The Spring Mountain Republican Women are sponsoring a “Meet and Greet” barbecue this coming Tuesday, May 13, at Mountain Crest Park, Pavillion B, at Durango and Lone Mountain. I will be there, as well as candidates for Assembly, judicial and local government races.

Master Chef Gustav Mahler is cooking an awesome sounding menu. Here is a flyer listing the menu and RSVP information.

It turns out very few people can answer that question, or even guess close.

Here’s an interesting new article by William G. Howell, associate professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and Martin R.West, assistant professor of education at Brown University, that says, on average, most people are off by half when asked to guess how much they and their fellow taxpayers spend on government schools.

In sum, Americans think that far less is being spent on the nation’s public schools than is actually the case. The vast majority of the public thinks we spend amounts that can only be described as minuscule, and almost 96 percent of the public underestimate either per-pupil spending in their districts or teacher salaries in their states.

Brian Greenspun inherited quite an empire, successfully converting his father’s foresighted real estate purchases into a tremendous amount of cash. Ironically, he spends a big chunk of it every week pushing a socialist agenda by funding the Las Vegas Sun insert in the RJ.

Generally, the Sun’s agenda is subtle - but every so often, Brian’s sense of self gets the best of him and he unleashes quite the rant. The agenda comes raging forth and the cover is blown, and working people wonder about guilt amongst children of successful men. Often, the rants contain Orwellian overtones thicker than an 8th grade literature class.

Today, for example, Brian drops this wonker on us:

In 2003… many of our enlightened legislators and Gov. Kenny Guinn got behind a plan that would raise the revenue needed to build the roads, buy the schoolbooks, construct the campuses and educate our people toward the top of the heap rather than relegating them to the bottom… It was a good plan and, if it had passed, would have put our state in a far better position today than the one in which we find ourselves.

It was killed by some greedy businessmen and a no-tax ideologue from Washington, D.C., named Congressman Jim Gibbons.

Brian, it wasn’t killed. It passed. It was the largest percentage expansion of state government spending in Nevada history. It directly contributed to the position in which we find ourselves today by:

• lifting Nevada from a slightly below average sized state government to a slightly above average sized per person state government
• making Nevada a less attractive place to live for entrepreneurs
• and leaving our state government with a raging appetite for more.

And I hate to tell you this, but today’s Governor was representing us in Washington during that time and, aside from warning us against the idea during his ceremonial speech to the Legislature that year, wasn’t part of the debate or voting.

It’s about time for the Clark County School District to roll out its annual teacher shortage.

Two years ago, KLAS-TV called Clark County’s teacher shortage “staggering” - even adjusting for their news department’s keen eye for over-dramatization, they make it sound pretty serious with a thousand empty teaching slots forecast.

Times have changed. NVTeacherJobs.com apparently has lost its once-lucrative CCSD contract, since it doesn’t even reference the Clark County School District on its homepage.

Meanwhile, the Socialist Republic to our west last month distributed more than ten thousand pink slips to public schoolteachers.

One of my beliefs that has changed since I first got elected is that I don’t believe government does a good job being charitable. There’s just too much mischief that takes place when strangers get to spend strangers’ money. Davy Crockett approached it from a different angle to come to the same conclusion over a century ago.

A great example was highlighted in the Las Vegas Sun this week, which told the story of the Las Vegas-Clark County Urban League.

The story starts with the “executive board” of the “non-profit”:

gathered in a $10.5 million community center that hadn’t even opened to the public. The room was bordered by soft leather couches and chairs so new that tags from the factory still hung from them. The league’s center was built with county and federal funds. “We don’t have enough cash on hand … to fully implement programs,” Raihl told his fellow board members. “Cash flow is extremely tight.”

What? This group has taken ten million dollars from Nevada’s families under the auspices of fighting poverty, and instead built itself a palace?

It gets worse.

It turns out this group:

is attempting to fill a void left by another nonprofit organization, the Economic Opportunity Board, which fell apart in 2006 under the weight of mismanaged finances and programs.

Having failed to fight poverty but succeeded in enriching a few once before, it seems government does the same thing all over again.

Las Vegas accountant Lynda R. Keeton was scheduled to work at the group’s Owens Avenue office for the last two weeks of April at a cost of $10,000. That money would come out of the $2.8 million federal grant administered by the state.

