Vin Suprynowicz

Goosed by an environmentalist lawsuit seeking a decision by Thursday, the Interior Department Wednesday declared the polar bear a “threatened species,” saying it must be protected because of the decline in Arctic sea ice caused by global warming.

The department certainly couldn’t say it was because polar bear numbers are down. Both the Edinburgh Scotsman and the London Telegraph report there are some 25,000 polar bears in the wild and their numbers are growing explosively — an increase of between 15 and 25 per cent over the past decade.

“We’re seeing an increase in bears that’s really unprecedented, and in places where we’re seeing a decrease in the population it’s from hunting, not from climate change,” Canadian polar bear expert Mitch Taylor told the Scotsman in 2005. “In the Davis Strait area, a 140,000-square kilometer region, the polar bear population has grown from 850 in the mid-1980s to 2,100 today,” added the Telegraph, last year.

Rather, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne cited dramatic declines in the size of Arctic sea ice sheets over the past three decades and computer projections of continued losses. These declines, he told a news conference, mean the polar bear is a species likely to be in danger of extinction in the near future. (Polar bears are experts at hunting ringed seals and other prey on sea ice. But they’re so unsuccessful on land that they spend their summers fasting, losing more than two pounds a day.)

The secretary failed to mention that “three decades” was used as the measurement period because we’ve only had sea ice satellite data since 1979 — the Arctic is a famously difficult place to survey by any other means, so there’s simply no information from previous decades or centuries to tell us to what extent such changes are normal and cyclical.

Secretary Kempthorne did say it would be “inappropriate” to use his listing decision as an excuse to seek a reduction in man-made greenhouse gas emissions, or to broadly address climate change.

But the secretary is either disingenuous or whistling past the graveyard. Environmental extremists have sought the listing precisely because the Endangered Species Act now allows them to sue any federal agency, demanding that said agency no longer license or allow any behaviors that might further “endanger” the “threatened” species — such as, to their way of thinking, allowing the continued burning of fossil fuels in power plants … not just in Alaska, but anywhere.

“If the bears were listed,” the Boston Herald warned in an editorial Sunday, “The Endangered Species Act provides that each federal agency would have to ‘insure that any action authorized, funded or carried out by such agency is not likely to jeopardize any endangered species or threatened species or result in the destruction or adverse modification (our italics) of (critical) habitat of such species.’

“The environmentalists, if not the service, could claim that any activity that emitted carbon dioxide, the chief gas causing the supposed warming, could not be authorized, financed or done by a federal agency,” the Herald continued. “The agencies would have to bring the modern world to a crash as no fossil fuels could be burned in power plants, no highways built and so forth throughout the economy.”

Although Arctic ice is shrinking, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in October this was caused not by warming but a shift in wind patterns that pushed more ice out of the Arctic. Another report in January said surface warming in the Arctic was caused by unexplained atmospheric heat transfer from the tropics.

“Polar bears have been around for 100,000 years, surviving much warmer temperatures before the last ice age,” the Herald noted. “Canada, on whose territory about two-thirds of the bears live, has refused to classify them as threatened or endangered. The United States should follow suit.”

Unfortunately, the deed is done, the precedent now set. The theory embraced is that the animal is somehow “threatened” by consumers burning fossil fuels in their SUVs in Georgia or Alabama, where the lumbering predator has never been seen outside a zoo, all based on cobbled-together computer models ignoring the ice-core evidence that global warming follows a predictable 15,000-year cycle far more dependent on solar activity than the notion that aboriginal peoples in 13,000 B.C. got carried away and burned too many buffalo chips.

If polar bears are placed on the endangered species list, “the legal hurdles to oil and gas drilling will increase,” warns biologist Kenneth P. Green of the American Enterprise Institute. “Last year, Shell Offshore Inc. was about to start drilling in the Beaufort Sea when a court order halted the activity on the grounds that the federal government did not thoroughly assess the environmental impact before granting Shell permission to drill.

“In petitioning against the drilling, environmental groups invoked sea ducks, whales, and, of course, polar bears. … The U.S. Minerals Management Service estimates that the area holds the potential for 7 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 32 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas.”

Fuel to help hold down gasoline and energy prices — fuel the green extremists hope we’ll never see.

