Nevada is booming, but that growth is overwhelming public services like education and transportation. And in rural areas outside of Las Vegas and Reno, other services like health care are suffering as well, which affects small businesses and other parts of communities.
The federal government — which owns nearly 85% of Nevada’s land, the highest share of any state — could be a better neighbor to the rest of us by pitching in more funding for important services. A simple new federal tax on the very rich, the Millionaires Surtax, could provide a good chunk of the necessary revenue.
This measure, which would add 10 percentage points to the federal income tax rate paid by couples on income over $2 million ($1 million for individuals), would affect only the highest-income 0.2% of American families but would raise nearly $635 billion over 10 years.
It would provide federal funding Nevada needs to address shortcomings in key public services.
Nevadans should be proud of their achievements, yet aware of the problems. A big public challenge is school funding. Because of all the young families moving here in search of opportunity, our schools are overflowing. In its most recent study, the National Education Association found that on a percentage basis, Nevada’s public-school enrollment grew more than any other state in 2016 and 2017.
As a result, Nevada’s student-teacher ratio jumped by the most of any state (over 4%) to the third-highest level in the nation (22.5-to-1). So more teachers are needed, but the study discovered that instead, Nevada has been shedding them — not surprising when considerating that when adjusted for inflation, teacher salaries in the 2018-19 school year were almost 10% lower than nine years before.
With too few, poorly paid teachers trying to teach too many kids, it’s little wonder that US News and World Report ranked Nevada’s public schools 48th among the 50 states.
Las Vegas is a low scorer on another important public service: transportation. An estimate from a few years ago was that almost five people move to Las Vegas every hour. Providing efficient and energy-saving ways of transporting all those people is imperative. Yet WalletHub ranks Las Vegas in the bottom half of America’s 100 biggest cities on public transit, with the age and quality of equipment like its buses particularly weighing down its score. To support consumers and employees getting to the city’s small businesses in an environmentally friendly way, we must invest in public transportation.
Health care is a good third measure of how well the state is doing, and we’re lagging there, too. US News placed Nevada in the bottom half of states on a combined score of several measures of health care. WalletHub ranked it in the bottom 25%. In both rankings, Nevada wound up near the bottom of the list in one key component of health care: accessibility. Undoubtedly, one reason is that the state’s share of uninsured residents is higher than the national average.
Another reason is the spread-out nature of the non-urban population. Last year, Tonopah became a symbol of the crisis in rural health care when its only hospital shut down. CBS News recounted the story of a young mother driving frantically through the night as her baby in back suffered multiple seizures before reaching the closest hospital, over 100 miles away in California.
Nevada’s education, transportation, health care and other public services could all be improved with greater federal funding. Small-business owners and their employees need these services to support thriving communities, and a small business economy. And a good way to raise some of those funds would be the Millionaires Surtax.
Important to the surtax’s success is that it would apply to every source of income for the rich, not only salaries but all investments, too. A lot of that investment income is taxed under a separate and lower rate schedule, so tax hikes levied only on wages and salaries alone don’t touch it.
Finally, the surtax simply raises tax rates for the rich under the existing system, which will make it much easier to get Congress to pass in the short-term. It will take longer to overcome the wealthy special interests in Washington who oppose major new measures such as a wealth tax.
Nevada can only keep booming if the public-sector services catch up to the private-sector growth. The state’s largest landowner, the federal government, can better contribute resources to that catch-up effort — here and across the country — if it better taxes the rich, and large corporations too, many of whom pay nothing in federal income taxes, compared with the millions of small-business owners paying their fair share. The Millionaires Surtax is a good place to start raising the revenue we need through a fairer tax system.
Amanda Ballantyne is executive director of the Main Street Alliance, an advocacy group for small businesses.