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The
more things change, the more they stay the same
BARBWIRE,
DAILY SPARKS TRIBUNE 7-9-2006
2003
Midnight
in the Garden of Good and Evil
Meltdown morphs
into Supreme Court sport
Neal:
no new taxes without meaningful gaming tax hike
Neal key swing vote in senate taxation committee
Hell
freezes over on the Ides of May
COP member e-mails
make a difference
Neal
blasts lawmakers for taking tax deliberations behind closed doors
Messages
from the piano player in the cat house —
Exclusive insider report
Barbano
vs. the Gambling-Industrial Complex —
Don't Let Casinos Off the Hook
Special to the Las Vegas Review-Journal 2-7-2003
Dudley
Do-Right, Joe Neal, chopped liver
and the elephant in the living room
The COP volunteer hall of courage
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Over the past two
decades, the gambling-industrial complex has kept its taxes low, opened
large tax loopholes for itself and facilitated major tax and fee increases
on everyone else. |
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Nevada casinos
pay the lowest state levies (with the exception of some tribal compacts)
in the nation, all of which are fully deductible on federal income
tax returns. Our
gross gaming tax, frozen since 1987, remains lowest in the world for
operations on the Silver State's level. |
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The Nevada gambling
industry also diverts hundreds of millions in public money toward
casino promotion. Because of this ongoing casino skim, booming cities
like Reno and Las Vegas cannot afford adequate parks, schools, roads,
police and fire protection or many other public services. |
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Because of four
decades of chronic corporate welfare giveaways extracted by the casino
industry, Nevada communities have been pressured to raise local taxes
and fees. The 2001 Nevada Legislature processed legislation to force
counties to raise property taxes to bail out state government. (Sen.
Bill Raggio, R-Reno, threatened the same in 2003.) |
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Nevada property
taxes have been rising faster than the rate of inflation due in large
part to communities being forced to deal with growth without the funds
to pay for it. The
casino tax skim has become toxic. |
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Regressive sales
and use taxes first surpassed gaming tax collections in 1998. Nevada's
governor and top gambling executives, echoed by an increasing chorus
of news media, have called for a "more stable" tax base.
The most often mentioned alternatives involve a universal sales tax
on non-gambling businesses. It would re-impose the sales tax on groceries
and place first-ever taxes on health care and other services. The
gross gaming tax has been taken off the table everywhere but with
the public,among whom two of three have consistently favored a gaming
tax hike whenever polled over many years. |
The Smoking Gun —
Sen. Neal, conservatives & Gov. Dudley Do-Right agreeGuinn-Hunt Administration Study points the finger at low-wage casino industry jobs
These issues are now reaching critical mass. Nevadans are now holding the end of a chain letter. Silver State Casinos Out of Politics (COP) was formed in 1999 to fight for substantive campaign finance reform for voters and candidates, equity for taxpayers and utility ratepayers and justice for casino workers.
Reducing the gambling-industrial complex's stranglehold on Nevada's political structure will not be easy. However, big, fat, rich targets move slowly and are easy to both hit and dodge.
We need volunteers in every Nevada county. Help us build a statewide network of people willing to write, call, fax, lobby and generally raise a ruckus. (See below.)
If you don't, you'll get stuck with the bill the casinos refuse to pay.Perhaps someday, we can put some sweat equity into buying an election for ourselves just once.
Be well. Raise hell.
Andrew Barbano, COP on the Beat
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We
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and communities. Get involved. This is important. |
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*"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder & lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. "This struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did; it never will." — Frederick Douglass, speaking in Canandaigua, NY, 3 August 1857 |
Dudley Do-Right, Nell Fenwick and Snidely Whiplash cartoon characters Copyright © Jay Ward Productions
Silver
State COP 1999-2001 Archive
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