Never forget that the goal of the green extreme is to shut down our modern industrial and technological civilization entirely, returning mankind to the “more pristine” state of existence last seen seven centuries ago, when wolves roamed the outskirts of Paris and the average human being died before age 40, toothless, crippled, and shivering in the dark.

“Notwithstanding the secretary’s disclaimers, this is the first time the Endangered Species Act has been used to protect a species threatened by the impacts of global warming,” The Associated Press noted Wednesday. “There has been concern within the business community that such an action could have far-reaching impact and could be used to regulate carbon dioxide.”

Here it comes.

Native Las Vegan Harry Pappas was appointed to the Bureau of Land Management Citizen Advisory Council by then-Congresswoman Barbara Vucanovich. He later represented the State Rifle & Pistol Association on the Clark County Tortoise Advisory Council.

“They said the (desert) tortoise was threatened, so they had to fence off these huge areas and shut out all the cattle, which means no one is out there shooting the coyotes and the raven or trapping the lions any more, so of course that wrecked the hunting,” Mr. Pappas recalled, back in 2001. “They said anyone who found a tortoise had to turn it in” to Clark County authorities.

“So what happened? They got so overrun with tortoises being turned in that they told us they were going to have to start euthanizing them. I said ‘Hold on a minute, here. Euthanize them? Why don’t you just drop them out in the desert?’ They said ‘Oh no, they’ll fight with the native tortoises that already live out there and they’ll kill each other, because all these lands are already at saturation levels.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, now: Which is it? How can they be ‘threatened,’ or ‘endangered’ … but now you tell us all these lands are at ‘saturation levels’ for tortoises?”

Harry recalls a wildlife biologist from California who, more than a decade ago, spoke before the BLM’s Citizen Advisory Council, bringing in “two huge plastic garbage bags full of baby tortoise shells — there had to be hundreds of them, probably thousands. Every one of these shells had a hole pecked through the top where the ravens had carried them off and pecked through the shell and eaten the baby tortoise right out of the shell, and he said they picked these up in middens around the raven nests, just thousands of them.

“I followed him out to his truck that night and asked if I could have one of those shells. He didn’t want to do it, but I talked him into giving me one. …

Cattle weren’t the problem, Harry has always insisted. In fact, cattlemen formerly reduced the populations of predators including the coyote and the raven, which benefited tortoise populations.

Later, when “desert tortoise preservation” became the main rationale for pushing most of southern Nevada’s cattle ranchers off the land, Harry remembered the ranger from California with his bags of tortoise shells, and asked if he couldn’t be brought back to address the Tortoise Advisory Council. “At that point they all said they didn’t know who I was talking about; they couldn’t find him.

“But now they say the way to protect the tortoise is to fence off the land and not let the ranchers and the hunters in, when the biggest tortoise populations we ever had were in the ’50s and ’60s, when you had plenty of ranching, and plenty of hunting, and plenty of predator control,” Harry insists.

Needless to say, it’s hard to qualify as a federal bureaucrat if you’re not willing to keep repeating the same mistakes. It was also back in 2001 that Congress authorized Fort Irwin — a prime site for desert combat training near Barstow in Southern California’s western Mojave desert — to expand into prime tortoise habitat. As mitigation, the Army agreed to move the tortoises from the expansion area onto unoccupied public lands, an effort that finally began in March 2008.

But so far, at least 14 of the translocated adult tortoises and 14 resident tortoises in the area have been killed and eaten by coyotes, according to biologists monitoring survival rates of the reptiles, many of which were fitted with radio transmitters.

Fifteen of 70 baby tortoises collected at the training center as part of the relocation program have also died of various causes, Army officials tell the Los Angeles Times.

The problem, they say, might be linked to a severe drought, which killed off plants and triggered a crash in rodent populations. As a result, coyotes which normally thrive on kangaroo rats and rabbits are turning to the lumbering Gopherus agassizii for sustenance.

In an effort to prevent further losses, the Army has requested that the predators, described by one military spokesman as a “rogue clan of coyotes,” be eradicated by sharpshooters. The hunt, however, have been delayed by bureaucratic red tape.

The Center for Biological Diversity, the Tucson, Ariz.-based environmental group, meantime announces it plans to file suit later this month against the Army, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management for allegedly violating the federal Endangered Species Act in their big tortoise move.

Michael Connor, a longtime advocate of the tortoise and California science director of the Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit conservation group, is critical of the Army’s plan to wipe out suspect coyotes.

