The Las Vegas Sun’s front page article on Thursday, “The unpopular, endlessly debated truth about our taxes,” is a remarkable example of how a truly outstanding elected official can be absolutely right and incredibly wrong at the same time on the same subject.
Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley’s chanting of the mindless mantra “Our (tax) system is broken” is right up there with “The Earth is flat.” Our system is not broken. Ours is the best tax system in the country.
Madame Speaker and the Sun could hire Guy Hobbs and Jeremy Aguero to go on a quest to find a more stable system and all that will happen is they will come back with the only conclusion out there: There is no such thing as a stable tax base.
Every state tax system that is sailing through these very tough times is dominated by agriculture, commodities and energy. If those areas of the economy continue to implode, you’ll see very quickly just how unstable those tax systems are.
On the other hand, Ms. Buckley’s position that we need to massively increase the size of the rainy day fund in order to weather the inevitable ups and downs of our economic system is 100 percent correct. This is the only way any state under any tax system can eliminate the “feast or famine, boom or bust” realities of a market economy.
It’s up to Ms. Buckley, State Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford and the Sun to back off the “broken tax system” twaddle and figure out how to get the rainy day fund up to $1.5 billion, where it should be.
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