To the Residents of Assembly District 3:

We are in the middle of the worst economic downturn in seventy years.  I know you know that.  And Nevada has the largest deficit of any state in the country.  The Governor has proposed a budget which has no additional revenue but proposes enormous cuts to education and our health and human services, off loads state responsibilities to local governments and uses various budgetary gimmicks that only kick the can down the road.

I cannot support these ideas.

Some believe that, at this difficult time, Nevada simply needs to “tighten its belt.” That suggests that Nevada has a large and wasteful government.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Nevada has, by a very large margin, the smallest government in the country.  Nevada could hire 10,000 government workers tomorrow and Nevada would still have the smallest government in the country.  If Nevada had the size government today it had in 1978 we would have to hire 44,000 more government employees.  Many of us were not surprised by the recent admission that our state is not auditing the mining companies.  Over the last thirty years we did not just cut the fat from government, we cut the muscle.  No other state comes close to Nevada in having reduced the size of government.

I believe our state needs more revenue.   But I am not just proposing additional revenue because we are experiencing this difficult time.  I am one Nevadan and I know there are others, who, even before we were hit by the worst economy in 70 years, had grown weary and impatient with being at the top of all the bad lists and the bottom of all the good.  And I believe that we need not only more revenue but a tax system which is more fair and more stable.

And I believed that it was incumbent on me to actually make proposals on taxes, put my money where my mouth is, so to speak.  So I have done just that.  I have proposed four tax bills.  They are these:

AB333 / This bill increases the tax we already pay on tobacco products and alcohol.  Many studies have shown that increasing the tobacco tax discourages young people from starting this bad habit, so it is a win-win for our state.

AB335 / A services tax.  Many states have adopted this tax, because we all use more services and buy less stuff than we used to.  I tried to make the services taxed in this bill geared to services used by higher-income people because we already have one of the most regressive (more burdensome for low-income people) tax systems in the country.

AB336 / A broad-based business tax.  We have known from study after study, for more than forty years that we needed a broad-based business tax.  We also know that many large businesses in our state pay almost no taxes to our state.  My broad-based business tax is modeled on the business taxes in many other states so it is tested and stable.  It has a lower rate than any of the surrounding states and has a deduction of $500,000 for small businesses. 

AB428 / An adjustment to the Net Proceeds of Mineral Tax, which is the main tax that the mining industry pays.  The mining industry has been given many deductions over the years resulting in them paying a much lower tax rate than other industries.  This would reduce the level of deductions that mining can claim bringing their contribution to our state more in line with other business.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Peggy