Jon Ralston warns of the Great Flood to come

By Jon Ralston

Sunday, April 13, 2008 | 2:01 a.m.

As Gov. Jim Gibbons and lawmakers announced a new round of cuts last week, a pesky fact clouded the sunshine of bipartisanship: It’s still raining.

And yet the state cannot buy any more umbrellas to shield the public from the coming downpour, with everything saved for that proverbial rainy day having been spent. As the deficit creeps toward $1 billion, the man charged with bailing the water out of the ship of state told legislators last week the respite probably is only temporary.

“I would caution everyone that this may not be the end of this,” Budget Director Andrew Clinger lamented to the Interim Finance Committee. And he added this ominous assessment of what will happen when the fiscal weather turns stormy again: “At this point we have cut just about everything we can cut.”

Before all the salivating conservatives unsheathe their budget broadswords to disagree, understand what Clinger was intimating: When the next numbers come out six weeks hence, if the economy does not rebound, they are left with few options but to slice into operations. That is, they execute more across-the-board cuts, lay off employees or call a special session to take away raises.

But if Gibbons and the Gang of 63 can agree again on how to continue sliding backward into Third World status, they can hold a news conference and congratulate one another as the rain falls down. Together, they can cut anything — oh, the rapture.

I understand legislative Democrats’ seeing the reality of the hard economic times and trying to minimize the damage to education, health care and social service agendas. But that’s a stopgap, myopic approach. As they publicly lamented their complicity last week — “There goes six years of work,” Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley said ruefully after one program disappeared — the Democrats are surrendering to death by a thousand cuts.

This is years of inattention and timorousness coming home to roost, with the failure to rely on anything besides gaming and sales taxes causing one of the worst deficits (in proportion to the entire budget, not raw numbers) in the country. So now we have the perfect storm:

A governor who spends a billion dollars while claiming to be a fiscal conservative and now knows the only way he can survive politically is to blindly hew to his no-tax pledge.

Legislators who levied the most taxes in state annals in 2003 and then, as the economy recovered, went on breathless spending sprees in successive sessions without stepping back to debate how the state expends and raises money.

A grow-grow-grow mentality by the business and gaming communities, without regard to the strain on every kind of infrastructure, that has stirred a gurgling tax-by-initiative movement.

And now a downturn that has crystallized all of this, provoking the governor to propose long-term cuts by finding the holy GOP grail of wasteful spending as the 2009 Legislature comes up against a cap that could devastate the state.

Are you feeling wet yet?

At some point, you expect some leader, elected or otherwise, to stand up and declare, “Enough is enough.” Oh, there are a few voices in the wilderness, but they are like trees falling in the woods.

At the risk of roiling the sectional waters, I ask how many of the projects that will survive all this slashing will be outside Clark County? I find it metaphorically apt that the flood control funds for Reno, which helped cause last year’s special session because northern lawmakers wanted the money, were spared. Only in the upside-down world of Nevada could the rain fall more plentifully in the desert as southerners have less protection from the coming high water, thanks to a northern governor and powerful northern lawmakers.

So what should they be doing?

When Clinger’s cautionary predictions come true in late May, the bipartisanship should continue with the only solution that has made sense for a long time — a special session to put everything on the table: cuts and taxes. And has everyone forgotten that the dam holding back those billions of dollars in unfunded retirement liability is about to burst?

If the state’s Democrats are true to what they claim their beliefs are, they would stop being the Neville Chamberlains of the state and take a stand before they see whatever practical and political gains they have made prove evanescent.

I can guess how Gibbons feels about this, probably having his Louis XV moment — Apres Gov. No New Taxes, le deluge. As for the lawmakers who wail about the terrible consequences and the progress lost by the cuts, they are simply too scared to come in out of the rain.