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June 22, 2005
Government employees: America's royalty
Across our nation, election officials are continuing the process of elevating and embedding a new ruling class of government employment at totally unsustainable costs. Time and again, when the clear and present danger of excessive taxation, public compensation and economic-imperiling regulation indicates new and creative policy thinking, our representatives chose to hide. In Philadelphia, the school district is more than $36 million in the red with little or no hope of being able to climb out. Rather than seeking a new solution to their obvious descent into financial futility, the school board caused the Edison project to close by not paying them money owed by contract and vowed to pursue new tax initiatives in the fall. This is significant because Nevada's education monopoly is headed in exactly the same direction. In San Francisco, the supervisors have decided they don't like the idea of a coal burning energy plant in Northern Nevada, even though it would provide power for more than 1.2 million homes. They feel the same result could be obtained using wind and solar power and are considering taking over power buying for everyone in the city. I guess the lessons of Enron have already faded for this sanctimonious cabal of tree huggers who are ignoring all current factual data on alternative resource applications. The good news is when the lights go out so will their microphones. On the bright side, the Governor of California has called for a special election this November to allow the voters of that state to decide spending restraints and priorities. Unable to get past the liberal rhetoric of that Legislature, he felt going to the people was his last choice. If successful, the once pending bankruptcy of the largest state might be delayed or even removed from consideration. Here in Nevada the precedent was made when voters twice approved a limitation on tax increases without a supermajority of both houses of the Legislature. Unfortunately for us, our RINO governor decided his desire for a legacy as the biggest spendthrift in state history overrode all other considerations and used the state Supreme Court to achieve his goal. His legacy will also record this act as the end of limited government in our state. With the ruling he obtained, any voter referendum passed in the future could just as easily be ignored and has already produced a yeah, right attitude among voters on new initiatives. Not to be outdone when expending other people's money without limitation or benefit is our very own Nye County Board of Commissioners. Busily searching for new and ingenious ways to extort more cash for investment in our future, they appear to have decided the next best course of action will be to have the inspection and certification process currently handled by private enterprise taken over by the Nye County Public Works Department. By all accounts, the current inspection program is going so well and generating so much money the county believes it should benefit from all the revenue, build another bureaucratic empire, and worry about the consequences when the lawsuits arrive. What they are thinking can only be imagined, but with the amount the district attorney's office has already advised them to pay out over the last few years - admittedly, the attorneys were forced to make a deal with the devil to mitigate monstrous liability - what's another million dollars or so of taxpayer money among friends? Finally we come to recent attempts to enhance revenue for the town of Pahrump by amending the ordinance concerning brothels and their approved geographical location. As normal with any proposal by government where money is concerned, all logic and consideration went into hiding as soon as the amount of potential investment, more commonly known as tax, was invented. Never mind the possibility of losing the brothels in favor of streetwalkers complete with pimps, crime and higher law enforcement costs. Never mind the fact a simple subdivision of land in conjunction with an annexation would have accomplished the objective. And never mind the numbers discussed were simply not possible within the confines of the area discussed. What the town board showed us more than any other single point of discussion is that the time for an unincorporated town board form of government has passed. I can only hope that when Mr. Willis puts his initiative to ban brothels in Pahrump on the ballot he will also consider one to change the town board to a town advisory board. With this reduction in stature and power, perhaps the motivation to become empire builders while forgetting about the impact ill advised proposals have on people's lives and welfare will become a reality. Then again, in this modern era of government outgrowing the people's ability to cover its markers, this idea might be too foreign for even normally lucid people to accept. We'll see. Little writes from Pahrump. His column, "The Other Side," appears here on Wednesdays. |
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