Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

jon ralston:

Think tank report card curves to the right

The Nevada Policy Research Institute is quite proud of its 2011 legislative report card, boasting the scores are “an objective measure to compare how favorable a lawmaker is to economic freedom and education reform.”

Maybe.

Or maybe it’s a thoroughly subjective measure, with capricious weights and tendentious bill choices. Maybe it’s only a measure of how compliant most lawmakers are to the party leadership’s wishes. And maybe, just maybe, it’s a one-dimensional evaluation of legislators, with little insight into their individual effectiveness.

What is the survey, using 80 bills considered with varying multipliers, designed to measure? Sayeth the institute’s site: “Which lawmakers were taxpayers’ best friends? Which ones were taxpayers’ worst nightmares?”

Actually, it’s mostly a barometer of which lawmakers can’t find a green button on their desks — hence, state Sen. Don Gustavson (89 percent), whose sole claim to fame outside of being Sharron Angle’s male doppelgänger is to quixotically push for a helmet law repeal, is the No. 1 friend of taxpayers. So, taxpayers want someone who will just vote “no” on everything? Or is that just what taxpayers who fund the conservative think tank want?

Objective? Hardly.

The report card is preceded by a rendition of legislative events that is redolent with the institute’s disgust with the outcome, as if there were some massive expansion of government that occurred. I repeat the facts: In 2009, lawmakers approved a $6.9 billion general fund budget; in 2011, they approved a $6.2 billion general fund budget. QED.

But the institute was upset that Gov. Brian Sandoval extended those expiring taxes after the state Supreme Court decision, and its ratings are affected by that outlook — the tax and budget bills are given eight to 16 times the weight of many other laws.

Indeed, the tellingly named “excess spending” category actually disproportionately dings lawmakers for voting on both versions of the lower education funding bill. Once wasn’t enough?

(You can see the entire report, the bills the institute chose and the score cards at npri.org.)

The institute found the taxpayers’ “best friend” in the Democratic Party is Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, who is described in the report as “the central engineer of 2009’s record-breaking tax hike” and who wanted to pass a larger one this year.

Granted, Horsford’s not much of a taxpayer friend in the institute’s eyes (I don’t think a 36 percent grade can even get you a Millennium Scholarship these days). But any system that rates Horsford and liberal leading light Sheila Leslie as better taxpayer friends than conservative Democrat John Lee has methodological problems.

But the real question is what the actual utility of such a report card might be. Forget, for a moment, that I could argue you might be a better friend to the taxpayer if you were more open-minded and didn’t consider every tax proposal a destructive sledgehammer on the economy or every regulatory idea a strangulation of the private sector. But this report card is the institute’s ideology at work and hardly objective.

Voting, though, is but one part of a legislator’s function, albeit a very important one. I once argued this point with a colleague who agreed that a certain lawmaker was fairly inept, but added, “He votes right.”

But is that enough? I’d argue that to be a friend of the taxpayer, to advocate for “economic freedom and education reform,” you need a few other skills, too — skills that are much more difficult to measure.

For instance:

Can a lawmaker bring consensus to bear on an issue so his or her own vote is not just a token? Can a legislator develop relationships, so important parochial issues achieve prominence and success? And can a lawmaker influence public opinion through forceful oratory and compelling arguments?

These can’t be quantified in a spreadsheet.

I can see Michael Roberson (89 percent), the ambitious would-be majority leader, ranked third in the survey by the institute. He fits the group’s ideological profile, was a player in the caucus and spoke on the floor to move others and public opinion, albeit not always successfully.

But what did Elizabeth Halseth (88 percent) and Ed Goedhart (85 percent), who did not influence one important piece of public policy, do to merit the glowing grades they received? I’ll tell you: They voted right. And with the institute’s standard, I mean right.

Because the report includes several measurements besides taxes and spending, including transparency, cost savings and regulation, even some Republicans did not fare too well under the rigorous curve. They were stretched from 44 percent to 89 percent while the Democrats were compressed at the bottom from 27 percent to 36 percent.

So what does that tell us other than Republicans vote pretty much the way a conservative think tank wants them to vote and Democrats pretty much don’t?

Not much.

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