Right now the state of Nevada is trying to balance their budget. In an attempt to meet that goal, they have proposed raising the taxes and fees placed on the gambling industry. Representatives from the state’s casinos, who are already being bled by the government, predictably said no. According to the Associated Press, the casinos’ unwillingness to accept higher taxes could derail “plans to raise enough extra revenue to avoid deep cuts to education and social services.”
This is how it always goes, isn’t it? We want to raise your taxes! No? Fine, we’ll have to lay off teachers then! This form of government blackmail is certainly nothing new, but it’s also dishonest. Governments love taking money and when you resist, they don’t take that lightly. I lived in the great state of Florida for a large portion of my life and I can tell you that every time the city faced opposition to raising taxes, they claimed that if they don’t hike the taxes then they’ll have to lay off teachers, police and fire fighters. The state acted the same way. You hear it from across the country and I would imagine every state uses this form of manipulation whenever they want to raise taxes. But it is dishonest.
If you listen to that argument, you are led to believe that the cities and states only pay for three things: education, police and the fire department. After all, those are the only places they can make cuts if taxes aren’t raised, right? I can think of a few other ways to balance the budget.
Does every road in the state need to be under construction? Do you need pretty grass and flowers in the median that need to be watered daily? And since Nevada brought up social services, are there a few people out there receiving welfare checks that don’t need them? Are there a few government employees with unnecessary jobs? Are there a few government employees making too much money (since those jobs pay considerably more than the private sector)? Can we cut back on some of the wasted “expenses” of government employees? This is just a list off the top of my head. Anyone who sits down and looks at the expenditures of the government can come up with lots of ways to balance the budget without letting teachers go. The point is this:
Don’t believe the lie. Nevada, you should be ashamed for threatening cuts in education if you don’t get more money. Then again, Nevada ranks 47th in the nation in education, so there’s a good chance a lot of those teachers should be let go, anyway. So let’s add the teachers unions to the list of problems, since they make it almost impossible to fire bad teachers. A bad teacher is an unnecessary expense.
People panic when they hear that the government will have to lay off teachers and police and that’s exactly what the government wants. Worse yet, on occasion they actually go through with the threats, while refusing to make any of the cuts I mentioned above. One thing you need to remember, though, is that anytime the government enacts a new tax or fee, they never get rid of it, even if they say it’s temporary. And if they raise taxes it’s very difficult to get them cut again.
The government works for you and is supposed to serve you, but they waste your money and always ask for more. Balancing the budget means making the amount of your money that they take equal the amount of your money that they spend. Since both types of money are yours, shouldn’t you get a say in how much is taken, what it’s spent on, and where the cuts are made?
Nevada and other states are doing nothing more than using scare tactics to get what they want: your money. The casinos in Nevada are already losing money in this recession. Increasing their taxes and fees would be crippling, but that’s not the government’s concern. The government doesn’t care about the business’s profits as long as they can get their share of the money. That’s why taxes are taken out of gross revenue rather than net. The casinos are right to reject the tax hike and as a result, uninformed idiots have branded them bad guys who don’t care about education. However, it is the state of Nevada, not the casinos, that is threatening the teachers, when they know there are much better ways to make cuts.
This is what governments do, though. They can’t just ask nicely for more money because most people will say no. Instead, they come up with a catastrophe that more money will avert. The planet will be destroyed by “global warming” unless we pass cap and trade legislation (which is essentially the largest tax hike on the middle class in history)! Our entire country will be unemployed unless we pass this “stimulus” bill! We’ll become a third-world country if we don’t bail out the banks and auto manufacturers! Those are all federal examples, but state and local governments do the same exact thing, but on a smaller scale. They invent or exaggerate problems that, according to them, can only be solved by taking or spending more of your money. It is a con, nothing more. Don’t buy into it.