A grand a day. Sweet deal, if you can get it. And it wasn’t just the consultants who were pillaging taxpayers under the banner of charity:

the local Urban League affiliate had what appears to be a top-heavy administration, with chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief operating officer and communications/government affairs positions overseeing a full-time staff of 48.

Turns out those four, plus a computer tech, were averaging $100K per year each, plus benefits. Looks like a great deal for everyone except taxpayers… and the poor.

“Non-profit” agencies are cursed with a great deal more transparency than government agencies. The reporters who were allowed to observe and report on this management meeting would never be allowed into the meeting of top bureaucrats for a government meeting. Once in a while, an audit, like this one, is released… but most of government’s “anti-poverty” fight is hidden and unaccountable.

Well-wishers and harm-casters alike have been emailing and asking me to describe what happened at this weekend’s GOP convention, though the latter tend to be from outside Nevada and rarely give their name or a way to communicate with them. Just as rarely, they use civil language. I imagine Dr. Paul is as embarrassed by some of his followers’ statements as I am.

First, some have suggested there are similarities between the GOP convention and the “Democrat do-over.” I don’t see them. Our state convention, in an orderly fashion, passed rules, bylaws, credentials, a platform, elected national committee members, and voted for the first 9 national delegates, though the uncounted ballots for 3 of those remain locked in the Peppermill hotel safe, I am told, a process witnessed and physically signed by a represenative from both John McCain’s and Ron Paul’s campaigns. We got a lot of work done.

Early in the day, the state delegates voted to depart from the way the Nevada GOP has elected national delegates for the 15 or so years I have been involved. Instead of short voice votes, the delegates wanted two separate and lengthy election processes: first, dividing the state delegates by our three congressional district, then having each third separately elect three national delegates each; second, an at-large election of 22 delegates from a list of candidates that would combine those who had applied through normal channels and those who self-nominated themselves from the convention floor. Many people who had gone through the normal channels also self-nominated themselves from the floor.

By 6pm last night:

• we were overtime on our contract for our convention space
• we were paying our stagehands and audio-video technicians overtime
• our volunteers running the convention (myself included) had already put in a 12-hour day
• only two of the three congressional district elections had been counted. The third (and largest) was about half-way done
• our rough calculations on how long it would take to compile the results of the upcoming 22-person ballot were l-o-n-g based on the three-person ballot taking as long as it had
• The convention secretary and party secretary (all volunteers) had compiled the 200 or so self-nomination candidates into their computer, but had not started figuring out who was on both lists and needed to be consolidated for the final, master ballot
• Delegates, frustrated that our 5pm end time had been missed, with no end in sight, had left and were continuing to leave to execute their travel plans.

So we made the decision to temporarily stop the convention and resume it at a later date.

It is my sincere hope that:

• This delay (of probably more than a week) will give the nomination committee time to produce a comprehensive list of national delegate candidates
• The same credentialed delegates who attended the meeting in Reno, and only those credentialed delegates, will be called back to order and quickly vote for the remaining 22 national delegates.
• The re-convening will be held in Las Vegas, so that those who already paid to fly across the state once won’t have to do that again this year.
• The elections committee can come up with a system to rapidly and transparently count the ballots under the watch of all concerned parties
• We will finish up whatever few minor agenda items remain and adjourn the convention so we can move forward together to elect common sense, limited government, pro liberty Republicans up and down the ballot.

The Urban Institute is a “non-partisan think tank” (doesn’t everyone claim to be?) that has published a comparative study of the 50 states, looking at each state’s revenue capacity, expenditure need, and overall level of fiscal capacity. The link is to a PDF file that includes the entire 90-page report.

The study defines a state’s expenditure need as

the amount that a state would have to spend on its residents to provide services on par with the national average. Expenditure need is calculated across seven broad spending categories, and state amounts can differ based on differences in population or other factors. For example, all other things being equal, a state with a large percentage of its population between the ages of 5 and 18 has a higher need for spending on education than one with fewer schoolage children. A state with a high expenditure effort spends more than its expenditure need.

The interesting part of the report is that Nevada’s “expenditure need” was fourth from last (see chart on page 71). Places like Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana topped this chart. And this was using data from before Nevada’s record tax hike in 2003 and spending splurge that took place in the years right after the study.

This study would seem to indicate that Nevada has shifted from a low-tax-and-spend state to a little above average over the past couple of decades, although some advocates cling to the past in an effort to increase taxing-and-spending even further.