Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

jon ralston:

Nevada’s problems run deeper than just Angle or Reid

“As your U.S. senator, I am not in the business of creating jobs.”

— GOP Senate nominee Sharron Angle, 5/11/10

“The economy in Nevada is not in good shape. It’s getting better, but not good. We’re one of the leading states in the union in unemployment.”

— Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, 6/18/10

This is not a Harry Reid-Sharron Angle column — save your lamentations or huzzahs — because this story, the story of Nevada’s battered economy, is not about them, despite what the partisans might say.

So the Reidophobes/Angleophiles and their counterparts can holster their vitriol for this holiday so we can examine who really is the father of the 14 percent unemployment rate in Nevada and the state’s bottom-bouncing economy.

It’s not Harry Reid. It’s not Gov. Jim Gibbons. And it’s no specific state or local leaders.

It’s all of them.

The reductio ad absurdum exemplified by those quotes above — as if one person could be responsible — is emblematic of the level of dialogue that has existed in this state for the past quarter-century — sound bites over substance, Band-Aids over surgery, finger-pointing over debate.

Do Republicans actually think that the Senate majority leader should take the fall for the national economy’s effect on Nevada, especially when most Americans understand the previous White House administration bears much culpability? Do Democrats actually believe that one of the most powerful people in Washington should be allowed to take credit for every job (every positive development even!) created in Nevada but not have to wear some of the blame when things don’t go so well?

This kind of inanity advances the dialogue not a whit and is the kind of mindless button-pushing that cable TV hosts employ when they want to activate their like-minded audiences. Nevada is in the throes of its worst recession since statehood, and this is the best we can do?

I know, I know. My Pollyanna personality emerges sometimes. Forgive me.

The problem with the national debate is the problem with the state debate. Is it true that the bailouts helped save the economy and that the stimulus has prevented a worse catastrophe? Perhaps. But is it also true that the bailouts should have been more thoughtful and that the stimulus should not have been larded with easily assailed nonsense? Maybe.

But what does any of that have to do with Nevada’s economic mess? Hardly anything. And, for the sake of argument, if Reid is to blame for the uptick in Nevada’s unemployment rate in May, should he, as majority leader, also be given credit for the 80 percent of states that saw a decrease in the number of unemployed? Absurd, it is.

Angle, actually, hit on it when she reiterated those May 11 remarks three days later at a campaign event:

“People ask me, ‘What are you going to do to develop jobs in your state?’ Well that’s not my job as a U.S. senator, to bring industry to the state. That’s the lieutenant governor’s job. That’s your state senator’s and assemblyman’s job. That’s your secretary of state’s job: to make a climate here in this state, ya’ll come.”

Not sure why she left out governor — perhaps just an oversight — but it is almost as silly to attack Angle for saying this as it is to lambaste Reid for being responsible for the unemployment rate (as Angle, ironically, indicates). Angle has, perhaps inadvertently, distilled Nevada’s problem quite nicely: There is no “I” in “team,” although there is always an “I” in politics.

The miserable current state of affairs in Nevada is directly traceable to a long, cancerous neglect of the salient issue: A narrow tax base that causes Nevada’s recession to be deeper and longer than other states’.

What do we have to show for decades of studies and rhetoric and promises? Agreement on the problem and on what seems like the one thing that we can count on to achieve bipartisan accord in Carson City: Doing nothing is better (i.e. safer) than doing something.

Nevada is not languishing at last in graduation rates, as was discovered last week, because of Harry Reid or anyone else in Washington. The state dwells in the cellar because state leaders have not led.

And — here comes the other half of Pollyanna’s personality — change is not in sight. How to fix that: Brian Sandoval should agree to a series of gubernatorial debates with Rory Reid over how to diversify the tax base and the economy, which is much more important to this state’s economic future than anything Sharron Angle or Harry Reid will say in the next 4 1/2 months.

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