“These aren’t rogue coyotes. They’re just coyotes trying to make a living in the desert,” Connor told the Times. “Now they want to shoot them. Fine. But what happens if there are unforeseen implications from wiping out the region’s top predator, like an explosion of rabbits and rats?”

William Boarman, an adjunct professor of biology at San Diego State University who’s helping direct the translocation project, explains that after the Army decided to expand operations at Fort Irwin, “We were stuck with bad options: move the tortoises or leave them in place, which would have been much worse.”

“Translocation was always risky,” Professor Boarman added. “We’re trying to make it work the best we can, and conduct research that can help us make future translocations more effective.”

“Coyotes didn’t seem to be a problem when we started,” sighs U.S. Geological Survey biologist Kristin Berry, a lead scientist in the project. “The question in the back of all of our minds now is this: How could we have determined that this was going to happen?”

Oh, please.

As documented in Vernon Bostic’s “Ecology of the Desert Tortoise in Relation to Cattle Grazing,” the greatest death loss among Southern Nevada desert tortoises during the severe drought of 1981 occurred in the Crescent Valley Allotment, where cattle had been excluded from grazing all year by federal fiat.

“On the adjoining Christmas Tree Pass Allotment, which was grazed (by cattle) all year long, the tortoises were relatively unaffected by the severe drought. … The reason is simple: Cows provide tortoises with both food and drink,” wrote Mr. Bostic, who took his degree in Range Management from Colorado State University in 1935.

(Unsavory as it may sound, the tortoises get water in times of drought by eating the cow pies.)

Cattle also benefit the tortoises by eating off the previous year’s dried growth from grasses and other desert plants, clearing the way for new growth close enough to the ground to provide turtle fodder. The toothless tortoise cannot clear away the old growth without such symbiotic help from a larger grazing animal.

The solution? Move the Fort Irwin tortoises not onto parched habitat from which they will only start their long, lumbering walk home, but rather onto well-maintained cattle grazing lands where local ranchers have improved the springs, putting it windmills, ponds and water tanks.

Cliven Bundy still had 500 head out on the Mesquite allotment near Bunkerville, the last time we checked. If that’s not enough, open up more of the old Clark, Nye, Inyo and San Bernardino County cattle grazing allotments to bid.

The tortoises will thank you.

For decades, sensible skeptics have warned that government tariffs and subsidies designed to encourage the conversion of corn to alcohol and requiring fuel distributors to mix this corrosive stuff into our gas tanks was not going to “solve the energy crisis,” reduce dependence on imported oil, or do anything helpful for “the environment” — unless by “the environment” you actually meant “the bank account of Archer-Daniels-Midland.”

If the critics failed to mention this expensive boondoggle could also promote starvation and food riots around the world, it was probably only because they were afraid of being ridiculed for “piling on.”

Guess what.

While both Congressional Democrats and Republicans were cheering a fivefold increase in mandated ethanol use as little as a year ago, and President Bush was calling the cornfuel program a key to his strategy to cut gasoline use by 20 percent by 2010, today The Great Ethanol Mandate seems to meet Count Galeazzo Ciano’s definition of an orphan. (“Victory has many fathers,” etc.)

Former “renewable fuels” champion Lester Brown now writes in the Washington Post “It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that food-to-fuel mandates have failed.”

“Our enthusiasm for corn ethanol deserves a second look,” said Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., in a House hearing Tuesday.

It’s hard to believe ethanol is getting “clobbered the way it’s getting clobbered right now” over something as insignificant as some starving Africans, says longtime champion Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

What happened?

Everyone knew all along it takes 1,700 gallons of water and 51 cents in tax credits to create one gallon of ethanol from corn — at which point the stuff still can’t compete without a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff to block the importation of cheaper sugar-cane ethanol from Brazil.

Everyone has long known we use up more petroleum-based fuel in trucks and tractors and distilleries to produce and transport ethanol than it ever saves us in the tank — and that (speaking of tanks) the stuff is meantime creating unmeasured private costs by rusting out our gas tanks and fuel lines.

It’s long been clear the 30 million acres of American farmland devoted to growing corn for ethanol this year will consume almost a third of America’s corn crop Ð driving up prices for meats and all other grains, worldwide — while yielding fuel amounting to less than 3 percent of our total petroleum consumption. (If cattle stop eating corn, you have to feed them something else, driving up the price of other grains, even if Sen. Grassley still can’t seem to figure that out.)

