Vin Suprynowicz

What’s slowing down job creation in Nevada, where the real unemployment rate — counting part-timers who would prefer full-time work, and those who’ve given up looking — averaged 20.3 percent in 2012?

One prime suspect is ObamaCare, with its mandate that employers with 50 full-time employees or more must offer health insurance — not just some high-deductible coverage for catastrophes, but a costly package including every kind of Politically Correct bell and whistle.

Left-leaning college professors with guaranteed government pensions and a belief that the end justifies the means may say it’s a minor problem, but the fact is that small companies with any number of employees between 25 and 100 — that’s a lot of employers — are eyeing the 50-worker ObamaCare mandate and making their desperate survival plans accordingly.

How do you think a Reno resident would fare today if he or she applied for a job at a local Jimmy John’s sandwich shop?

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A 200-megawatt wind energy project near Searchlight, Nevada (home town of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) has been approved by the federal government.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Wednesday the project will be built on almost 19,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land about 60 miles southeast of Las Vegas.

The project will occasionally generate enough electricity to power about 70,000 homes, according to the Interior Department.

It’s expected to create about 275 jobs during construction, and 15 jobs for operations — and to generate about $18.6 million in property and sales taxes for local government, the agency said.

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From the mailbag

Another Fearless Drug Warrior is writing my boss at the daily Review-Journal, trying to get me fired.

One “Scott Miller” wrote in on March 12:

I must state upfront that I am not a regular reader of any Stephens publications and am not likely to become one in the foreseeable future. Because of your publications political fanaticism that colors every thing published (and that you still give a voice to the likes of Mitchell and Frederck), I active avoid any support of Stephens Media.

If you are still reading at this point, I have some corrections to Mr. Suprynowicz’s latest missive. He wrote on 3/10/12 about a trial in Las Vegas of a Dr. Stoermer who was accused of over prescription pain killers. In his typical one sided and vitriolic fashion he paints every action and hypothetical motive of the Government as evil and Dr. Stoermer as the unjustly accused (and later aquitted) saint. He was strident but still within the bounds of legitimate commentary.

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During the Christmas season, 1994, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration put Las Vegas medical doctor Dietrich Stoermer, who had treated our troops in Vietnam, on trial here for writing “too many” painkiller prescriptions.

Since other doctors worried about being “red-flagged” by the drug police if they took on the cases of chronic pain patients, Dr. Stoermer was often the refuge of last resort for such sufferers. He ended up with a lot of them.

So a parade of sick people, some doubled over with cancer or spinal disease, testified at trial that Dr. Stoermer had been a God-send, had literally saved their lives.

The government, on the other hand, contended he was a mere “prescription factory,” issuing scrips for pain medications in order to profit from his $60 charge per office visit.

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Last week, Nevada gasoline prices averaged $3.75 at the pump — a leap of 59 cents since the beginning of the year.

The average price of a gallon of gas has increased 96 percent under our current president. According to the Energy Information Agency, the average price of a gallon of regular unleaded in the United States was $1.838 on Jan. 19, 2009 — the day before Barack Obama took office.

AAA officials attribute the dramatic spike to regional refinery issues, a move toward summer-blend gasoline, and “more expensive crude oil.”

But recently discovered domestic shale oil and gas reserves are enough to last a century.

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American politics is a lot like professional wrestling — the dork in the diaper loses again and again to the masked bodybuilder, until finally the tables are turned and the dork wins on a technicality, setting up November’s big grudge match.

Three months ago the press was full of speculation that what passes for America’s smaller-government party was on the ropes, a bunch of tired old white men who could never win again, since they’re not well liked by a bunch of illegal immigrants who can’t vote. (It’s the mainstream press; it doesn’t have to make any SENSE.)

Then, in their exuberance, the Democrats figured “We’re on a roll — it’s time to try more gun control!”

It’s never pretty.

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You want positive evidence that close proximity to government causes brain damage?

Democrats invented “the sequester” and Barack Obama signed it into law.

Bob Woodward writes for The Washington Post (at http://tinyurl.com/abrm948): “My extensive reporting for my book ‘The Price of Politics’ shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of (Jack) Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors. … Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011. … Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid.”

Yet for two weeks now Mr. Obama has been wailing that these minimal federal budget “sequester” cuts — somehow imposed on him by the demonic powers of unnamed minority Republicans — will require him to do terrible things.

Why, on Tuesday, the White House announced the pending cuts had already forced them to release hundreds of illegal immigrants held in detention facilities — something the White House wanted to do anyway, since the last thing Mr. Obama wants to do is the job he took an oath to do, which is to enforce all the laws, including our immigration laws.

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It’s a well known doctrine of economics that what you subsidize you get more of, and what you tax you get less of.

Thus, the United States government in its infinite wisdom subsidizes poverty and out-of-wedlock birth, along with unmarried women raising children without any man in the home, and gets more of all three — along with a steady supply of badly socialized, functionally illiterate, violent youths with which to fill up our prisons, assuring the unwavering support of the prison-guards’ union.

It’s brilliant.

Simultaneously, our collectivist government heavily penalizes those who work hard, save, invest, and threaten to grow rich through their own tireless entrepreneurial activity, creating almost as an afterthought lots of good-paying jobs. So for the first time in our history, we’re now running short of such people — or at least have caused them to keep their talents well out of sight.

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Not content with banning or at least fining those who traffic in cigarettes, trans-fats, salt, and big sugary soft drinks, New York City’s Mayor and millionaire chief busybody, Michael Bloomberg, last week set his sights on a new villain: Styrofoam.

In his State of the City address Thursday, Mayor Bloomberg pushed for a ban on Styrofoam food packaging, complaining it “costs taxpayers money” because the light-weight, heat-insulating plastic foam is not biodegradable and thus has to be extracted from garbage before that garbage can be used as compost.

(Glass also has to be removed, as do lots of other things. What’s next on the verboten list?)

The mayor also wants to decrease the already sharply limited number of parking spaces available in his city for normal cars, in order to set aside more space for electric cars that will probably never show up.

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A reader — one of many similar — recently wrote in to complain “They tell us that Social Security and Medicare are broken. The fact is the government used that money for wars and should have left the money in the so-called lock box. … I’m incensed that those programs are called entitlements. I paid into both, and I am entitled.”

She’s entitled … so we should stop calling them “entitlements”?

Beneath this linguistic confusion surely lurks a thought — a thought probably shared by many Americans: that Social Security is an insurance program. American workers are required to pay “premiums” into the program, while their employers match those “contributions” — all diverted from what the worker could otherwise take home and invest for him or herself.

An annuity is thus formed, an “investment yielding periodic payments during the annuitant’s lifetime, for a stated number of years, or in perpetuity,” administered by the federal government, which thus incurs an obligation to pay it all back.

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