The word “hope” starts with an “F” in Nevada. For the third session in a row, the hidebound Silver State legislature will open next month with a female majority.
I’ve carped that the initial installments of the history-making hat trick accomplished not much major.
This year, 13 of 21 senators and 25 of 41 in the assembly are women. One seat in the lower house remains vacant as Assemblymember Rochelle Nguyen, D-Las Vegas, resigned on Dec. 21 to fill a vacancy in the senate.
As always, partisanship will play a role. I know that some reluctantly support nutso conservative positions or risk ousting at the next election.
Nonetheless, I remain guardedly hopeful. The saving grace may come with leftover federal funds.
Like the incumbent he defeated, Gov. Joe Lombardo promised no tax hikes. He even misleadingly asserted that he had cut taxes. As Clark County sheriff?
He ran a TV spot in October wherein the voiceover announcer stated Lombardo “would” cut taxes. But the accompanying big bold graphic boasted “Lombardo cut taxes.” Visual always trumps audible on television.
I would not have opened 2023 as a guardedly hopeful cynic had I not noticed a rare accolade for Nevada in last Friday’s New York Times.
A commentary by journalist Bryce Covert was headlined “How Could Congress Take Away Food From Kids?”
Well, for starters, because they could. The plague forced Congress to do unthinkable things like making sure school kids got enough to eat. A hungry student is not ready to learn.
The stigma of being a poor kid on a federal free lunch program “melted away after Congress passed legislation in early 2020 allowing the Agriculture Department to issue waivers for schools to give free meals to all students, regardless of income. Suddenly, nearly all children in America could get free breakfast and lunch, no matter their family’s income,” Covert wrote.
“Being on free school lunch was ‘another thing for them to torment’ her son with,” Covert quoted a mother from Maine.
“It was a burden on her son, (forced) to hand paperwork proving his family qualified to his teacher in front of all his classmates,” Covert noted.
Alas, last June “at the behest of Republican lawmakers who believed that they were no longer necessary, Congress terminated” the program.
Combined with snuffing the child tax credit, child poverty, which had fallen 30 percent, predictably shot up 41 percent.
There were rays of light.
“California and Maine made universal free school meals permanent, and in November, Colorado voters passed a ballot measure doing the same.”
Probably using federal funds, “Massachusetts, Vermont and (DRUM ROLL, PLEASE) Nevada extended them for a year. When Congress is ready to listen, these states will help make the case that all children deserve free meals at school,” Covert concluded.
“I can’t imagine who would think it’s OK to take food away from kids,” said the mom from Maine.
I hope a majority of Nevada legislators and the new guv listen. Based on long experience, some perpetrators of the unimaginable will emerge this year in Carson City.
PUPPETMASTERS DEPT. Last Sunday, I rooted for the 49ers against the corporate welfare Oakland/Los Angeles/Oakland/Las Vegas Raiders. The Al Davis dynasty is accomplished at pirating public funds. The Raiders are now the number one corporate welfare addicts in Nevada, eclipsing Tesla in their new Gomorrah South Strip cathedral.
The 49ers play in the only NFL stadium not built with taxpayer money.
The likes of Tesla and the pirates drain money from Nevada parks, schools, roads and first responders.
Two decades ago, the list of corporate tax breaks filled a dozen or so legal-sized pages. Recently, state government has had to publish a thick bound book categorizing the freebies.
The jocks remain pikers compared to the all time corporate welfare champs, the gambling and mining industries. The foreign-owned mineral exploiters have had a free ride since 1872.
Nevada gambling was legalized in 1931 with the understanding that the business would be taxed according to the needs of a state impoverished when the mining boom went bust.
By the 1950s, that deal was broken. Angry parents, incensed by underfunded overcrowded schools with the post-war Baby Boom in full swing, circulated a ballot initiative enacting a two percent sales tax for education.
The low-income punishing sales tax, now pushing 10 percent in many places, has been exploited to become the biggest funder of state government. Meanwhile, the state’s largest most profitable casinos enjoy the lowest gross tax in the world. And it’s all deductible from corporate federal income tax. (Only a few California tribal casinos pay lower state taxes and some are now investing in Nevada properties.)
Worldwide, gambling is taxed much higher, some at 50 percent or more.
The Silver State gross gambling tax has not been raised since 2003 and Sen. Joe Neal is dead.
Alas and alack, Nevada remains a small company town sprawled over a huge geography. Which is why nothing major will pass this year’s legislature.
But hope springs eternal.
ZOMBIES R US. Last week, some MAGA moonhowler gave a twisted retrospective on conservative success, pointing to trickle-down Reaganomics of the 1980s.
Remember Ronald the Vague’s made-for-TV line “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”?
The late Soviet president allowed it and in came University of Chicago-trained economists who convinced Mikhail Gorbachev to take the Russian economy cold turkey into free market capitalism. The result was instant depression as state-owned industries hemorrhaged jobs.
An out-of-work KGB spy named Vladimir Putin took advantage, weaseling his way to the top of the regime of Gorbachev’s corrupt and drunken successor, Boris Yeltsin. The rest, as wise wags say, is history.
So if you want to place blame for the rise of Czar Vlad, blame Reaganomics. Which never worked in the first place.
Nonetheless, moonhowlers are still selling the idea that you can have your cake and eat it, too. Just cut taxes for the corporately wealthy and the world will become heaven on earth.
But don’t feed school kids in the process.
Stay safe and pray for Ukraine and 53 other currently war-torn lands.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Quarantino Barbano is a 54-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com and SenJoeNeal.org/ Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us
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