them in his State of the State next week.

What an act.

In this budget Kabuki, the chamber’s tendentious studies about state employee retirement benefits have been adopted by the SAGE Commission, which voted last month to slash benefits for an estimated 30,000 state workers and retirees. The panel voted, with ex-Las Vegas Mayor Jan Jones and ex-Assemblyman David Goldwater dissenting, to eliminate health care subsidies for post-July 1 retirees and to cut in half subsidies for existing retirees a year later.

This has all been leading to an inevitable political donnybrook when the Legislature convenes and the public employee unions will try to use a Democratic-controlled Gang of 63 to crush the chamber-SAGE-Gibbons hopes of retirement benefit changes.

If the forces of the left tried to hide their glee at the declining economic fortunes last fall that helped Barack Obama, so, too, the agents of the right must be trying to conceal their opportunism as they exploit a tanking state budget to enact long-sought policies. This is one big, happy, incestuous family with everything aligned economically, but not much politically for them to have a capital reunion.

Over on the left, the teachers, state employees and university types will bring their apoplexy to Carson City, hoping for a defibrillation by the Steven Horsford-Barbara Buckley-led Legislature. But will it be that simple?

I am not sure Horsford, more conservative than Buckley, even agrees with Madame Speaker on everything. And even though, as Goldwater said, some will believe that current employees and retirees should be grandfathered in, it’s hard to argue that a looming multibillion-dollar liability doesn’t merit some attention.

This is either a brilliant negotiating tactic, or a devastating overreach, substantively and politically. SAGE Chairman Bruce James apparently tried to use the same tactic in the federal bureaucracy to induce employees to retire when he was the U.S. printer. But D.C. is not Nevada, where the chamber’s own study found we are remarkably deficient in state employees per residents. (I wonder why that was not highlighted in the chamber releases.)

The chamber/SAGE axis has found a powerful ally in Gibbons, who almost surely will parrot the panel’s recommendations as he gives his solemn speech next week. And, whether the unions like it or not, this could have plenty of popular support, especially with the amen chorus over at the Las Vegas Review-Journal hopping on this hobbyhorse. Folks in the private sector who have seen their wages and 401(k)s decimated are unlikely to have much sympathy for state employees. This will be one of the loudest and most persuasive campaigns coursing through the hallways of the Legislative Building, with some satisfaction on this topic probably the only way to get the business types to look at the other side of the equation.

Ah, yes. The other, less significant side.

Indeed, these visionary SAGE/chamber/Gibbons reforms will go a long way toward fixing an underfunded K-16 education system, a porous social safety net and a crumbling physical infrastructure. How foolish of me to suggest Gov. Jim Gibbons, the unwitting puppet of the chamber/SAGE ventriloquism masters, is the dummy here.

We are the dummies.

In Business commentator Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program “Face to Face With Jon Ralston” on Las Vegas ONE, publishes the daily e-mail newsletter RalstonFlash.com and writes columns and a political notebook for the Las Vegas Sun.