The Review-Journal published a poll in today’s editions, revealing that 60 percent favor increasing the room tax to pay for education, a move that will raise about $150 million to $185 million per year. “People will vote for tax increases that don’t affect them. I would be surprised if it did not pass given the numbers that are showing right now,” said Brad Coker, managing partner of Maxon-Dixon, the company that did the poll.
Exactly. People don’t mind soaking others for things they ought to be paying for themselves. In this case it’s two easy targets: Casinos, and tourists.
How many of those people would walk into a 7-Eleven, fill up a Big Gulp, grab some Doritos and then tell the clerk to charge the guy who’s next in line? Sure they might want to do that, but how many would actually have the cojones to do it in person?
Not very many. But they’ll do it at the ballot box.
The point is, education benefits everybody in Nevada, and therefore, everybody in Nevada has an obligation to pay. A good chunk of room taxes already go toward education. The casino industry — which pays sales and gambling taxes, the two levies that make up about one-half of the state’s general fund — pay heavily into schools, too. Clark County residents pay for schools via property taxes.
Who doesn’t pay? Well, businesses, for one. Nevada has no corporate income tax, gross receipts tax, net profits tax, or anything that would compel businesses that benefit from education to support it in the one way that really matters, i.e. with dollars.
“The room tax ought to be part of some package to deal with, long term, the state’s needs. This particular proposal isn’t really going to meet those needs,” says Alan Feldman, spokesman for MGM Mirage. And Feldman is absolutely correct: the existing package isn’t going to do jack to help schools, especially under the pain of Gov. Jim Gibbons’s budget knife. (We’d love for MGM Mirage to propose an alternative, by the way, and actually work to enact it. Anybody? Anybody?)
University Chancellor Jim Rogers came to a stark conclusion recently, that Gibbons simply doesn’t care about state services. He only cares about reducing the size and scope of government, because he thinks it’s too big. (Nevada has a “spending problem,” the governor says, not a tax problem.) He’s joined by others, such as Regent Ron Knecht, who recently denigrated the very education system he’s supposed to be guiding.
The problem is, there’s plenty of people in Nevada who simply don’t want to pay, either because of greed, laziness or a warped political philosophy that says public education isn’t worth supporting in the first place. They want their Big Gulp free. And there’s just no such thing.
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