A good friend of mine (a strident Democrat) wrote this morning with a touch of indignation after going to see Marcia Ball last night at the Railhead theatre. It turned out the $5 tickets said “LET Included” on them, and the internet receipt from his online purchase had the tickets priced at $4 with a [...]

Attentive readers of the Beers Blog learned a couple of weeks ago that my opponent Dina Titus was right: sometimes Nevada ends up at the top of bad lists. Like this one - some research that ranked Nevada highest in hidden taxation.
ALEC apparently sent a copy of their study to the Nevada Policy Research Insitute, [...]

Nevada hides taxes like no other.
Although I was named one of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s “Legislators of the Year” this summer, I didn’t realized they’d called us out until I read this weekend’s editorial in the Review Journal.
If the issue is truly a faulty tax structure, why aren’t Mr. Rogers, Mr. Lanni, Assembly Speaker [...]

You won’t read about it in the newspaper much, but it turns out California (you know, the state with the “stable” tax structure because it has an income tax) is much worse off than Nevada is.
Here’s an article from the Sacramento Bee.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s finance officials are estimating a California budget deficit next year of [...]

Our political leaders sometimes suggest that Nevada is at the “bottom of all the good lists” and “top of all the bad lists,” and that they want to tax us out of this statistical black hole.
Here is a list we’re at the top of - tax hikes per person from 2002-2007.
Another sign that Nevada is [...]

Today, Nevada workers got an official indicator of how hard they’ve been hit by our economic downturn. Nevada’s hidden income tax, named the “Modified Business Tax”, came up short of projections by $13-million over the three months ending September 30.
This tax is .62 of one percent of wages paid. When you divide the $13-million shortfall [...]

Dina Titus says “the tax system is in chaos and needs stabilizing” and tax increases are the thing that will tame it and stabilize it.
In fact, Nevada has one of America’s most remarkably stable tax structures. Here’s a report from the Council of State Governments - West that shows Nevada (and Wyoming) to have the [...]