In December, the Congressional Research Service warned that even if we devoted every acre of American cornfields to ethanol production — at who knows what human cost in terms of world-wide hunger and starvation — it still wouldn’t be enough to meet current arbitrary and grossly optimistic federal mandates.

In February the journal Science reported “Corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20 percent savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years. …” (Not that this really matters, since current minimal rates of global warming are mostly caused by solar activity and other natural causes, and are a good thing, anyway. More food production.)

Forests? Being bulldozed for more corn production. O, Bambi and Thumper lovers, what hast thou wrought?

Suddenly, inspired by the sight of thoroughly predictable food-price riots overseas, political candidates who were happily hopping on the ethanol bandwagon as recently as 2006 are looking for a way out. Sen. Barack Obama said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that it may now be more important to help “people get something to eat” than to keep pushing the biofuels boondoggle up the hill.

“Corn ethanol was presented as an almost Holy Grail solution,” moaned Rep. Mike Doyle, D. Penn., this week. “But I believe its negatives today far outweigh its benefits. … We need to revisit this … and back away from the food-to-fuel policy.”

Would those be the same negatives I and the other skeptics have been warning about for years, Congressman? What did someone do in the interim, teach you simple arithmetic and Economics 101?

Meantime, the governor of Texas and 26 U.S. senators, including GOP presidential nominee-in-waiting John McCain, have asked the Environmental Protection Agency to cut in half this year’s requirement for 9 billion gallons of corn ethanol in order to ease the pressure on rising food costs.

That would be a start. But washing their hands and pretending they don’t know who gave birth to the biofuel boondoggle will not suffice. Congress needs to repeal the ethanol mandates, subsidies, and protective tariffs immediately. The congressmen need to admit they don’t know a darned thing about energy markets, and vow to stop using billions of our precious tax dollars meddling in matters they don’t understand.

Finally, investors and energy companies need to soberly review where it gets them to rush into programs that couldn’t possibly survive in the unmanipulated market, based on the promise that big federal subsidies are going to make everyone rich.

The old warning was “Remember Colorado oil shale.” The new one will now be “Remember ethanol.” But the lesson itself is the same: Depending on idiotic congressional enthusiasms is like trying to buy presents for the kids based on last year’s Christmas list. Best to double-check. By now they’ve probably outgrown the Lego set and the Chatty Cathy, and moved on.

That thing they left you holding? It’s called “the bag.”

Why a presidential caucus or primary?

Last fall, officials for both “major” Nevada parties were loudly celebrating “all the new people this will bring into the process.” Then, when those people actually showed up at their state conventions this spring, chaos ensued.

The Democrats hadn’t rented a big enough room for enough time to even sort out who was a credentialed delegate and should be allowed to vote. They had to close down and do it all again, a few weeks later.

And what happened at the GOP carnival in Carson City two weekends ago was even harder to sort out, at first. Reports from party regulars were that the Ron Paul minority (the Texas congressman came in second to Mitt Romney in the party’s Nevada caucuses this winter) had shown up and tried to “take over” the convention, or else “wreck it,” though no one could explain precisely why they’d want to do that.

After talking to a number of participants, both those who were on the stage and those out in the cheap seats, I must conclude the clash of expectations on view at the Peppermill in Reno April 26 was actually more interesting and important that the rumored attempt at a “minority takeover,” which is not what actually happened.

First, America does not have two major parties. It has one major party — the Incumbent Party — which is divided into two social clubs, the Republicrats and the Demopublicans.

This single party has a single agenda: Tell the voters you stand for “change,” and then deliver them no change at all, except incremental further steps toward the brand of state socialism popularized by Bismarck, Mussolini, Hitler, and Roosevelt the Second.

If we have two DIFFERENT major parties, tell me which one, placed in power, would quickly end the War on Drugs; pull our troops out of 103 nations overseas; restore the Second Amendment right to own a machine gun without having to sign your name or show a photo ID; end the actuarially bankrupt and constitutionally unauthorized Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security Ponzi schemes; shut down the Federal Reserve Board and put us back on a sound, non-inflating dollar made of gold and/or silver. Tell me which one would declare that children belong to their parents, shutting down the state “Child Protection” kidnapping racket (kids have been kidnapped and killed for an offense as minor as mom not “getting them their shots” — see Cameron Justin Demery, Oct. 14, 1996) and the vastly expensive Government Youth Propaganda Camps which are dumbing down our children into quasi-literate sociopaths.

