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Hold onto your wallets: Education bureaucrats seek property, sales tax hike
Victor Joecks
Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 1, 2021
Those in Nevada’s education establishment want to raise your property taxes — by a lot. Then they want you to pay more in sales tax.
No thanks.
The Nevada Commission on School Funding recently released a report calling for a 36.7 percent to 55 percent increase in per-pupil spending. By 2031, the annual inflation-adjusted cost of those increases is projected to be between $2.17 billion and $3.24 billion.
That conclusion wasn’t a surprise. Democrats created the commission two years ago and stacked it with members of the education bureaucracy, including school district employees. Its task was to determine “an optimal level” of public school funding and how to pay for it.
So school district employees think it’s “optimal” that the public spend a lot more on public education. Go figure.
This approach has it backward. It’s like being dissatisfied with your Ford Taurus and then asking Ford how much it would cost to create an “optimal” car. That makes no sense. Before spending more, you would investigate how much cars from other companies cost. You may discover that another company has a better product at a lower price.
That happens all the time — when there’s competition. When companies have to earn your business, there’s innovation and downward pressure on prices.
But when there’s a limited competition, products tend to stagnant and prices usually rise. That sounds a lot like what you see in Nevada’s traditional public schools. The only area of widespread agreement is that overall performance is terrible. Instead of exploring ways to improve using current resources, however, the establishment moans for more money.
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