How can two top Republicans even think of hatching this budget plan?

By Jon Ralston

Sunday, April 6, 2008 | 2:01 a.m.

If you want the most compelling evidence yet of the consequences of repeated failures to reorganize the state’s tax system, consider what is emerging as the Republican Party’s master budget plan in Nevada.

I doubt it is a calculated or coordinated strategy — at least not yet. Nevada Republicans are not that organized.

But it is insidious, irresponsible and slightly insane. Taking advantage of the worst budget crisis here in memory — the deficit is 14 percent of the state budget and growing — two of the state’s top Republican leaders are exploiting the financial hard times to try to cut spending and taxes even more.

Gov. Jim Gibbons is the spending-cut half of the duo, showing the intellectual dexterity that has characterized his public life. When he’s not being Gov. Turtleneck (to emphasize his casual interest in the public health scare) or being Gov. Flip-Flop (to show he was for the water pipeline before he was against it before he was for it before he was against it) or being Gov. Nixon (to blame the media for all his and the state’s ills), Gibbons’ only consistent personality is Gov. No New Taxes.

And last week, giving a speech that was talking-point-rich and ideas-poor, Gibbons declared it was “high time that we rethink government altogether.” Cribbing from various sources, from Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio to libertarian activist Chuck Muth, Gibbons said he wants to form a commission “to provide recommendations on how our state government could become more efficient.”

Most sentient human beings with only a dollop of knowledge of how Nevada spends money would realize that while waste may be there, it is a minuscule amount compared with the deficit in how much the state should be spending to buttress crumbling education, health care and public works infrastructures. As I suggested months ago, let’s get that study going so sound-bite CINOs (conservatives in name only) such as Gibbons and real conservatives such as Muth watch as the underpinnings of their attacks evaporate.

So let’s tighten our belts, cut the waste from government and run it like a business while we’re at it — any more sound bites, governor? — and then see what’s left. If we don’t see a plan to cut hundreds of millions by the next Legislature, we will know this is a sham.

State Republican Party Chairwoman Sue Lowden is the tax-cutting half of the GOP pair, presenting an idea on her blog that is equally disingenuous and destructive. “The problem is the Legislature has overspent and overcommitted the state on the spending side for the last dozen years or so,” Lowden wrote. “Not only should we not be talking about tax hikes, we should be talking about tax cuts.”

Really? Perhaps Lowden could find one of our Sybil-like governor’s many personalities — I call this one Gov. Billion — and ask how he could have signed a 10-figure increase in state spending in 2007. If he had disallowed all that spending, he could have provided Nevadans with a ... tax cut.

That hypocrisy notwithstanding, let’s go with Lowden’s idea, too. As the titular head of the GOP in Nevada, she should now provide a list of these tax cuts and have them ready for the 2009 Legislature. Indeed, the Gibbons-Lowden plan could have his spending cuts matched by her tax cuts. And if we don’t see such a scheme less than a year from now, we will know they are both CINOs.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, the silence is deafening, thus giving the GOP leaders’ otherworldly ideas some buoyancy. These ideas will catch on, folks, unless someone — indeed a lot of people — steps forward.

If Democrats don’t stand up, they deserve to hemorrhage seats in the one year they should gain them. If reasonable Republicans don’t split with Gibbons and Lowden, they are the babies that should be thrown out with the bath water. If the gaming industry doyens don’t speak out against this one-dimensional thinking, they deserve to have their bottom lines laced by the teachers union or Kermitt Waters. And if business leaders don’t try to reverse the course advocated by the Gibbons-Lowden plans, they should pay the price with a poorly educated workforce, higher health care costs and more clogged roads.

For years, even the best-intentioned advocates of bringing Nevada from the Third World to the real world when it comes to funding services have blinked when it came to putting their money or votes where their mouths have been. With the state already suffering from what could become a billion dollars in cuts, the Gibbons-Lowden plan is the natural and devastating result of this failure to follow through.