That would be “change.” And the One Party has none to offer.

I come from New England. Many fine New Englanders are the Catholic descendants of Irish and Italian immigrants. They’re against abortion, suspicious of much current “Politically Correct” chicanery, and — having had three generations to start a business and accrue some wealth — balk at higher taxes.

Looking at the platforms of the “two parties,” they should be Republicans. But they’d be ostracized by their friends and families if they registered as anything but Democrats. The Republicans are the fat cats with the Mayflower names who live up on the hill and won’t let the darned Swamp Yankee (insert colorful racial epithet of your choice) into the country club.

It’s a social thing.

Over the decades, the agenda for a Nevada Republicrat state convention — especially in a year when the presidential nominee already stands anointed — has become ritualized. Sign in a few hundred delegates, most of whom know each other and — for that matter — knew each other’s parents. Show some “pep rally” videos designed to stir up the crowd and ridicule the Demopublicans. Troop out the party’s old war horses and celebrity guests to take a bow and — in at least one case — actually sing a song.

Now, with lunchtime approaching, seek a voice vote OK of the credential committee’s delegate slate for the national convention Sept. 1. After all, the nominee is a given, so the challenge here is to make sure no one important is offended: Sen. Ensign has to be a delegate, and Gov. Gibbons, and on down the list of longtime party loyalists who have been willing to make the phone calls and stamp the envelopes and who — most important — are known to have the $5,000 necessary to make the trip.

In Reno April 26, convention chairman Bob Beers said the “Ayes” had accepted the party delegate slate. But a count of hands was called for. Turns out the “Ayes” didn’t have it — by a margin of about 670 to 430.

The eager Ron Paulista delegates — accompanied by a fair number of newcomers who signed on as Mitt Romney delegates, without whom the Paulistas could not have raised the majority that voted down the “company delegate slate” — didn’t realize they’d been invited to attend a formal social gathering with rituals as time-honored as the garter toss and the father dancing with the bride. They thought they were there to participate in “live” politics — to elect a slate of delegates to the national convention, and instruct those delegates through the mechanism of a state party platform as to which issues they wish the national party to bring before the electorate next fall — things like shutting down the Federal Reserve and restoring sound money before we’re heading to the grocery store with our wheelbarrows.

These people have never met John Ensign or Jim Gibbons, had certainly never heard either one address any of their major issues, and didn’t give a hoot whether either man got a seat in Minneapolis Sept. 1.

One group was there for a social event. The other still believed that political change can be effected in America through political activism.

The faith of the Paul and Romney delegates — their desire to see the campaign confront real issues like our eroding standard of living caused by the purposeful inflation of the Federal Reserve — is naive, but a precious thing. That this faith will be crushed by a system that values nothing other than “triangulating” to 51 percent — this year — is very sad.

But the folks who started out “in charge” at the Peppermill April 26, assuming all the ritualized business could be handled with some quick voice votes, are not evil people. Republican Chairwoman Sue Lowden showed great political courage in standing up against mandatory vaccinations — correctly labeling them “not as effective as they claim” (she could have added some are outright dangerous) — in the state senate a few years back. That brave stand gave the Culinary Union all the ammo they needed to bring her down, absurdly claiming the young mother was “in favor of childhood disease.”

And convention chairman Bob Beers is as close to a lower-tax, smaller government Republican as this state party has produced in a long while.

But one team showed up ready to reminisce about old times and play a little lawn croquet on April 26, only to find themselves in a hall with 900 strangers suited up for lacrosse.

You see, when leaders of both parties crowed last fall about how happy they were to see so many new people being “brought into the process” by the new Nevada caucuses, they meant “registering to vote for our guys.” They never imagined these characters would actually crash their annual tea party.

I’m to do a “blog.”

“It’ll be easy, Vin. You type in your thoughts. The readers respond. You respond to their responses.”

“I already do that. I use lots of reader mail in this thing we like to call my ‘weekly column.’”

“This will be much faster. And it builds traffic!”

Ah. Just like a weekly column, but with even less emphasis on documentation, contemplation, or craftsmanship. No wonder the Web is awash in largely unsubstantiated but furiously fervent personal opinion. It’s like giving every kid his own radio show. More »

April 15 is not “tax day.” It’s “tax filing” day.

