GRAPHIC/ITEP
Nevada State & Local Taxes
Wesley Jim 1922-2013
Shares of family income for non-elderly taxpayers
In the summer of 2001, a young white girl named Jody Olsen spent several days at a Christian conference on the Pyramid Lake tribal reservation. When her parents came to take her home, they stopped at the home of one of the tribal leaders. When he came to the door, she greeted him in Paiute. Pleased, the elder commented that even young members of the tribe were unlikely to know the language. The preservation of tribal languages is an ongoing battle fought every day by a few dedicated Native Americans. On Sept. 27, one warrior in that battle, Wesley Jim, died at South Lyon Medical Center in Yerington. He was known as a Paiute language keeper. Born in Nixon, he was educated at Stewart Indian School and eventually settled in Schurz. He served in the Navy in World War II, receiving the Asiatic Pacific ribbon with 3 stars, the Philippine liberation ribbon with 2 stars, a Victory ribbon and the Purple Heart. He worked at the Walker River Indian Hospital for three decades. In an email message to friends, Patrick Wilkes of Sutcliffe wrote, “He was an amazing man who worked tirelessly to preserve Paiute language, stories and songs with help from his wife Bea.” One admirer, Marlin Thompson, said, “Wesley was a fluent speaker of the Northern Paiute language, the Pyramid Lake dialect. He sang in the Paiute language and spoke the language excellently. He spoke whenever asked and prayed. He had an excellent knowledge of the old ways he learned from his grandfather. He also recorded songs in the Paiute language.” There are YouTube videos in which Wesley Jim performs.
Nevada seeks Israeli answers Israel experts in getting more out of little water are ready for a Nevada mission to their territory. Gov. Brian Sandoval is leading a group of Nevadans to Israel’s Negev, a desert and semidesert region in the south, to learn more about indoor farming. “One of the prominent areas of mutual interest is water management,” Uri Resnick, deputy consul general of Israel to the Southwest United States, told Jspace.com. Nevada imports billions of dollars of food every year to feed tourists and has been in touch with the Israeli national water company, Mekorot, seeking assistance.
Poll makes questions easy In an opinion survey by Moore Information of Portland, commissioned by the Retail Association of Nevada, the following questions were asked: • “Do you think that the Nevada school system needs significant reforms in order to improve results?” • “Do you think that the Nevada school system can be improved through increased spending?” By gosh, respondents voted 70 percent for “reforms” to 18 percent for “increased spending.” “Reforms” were never defined in pollster questions. It may have meant a return of corporal punishment or switching from 20th to 21st century textbooks—who knows? Respondents had no idea what it meant. Nor was the purpose of “increased spending” ever explained. Maybe it was for repairing leaking ceilings or for free cola in the cafeteria. That information was never given to respondents. They were just responding to buzzwords. The poll also tilted questions on the new national health care program by using the loaded and colloquial term “Obamacare” in its language instead of “Affordable Care Act” or some generic term like “new federal health care program.” The questions began, “Do you believe that the Obamacare law will …” Obamacare has been used as a pejorative term by Republicans. Some Democrats, including Obama, have also used the term, not always comfortably.
—Dennis Myers 8 | RN&R |
OCTOBER 10, 2013
8%
9.0%
7.0%
6%
6.8% 6.0% 4.9%
4%
3.8% 2%
2.4%
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Lowest 20%
Second 20%
Middle 20%
Fourth 20%
Next 15%
Next 4%
Top 1%
Low-income penalty Nevada socks it to the working poor There is a 6.6 percent difference in the amount paid in state and local taxes by families at the top of Nevada’s by economy when compared to those Dennis Myers at the bottom, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a Washington, D.C., research organization. The 20 percent lowest income Nevada families pay 9 percent of their income in local taxes. The top 1 percent pay 2.4 percent.
“The ones who do vote make sure the system stays the same.” Fred Lokken Political analyst The study is the latest to characterize Nevada’s tax structure as regressive—that is, as hitting lower income Nevadans the hardest. Or to put it another way, the richer you are, the less you pay. But no matter how often it is described that way, the issue never seems to get traction in the state’s politics. “Well, because those who suffer the most from regressiveness don’t vote,” said political analyst Fred Lokken. “They have the lowest turnout in the country.” Jeri, a working mother in Sparks, stops at the Rainbow Market on Rock Boulevard on the Friday her paycheck comes out to fill her tank.
“I always hope that one tank lasts for the two weeks of my pay period,” she said. She shops at the cheapest places she can find for retail goods, uses no air conditioning in summer and keeps the heat shut off as often as her children’s health allows it in winter, and actually uses something that is increasingly rare—a clothesline. “I know about that [sales tax regressiveness]. I heard about it in government class in high school. I always figured it would get fixed when people realized it. I gave up on that a long time ago.” “Yes, I vote,” she said. “But I would expect them to represent my needs even if I didn’t.” She may be expecting too much. “We’ve embraced the notion of dropping property taxes and making them as low as possible,” Lokken said. That puts more and more pressure on sales taxes. “We know the sales tax is regressive, and it’s highly sensitive to recession,” he said. “Pragmatism creeps in. If you’re going to put a bond issue on the ballot, good luck. For whatever reason, sales tax seems to be the tax that they can get away with. And some legislators are proud—‘We protected the wealthy people.’” It’s not always the lobbyists for the rich and powerful who saddle low-income people with higher sales taxes. When the first sales tax was created in Nevada in the 1950s, it was done under pressure from teachers’
lobbyists, whose own constituency would be hit hard by the tax. The same thing happened in 1997 when labor union leaders joined businesspeople to support a sales tax hike to pay for a Colorado River pipeline in southern Nevada and floor control and a railroad trench in northern Nevada. And Democrats were part of the support for a Republican neardoubling of the sales tax in 1981, the largest sales tax hike in state history. “In essence you’ve got a small group of people turning out,” Lokken said. “The ones who do vote make sure the system stays the same.” In some narrow situations, that’s particularly true. “Sparks, especially,” one activist said. That’s surprising because at one time Sparks, as a union stronghold, was very suspicious of sales taxes. These days, it is known as the Mecca of STAR bonds, which allow some businesses to, in effect, keep most of the sales taxes they generate, thus putting greater pressure on the taxes paid by residents who pay their full share. Columnist and editor of NevadaLabor.com Andrew Barbano said Nevada is like a big company town. “Nevadans have a bad case of political co-dependency,” he said. “We seem to enjoy being hurt by the ones who say they love us ... the casino owner who gladly cashes miners’ paychecks, then buys them a few drinks on Friday night. ... Nevadans have seen their governments pass out corporate welfare like candy and condoms. Why clutter your mind considering a tax increase, or a shift toward tax equity, or any tax-tinkering if you have hard evidence that the money will just be handed to some billionaire or corporate predator that doesn’t need it?”
Other people’s money The state also has a tradition of trying to fund government with tourism dollars. “Our philosophy here in Nevada is always to have our taxes paid by tourists,” Lokken said, pointing out that this makes the state highly vulnerable when hard times come. In recessions, which have occurred approximately every 10 years for the past four decades, the state has endured four major budget crises. When the revenue from sales taxes take a dive, services that working people have paid for in good times are not always available because of shortfalls. And it’s not the wealthy
