Budget Watch Nevada

This morning I participated on a conference call with Governor Gibbons and other conservative bloggers, discussing the budget, legislation, and taxes.

Organized and moderated by Citizen Outreach’s inimitable Chuck Muth, right-thinking scribes Eric Odom, Richard Disney, Sonny Minx and yours truly spent about 20 minutes with the Guv discussing the 11th hour negotiations going on in Carson City prior to the legislature’s June 4 “sine die.”

Noteworthy from the call:

1. Mainstream politicians are paying attention to the blogosphere. Governor Gibbons and his staff understand that legitimate bloggers like the aforementioned are increasingly important players in the realm of news, commentary, and popular opinion. Members of mainstream media also monitor political blogs in search of new angles and viewpoints that many reporters overlook. Particularly in light of Gibbons’ lagging popularity, he knows that positive reportage among his conservative base is crucial to his success. Conversely, alienating them would only add to the piling-on by the liberal media.
2. Gibbons mentioned more than once that he is leading and governing based on principle. How often do you hear that from a politician’s lips? Not very, so it’s refreshing. Of course, some liberals also lead from what they consider to be principle, even though it‘s the principle of collectivism. In Gibbons’ case, he said that he pledged to the citizens of Nevada that he would veto any attempts to raise taxes, and so far he has stuck to his guns. I applaud this.
3. The governor reiterated his intent to spend more money on transportation infrastructure in Nevada without raising existing tax sources. Instead, he wants to reallocate monies from other accounts or agencies that don’t need it as much. In particular, he wants to seize some of the booty that the LVCVA reaps every year from the Room Tax. Instead of the Authority spending $2 billion-plus over the next 10 years to advertise a city that everyone already knows about, why not use some of that cash to build roads, bridges, on-ramps, and other critical improvements to move people around more quickly and efficiently? He also wants to tap into the Entertainment Tax. Now, from where I stand as a true libertarian-conservative, I’d like to eliminate the Live Entertainment Tax altogether, and slowly roll back the Room Tax to about half of where it is now and starve the LVCVA (see my previous column on this below), but this is a decent start.

The only disappointing part of the call was that we did not hear anything from Gibbons about cutting any programs or reducing spending. He acknowledged that this biennium’s budget is still 15% greater than that of 2 years ago. That means that any reported “cuts” are really just reductions in the rate of increase in budgetary spending. As anyone who has visited BudgetWatchNevada.com knows, there are dozens of bureaucratic hogs in state government that deserve to be slaughtered. Perhaps we can encourage the governor’s staff to review these in the interim before the 2009 session, and make real reforms to the jacked-up, statist largesse we now have.