It’s not a new observation that, If this were a day when Americans were required to hand over in one lump sum a personal income tax applied to their wages and other gains of the previous calendar year, some form of revolution would not be far behind.

The stroke of genius that keeps the whole operation afloat, despite a combined tax rate much higher than that which got the people of France “up in arms” in 1789, or our own ancestors in 1776, is called the “withholding tax.”

The “withholding” levy — initially at a rate of 20 percent — was instituted in July of 1943. More »

Over the past six years, Nevada’s U.S. senators, Harry Reid and John Ensign, have successfully pushed public lands bills which facilitated the sale of tens of thousands of acres formerly managed by the federal government in Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties — basically, southeastern Nevada.

Although the federal government could show no title for those lands — no bill of sale approved by the state Legislature as required under Article I Section 8 — they have successfully been sold back onto the private tax rolls, allowing additional room for growth in Southern Nevada.

So far so good.

On the down side, the bills also designated more than 1.7 million new, additional Nevada acres as federally “protected” wilderness, stymieing the objective of a net reduction in the 90 percent of Nevada still controlled from afar by the bureaucrats of the Potomac. More »

One R. Lane wrote in on March 31:

“After reading his March 23 diatribe, it is clear to me that Review-Journal columnist Vin Suprynowicz has not yet learned the obvious: the more handguns a country has in circulation, the more handgun deaths that country is going to get — not less.

“The United States has some 200 million handguns in circulation, and the highest handgun death rate (per 100,000 population) of any industrialized nation, with the possible exception of Brazil. Japan has the fewest number of handguns in circulation and the lowest handgun death rate per 100,000.

“If all these guns make us safer, we should be the safest nation on earth.”

Thus endeth R. Lane’s succinct submission.

Wow. This really simplifies the question, doesn’t it? All we have to do is look to see if we can find any historic examples where a government has banned access to handguns for a sizeable portion of the population, and see what that did to handgun death rates among that population.

And you know what? It turns out R. Lane is correct!

Back in the 1920s and 1930s, the forward-thinking German “Weimar” republic effectively banned firearms possession by just about anyone but the military, the government police, and the ruling “Junker” class, who were allowed to keep their fancy hunting rifles. More »

I see where Clark County Superintendent of Schools Walt Rulffes here in Las Vegas has responded to the Feb. 14 drive-by murder of a 15-year-old Palo Verde High School inmate — shot by another one of Mr. Rullfes’ young charges — not by admitting a failure of his own tutelage, but instead by whining it’s difficult to prevent his young wards from shooting each other given today’s “easy access to guns” and television violence.

I’m not sure about the TV part — seems to me most of the drive-bys I’ve seen portrayed on the tube have concluded with the perpetrator going to jail, which Mr. Rulffes might explain to his young charges as “just like school only it doesn’t last as many years and you can’t take your boom-box.”

But as for the “easy access to guns” part, since the hoplophobes insist on referring to guns as “penis substitutes,” anyway (never explaining why any male but Hemingway’s Jake Barnes would need a “substitute,”) I await Mr. Rulffes explanation that some of his young darlings commit the crime of rape due to the currently excessive “easy access to penises.”

As attractive as the scheme might seem to the disciples of Andrea Dworkin, I suspect there might be some hint of a civil rights problem with a society-wide program of penis removal, even though the right to keep and bear those organs is not protected as explicitly in the Constitution as the right to keep and bear arms of military usefulness. More »

The “experts” seem to have overestimated the tax revenues our greedy Nevada bureaucrats will get their mitts on this year by about a billion bucks.

(What does this tell us about the folks who still believe “experts” can reliably predict global temperatures or mean sea levels 100 years from now?)

I submit three modest suggestions:

1) Dig up a couple of Nevada state budgets from 1958 and 1908. Not much need to examine the actual dollar amounts under the various headings, since the 2008 dollar is worth about 2 to 3 cents in 1908 dollars. (But the inflation rate is only 2.2 percent; I heard it from a government “expert” so I know it’s true.)

Instead, just compare the headings with this year’s proposed budget — the names of the state departments, divisions, offices, and programs. Cross out any headings from the 2008 budget that did not appear in the 1958 budget. After all, Nevada was a relatively happy and prosperous place in 1958, wasn’t it? Do you remember anyone back in 1958 squawking that Nevada “didn’t have enough government”? More »