National Priorities Project: What It Means for Nevada

I got noodling around the National Priorities Project website this evening - playing around with their various tools, charts, interactives and such. It’s actually fun, especially for anybody with a mind for budgets and number crunching. And, as I’ve probably mentioned before, it’s instructive for anybody who has complained about federal and state budgets.

It’s too damn bad that more Nevadans don’t spend a few minutes on this website.

I’m not good with numbers, and I don’t always know the right questions to ask, or the way to ask them when it comes to statistical information. There were a few things, however, that even I could see were problems.

Right off, we don’t have so much a problem of not enough money in America … we have a problem of where it’s being spent. I know, the Teabaggers/GOP will tell me that it’s being spent on (gasp!) the losers at the lower levels of society who didn’t go to prep school, didn’t work, plan and save. Yup. Those bottom rung losers are the people with the political will and power to get more than their share.

WTF? When will people let this ludicrous old chestnut go? The poor have never been able to get squat politically. The poor can’t afford lobbyists on K Street.

If folks would really look at where their tax burden is going on a federal level, it might …. might be a wakeup call:

I plugged in an approximate figure for the taxes we paid last year. Whoops! It isn’t going to teachers, or food programs, or Pell Grants, or highspeed rail so that I don’t have to drive over the Sierras during a blinding snowstorm.

It’s primarily going to the military. Hey, that works. If you’re an aerospace consultant. The second biggest chunk is going to health care - and you can thank everybody who didn’t want that damned Socialist Medicare for all. The rest is chicken feed.

But what could we buy, for the Nevada 3rd Congressional District, with our combined national military budget?

Jeeze … 27,924 firefighters for one year! That would save a lot of angst which is currently being expended down in the Reno City Hall. It would also buy 34,504 elementary school teachers. That would certainly stimulate the Nevada economy.

I know that’s a silly way of dividing things up. Trading the military budget for firefighters and school teachers - I know that F-22’s (which aren’t even being used in our current military conflicts) are a much better bargain for America as part of the Defense Department’s unofficial ‘jobs’ program. It supports a lot of luxury car dealerships - probably where the new Mercedes SUV came from that was parking at Peg’s Ham n Eggs today with the vanity plate: AROSPCE.

But, when Congress has given so much away in the form of tax breaks for the richest 400 households in America, then distributed such a disproportionate amount of largesse to one sector of the economy, and let Wall Street criminals walk away with billions in bonuses this last year … do you really need to wonder why we don’t have enough money to fund the things that really matter to the great majority of us?

Remember, most states are bound by stupid balanced budget amendments. They can’t borrow money to tide them over through the bad times. Like now.

Only the federal government can do that. Except that it’s been hi-jacked by ‘deficit hawks‘  who want to close down the federal governments ability to generate money - which would go to states like Nevada - that would in turn go to counties and cities, and tide us over until things got better.

There are a lot of problems contributing to the current fiscal stress here in Nevada.

1-A mining industry that doesn’t even pay a portion of it’s share as outlined by the Nevada Constitution.

2-A ‘housing bubble’ that burst. Actually it was a foolish ‘buy now-pay later’ bubble.

3-An antiquated, broken tax system, better suited to the Wild West of years past.

But those things could be mitigated by help from the federal government - except that American’s have stacked that deck with people who confuse debts with deficits, and they don’t want any.

Meanwhile, folks from Nevada to Wisconsin, and everywhere in between are content to blame the teachers, firefighters and anyone in public service.

Yup. It’s those billionaire, lobbyist-owning union people who are the cause of it all.

Right. And, I’ve got a bridge to sell.

-maven