Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

SUN EDITORIAL:

Have a real discussion

All options, including taxes, should be on the table in budget debate

Gov. Brian Sandoval’s budget proposal underwent a hearing in the Senate on Monday, and it wasn’t a pretty picture.

The legislative staff explained how the governor’s budget would shuffle $1.5 billion by taking money from local governments, shifting various funds and borrowing money from the future. It’s all part of Sandoval’s disingenuous plan to close a massive deficit without violating a pledge not to raise taxes.

Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, D-North Las Vegas, said building a budget that way would leave the next Legislature $1.1 billion in the hole. Horsford has been one of the Legislature’s most outspoken critics of the governor’s budget, and has said he would not support it.

The cuts, coming on several years of reductions, would be drastic, gutting education and social services.

Horsford went through a list of cuts, and Republicans dismissed it, saying it was a scare tactic to drum up support for tax increases. But if anyone has been shopping around scare tactics, it’s the Republicans. They have said that any tax increase would be catastrophic to the state’s economy. But that’s what they said when the Legislature was approving a major package of tax increases in 2003 — and the economy responded by soaring.

It’s time for Republicans to quit treating taxes like a four-letter word. They have known for years that there is a serious problem with the state’s tax system, and this recession has shown that. It is inequitable, allowing many businesses to go virtually untaxed, and it has failed to provide a reasonable stream of revenue for the state. As a result, the state’s services, from education to infrastructure, have suffered.

Unfortunately, too many politicians don’t want to even discuss taxes in fear of being politically vilified. Instead of addressing the big picture, Sandoval and the Republicans have talked about the need to make budget cuts so the state can live within its means. But what does that really mean?

Cutting people off Medicaid? Packing more students into overcrowded classrooms? Letting seniors go without essential services?

And how will these cuts affect the quality of life and the future of Nevada?

Republicans don’t want to talk about the future. Senate Minority Leader Mike McGinness, R-Fallon, said if lawmakers “looked out there far enough we could scare ourselves to death.”

He, instead, talked about handling the “current budget.”

And that’s a problem. Governors and lawmakers have always looked at the budget in front of them instead of looking at the long-term effects.

The cuts proposed in Sandoval’s budget would be disastrous to Nevada, and that’s not fear-mongering. That’s reality.

Horsford said there needs to be a discussion with “everything on the table,” and he’s correct. That must include not just budget cuts, which will be needed, but also changing the tax structure to broaden it and make it more fair. As well, it should include not just the next two years but the future.

Republicans need to quit running. It’s time to put the rhetoric aside and have a grown-up discussion in Carson City.

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