Sandoval, Reid need to address the budget honestly

By Jon Ralston

Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

You can almost imagine Bud Collyer asking the two contestants what their occupations are:

“I’m Brian Sandoval, and I’m a serious candidate for governor.”

“I’m Rory Reid, and I’m a serious candidate for governor.”

Welcome to the Nevada version of “To Tell the Truth,” the strange perversion of the game where everyone who understands the budget speaks with veracity, but the two men who would be governor keep trying to fool voters that they are serious.

This isn’t just about whether raising taxes or fees might be necessary — although it is partly about that. It is about whether this state will move out of the Jim Gibbons era with something more substantive than “no new taxes” every time the state’s fiscal future comes up.

“With all these burdens on Nevada, I’m not going to suggest that an additional burden is appropriate at this time,” Reid told the Associated Press this week.

And last week, Sandoval told several northern outlets: “Asking Nevada families and businesses who are already barely making it to pay more just won’t work.”

At the risk of sounding like a broken pundit: Would it be an additional burden on Reid and Sandoval to elevate the dialogue a bit? Would it be too much to suggest these kinds of craven sound bites just won’t work?

Within the past 10 days, the majority and minority leaders of the state Senate have all but said more revenue is necessary, and the state budget director, who understands the math better than anyone, has said unless the state steals money from strapped local governments, there will be no choice but to raise taxes.

Rory Reid likes to say Sandoval is just Jim Gibbons in a more expensive suit. It is looking more and more as if Reid and Sandoval are simply Gibbons without the personal drama, and both seem ill-suited to the formidable task at hand.

The latest comment came from an obviously frustrated Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio, who told the Sun’s Anjeanette Damon on Tuesday essentially what Majority Leader Steven Horsford told David McGrath Schwartz a week ago: “I do think we will have to have some infusion of new revenue. But first, we must determine the essential services at the state level.”

This is almost word-for-word what Raggio, who understands the state budget better than any lawmaker, said last session. And it comes days after Andrew Clinger, who has escaped the Gibbons taint by displaying equanimity and credibility as the state’s budget overseer, gave a couple of interviews in which he laid out the math.

“You could eliminate everything, and have nothing but K-12 and higher ed, and you would have a balanced budget,” Clinger told the Nevada News Bureau. A few days later, Clinger went on “Nevada NewsMakers” and said the only way not to raise taxes was to open up collective bargaining agreements and reduce local government salaries. But he also said there is no way to enact only cuts at the state level to make up a multibillion-dollar deficit.

Raggio and Horsford know that public employee salaries and education accountability will be necessary trade-offs to get a revenue package passed in 2011 — they are aware of private discussions among business leaders to try to find out what kind of quid pro quo might be acceptable and what kind of business tax package could be enacted that would not destroy already hurting enterprises.

But it’s all very sub rosa, very hush-hush, lest the politicians have to tell the truth, especially the Gibbonsesque duo campaigning for the state’s highest office. They are both working on plans, you know, to show how state government is spending too much money and how everything can be recalibrated, restructured, revamped and reinvented to make it all zero out.

No taxes. No pain. No problem.

No way.

Reid and Sandoval also are embellishing their simple lie with promises that no one will be laid off, either.

Sandoval boasted to the Reno Gazette-Journal that he could balance the budget without costing anyone a job and without “reducing services to the people who are most vulnerable in society.” That cannot be done and surely he knows it.

Meanwhile, Reid frequently accuses Sandoval of proposing teacher layoffs, which the Republican has not done and which the Democrat surely knows might become necessary — if his teachers union friends don’t agree to salary cuts. Neither is being honest, and both know it.

“To Tell the Truth” always ended with the one truth-teller being unmasked. Here in Nevada, when the credits roll on Nov. 2, we will still be waiting.