And they will spend spend spend till daddy takes the T-bird away

Nevada reported taxable sales fell 20.5 percent in June, marking the eighth straight month of double-digit declines, the state Department of Taxation reported Friday.

For the fiscal year ended June 30, sales dropped 12.7 percent from 2008. And 2008, recall, was not exactly boom times.

Gross revenue collections from sales and use taxes totaled roughly $250 million in June, a nearly 19 percent decline from the same month last year. For the fiscal year, collections dropped 13 percent compared with 2008.

This has now been going on for two years, with no end in sight. (Yes, housing sales are up a bit — thanks to federal arm-twisting and more of the market-warping subsidies that got us into trouble in the first place. Brilliant. Call it “Housing for Clunkers.”)

Yet the clowns in Carson City think every state bureaucrat can still keep his or her job and pension — AND keep getting raises?

June sales were down in all major categories. Durable goods dropped 39 percent; restaurants and bars, down 9.2 percent. Construction sales tax receipts were down a massive 51 percent.

Telecommunications sales were an exception, up 53 percent. Everybody has to have a cell phone. And rail transportation: up 408.4 percent. (Is that good? The truckers probably don’t think so.)

In Clark County, taxable sales totaled $2.4 billion, down 21.7 percent from June 2008. Sales by food services and drinking places, a key indicator of the Las Vegas tourism industry, dropped to $444.2 million, a 9.1 percent decline from a year ago. For the fiscal year, the industry in Las Vegas was off 9.7 percent — despite all those non-smokers who swore they’d flock to local taverns as soon as their new law required all the ash trays to be removed.

Meantime, last week, the state reported Nevada’s unemployment rate hit a record in July, climbing to 12.5 percent statewide — 3.1 percent above the national unemployment rate of 9.4 percent. And earlier this month, the state Gaming Control Board reported Nevada casinos won $10.8 billion from gamblers during the 2009 fiscal year, down almost 14 percent from the previous 12-month period.

Those with long memories will recall that, last winter, Gov. Jim Gibbons — widely reviled by the Democratic left and their transcriptionists in the freebie media — presented a modest state budget which, if enacted, would have left Nevada facing a smaller budget gap today.

It wasn’t a “cut-to-the-bone” budget, mind you. We may yet live to see what that looks like, if we ever get a state attorney general who’s willing to sue the federal government to challenge their unfunded welfare mandates.

Nonetheless, legislative big-spenders laughed out loud, last February, and started larding up the budget with one handout after another for their most valued constituents, the state employee unions. They said all this new largesse — doled out at a time when the state’s economy was already crashing — could be paid for by the simple expedient of raising the hotel room tax, paid largely by tourists.

After all, it wasn’t like the tourists, should they start to feel ripped off, could just stay home!

Ha ha ha!

Ha ha …

… Ha.

Then they also raised the sales tax rate, over Gov. Gibbons veto. As a result of which, sales tax revenues are now, um … down.

A special session to further pare back the bloated state bureaucratic budget now looms all the more likely. Watch for a governor who stands so widely accused of “doing nothing” to put his staff diligently to work, coming up with the most sensible plan they can devise to maintain constitutionally mandated state services.

It’s tempting to advise Gov. Gibbons to do nothing of the sort — to just tell the legislative leaders “You don’t like my plans; let’s see YOU make the cuts.”

He won’t, in part because Mr. Gibbons, though hardly Mister Show Biz, generally does his job as he sees it, but also because — “left to their own devices” — the Legislature would probably tax school lunches and sunny days.

The state will muddle through, despite a lack of any leaders daring enough to propose the modern equivalent of what Nevada’s Legislature did in 1931, in the depths of the Great Depression.

Nevada legalized gambling and divorce in 1931 (prostitution was already legal), launching an uninterrupted 75-year boom.

The modern equivalent would involve — at the very least — copying the legal hashish bars of Amsterdam, and re-opening the taxed and legal red light district here in Las Vegas, closed (officially, at least) since 1951.

Oh, and re-legalize tobacco.

Nevada would boom. Tourists would return.

Instead, watch for the Legislature to keep finding new ways to chase them away.

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