DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

When I was a kid, there was a Democratic member of the Nevada Assembly from Washoe County named Don Crawford. He was elected for an astonishing long period for the time -- 20 years, from 1942 to 1962.

Just as surprising was his residence. Washoe County runs from the elbow of Nevada all the way to the Oregon border, but nearly all the residents are in and around Reno. Crawford kept getting elected from the hamlet of Vya, where the state boundaries of Nevada, California, and Oregon come together and near the intersections of what were them state routes 8a and 34. There was a rumor, probably false, that Crawford actually lived in California (I heard it from my dad).

Crawford was a colorful but also serious legislator. In 1949 he unsuccessfully sponsored repeal of the poll tax. In 1955 he introduced one of the first -- perhaps THE first -- Nevada civil rights bill. He also reportedly introduced a measure outlawing the hunting of the Pyramid Lake monster.

But probably Crawford's greatest contribution came in 1949 when, during the consideration of whether to create a Nevada sales tax, he helped defeat it by raising the question of tax fairness. For many years before that time, a sales tax was political poison in Nevada, but the baby boom was changing things.

When a sales tax bill came up on March 21, 1949, Crawford spoke: "Our economic books when I went to school said the sales tax was the most unfair tax possible because it did not tax upon the ability to pay." The bill went down to defeat.

It's entirely possible that was the last time anyone brought up the subject of equity of taxation on the floor of a Nevada Legislature hall. These days, lawmakers examine the predictability of taxes, the stability of taxes, but never the fairness of taxes. The closest they get is discussion whether taxes are fair to businesses, not to individuals or families.

Over the years since the first Nevada sales tax was enacted in 1955, the problem has gotten worse and worse. The legislature keeps going back to that same well for more money. In a single legislature (1981) the Nevada sales tax was nearly doubled. The state portion of the sales tax is now so high it is one of the highest in the nation.

Politicians learned that the sales tax was a low-political-cost levy: The rate of collection is so gradual that people, particularly the working poor, have no idea how heavily they are being taxed, so they don't complain. A book-length 1960 study of Nevada taxation called the sales tax a "sucker" tax. And those hit hard by the sales tax have a low rate of showing up at the polls while those least affected by the sales tax are far more likely to make campaign contributions and hire lobbyists.

Some lobbyists have claimed that by exempting some things like food and prescription drugs from the sales tax, its regressiveness was neutralized, but in 1988 a major study of Nevada taxes concluded, "Of the portion of the sales tax that is borne by Nevada resident consumers, the distribution is clearly regressive. That is, the burden increases as family incomes decrease. The fact that there are other regressively distributed taxes and virtually no progressively distributed levies makes it among the most vertically unfair in the nation."

By then the problem extended well beyond just the sales tax. The patchwork quilt that the Nevada tax structure had become contained other features that were also regressive and unfair, as the 1988 study reported. Yet the lawmakers still resisted examining the inequity of the state's tax system, which inequity may well hamper the recovery of the state from the current recession.

At this year's Nevada Legislature, the state's tax structure is the principal topic. Yet legislators once again are talking mostly about stability and predictability, not about fairness.