Senate shows inevitable progress on tax issue

The Nevada state Senate, on what Majority Leader Michael Roberson, R-Henderson, called “an historic day,” passed Gov. Brian Sandoval’s business license fee plan to better fund education in the Silver State.

Of course it did.

Sure, it took awhile: Roberson pushed for a vote at the end of last month, trying to avoid leaving the bill to languish in an end-of-session tug-of-war. Democrats didn’t cooperate, first introducing an entirely different tax plan, then hammering out concessions behind closed doors as the governor’s bill sat in legislative limbo, rolled to successive agendas, day after day.

Even as Tuesday’s bill-passage deadline approached, things didn’t go smoothly: Sen. Patricia Spearman, D-North Las Vegas, tried to amend the bill on the floor with elements of her rejected proposal. But in the end, Spearman and every other Democrat joined with all but four Republicans to lend their votes to the plan.

“It’s time,” said state Sen. Greg Brower, R-Reno. “It’s time to step up and do what we all know is the right thing.”

Of course it was. As the late, much-lamented Assemblywoman Peggy Pierce was so fond of saying, Nevada’s decades-long experiment with the smallest state government in the country has to come to an end sometime. Its supposed virtues (low taxes mean more business!) have never materialized. It’s obvious vices (poor education performance, terrible social services, a lack of economic opportunity) are manifest.

Sure, there are still some, like state Sen. Don Gustavson, R-Sparks, who will be found publicly espousing those ideas. Businesses won’t come here if this tax is passed, Gustavson said on the floor. (Oh, really? Where are those businesses now, senator? Why haven’t they come for the decades we’ve had low taxes in Nevada?)

But, more and more, people are waking up to the point made by Sen. Tick Segerblom, D-Las Vegas: Taxes aren’t the reason we don’t have economic diversity while high-tax California does. Our poor education system has more to do with that than anything else. This tax increase is intended to fix that problem, and to make Nevada into a modern state, Segerblom said.

Of course it will.

Segerblom was the only senator to mention last year’s two-day special session that gave away more than $1 billion in tax credits to electric-car maker Tesla Motors, and he credited Sandoval for “making up for” that giveaway by proposing this tax on business revenue, the first in state history. (Unlike the Sandoval tax plan, however, the Tesla giveaway passed unanimously after just one day’s debate, including an aye vote from Segerblom himself.)

Sen. Debbie Smith, D-Sparks, who missed the first part of the session because of surgery to remove a brain tumor, said that getting back to Carson City to debate the tax issue was one of the things that aided in her convalescence. With characteristic candor, she derided senators who complained about the complexity of the tax but who also voted down Spearman’s amendment, which would have created a much simpler levy.

“It’s time we act and do something about it,” she said.

Of course it is.

In fact, it’s long past time that we did something about Nevada’s moribund tax structure, its underperforming schools, its cruel and unusual mental health system, and its inability to create economic opportunity. That starts with fixing education, which can’t happen without the funding and (many, although not all) of the fixes that Sandoval has proposed.

And while some lament the plan now goes to the Assembly, a den of implacable anti-tax conservatives, there is reason for hope. Because there are enough people in the Assembly — in both parties — who understand that things have been broken for a long, long time, and now there’s a chance to fix them, and maybe get some things right for a change.

That’s why the Assembly will pass this tax, or at least an amended version of it, although not without struggle. But ultimately, it will pass.

Of course it will.

Steve Sebelius is a Las Vegas Review-Journal political columnist who blogs at SlashPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter (@SteveSebelius) or reach him at 702-387-5276 or ssebelius@reviewjournal.com.