Director of Research Geoffrey Lawrence and Policy Analyst Anahit Baghshetsyan op-ed in the Reno Gazette Journal about short term rental regulations.
Director of Research Geoffrey Lawrence and Policy Analyst Anahit Baghshetsyan op-ed in the Reno Gazette Journal about short term rental regulations.
Nevada Policy’s Anahit Baghshetsyan’s informative commentary in the Las Vegas Review-Journal
The Las Vegas Review-Journal published an op-ed letter by Nevada Policy’s Policy Analyst, Anahit Baghshetsyan, about the future of film tax credits in Nevada.
Policy Analyst Anahit Baghshetsyan’s op-ed for the Las Vegas Review Journal about the New York City Mayor’s race and what it could mean for Nevada.
Read the op-ed here.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote an article based on Policy Fellow Cameron Belt’s piece about a need for changing regulations in Nevada. Read the article here.
The Reno Gazette interviewed Policy Analyst Anahit Baghshetsyan about the changes to Nevada’s home insurance law. Read the full story here.
The Las Vegas Review Journal cited Nevada Policy’s research in its article about Governor Lombardo’s vetoes this legislative session.
The Review-Journal’s editorial quotes Research Analyst Anahit Baghshetsyan.
Article written based on Nevada Policy’s 200 Boards report
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MINDEN, Nevada — The Nevada Policy Research Institute filed suit today against the Tahoe Douglas Sewer Improvement District (TDSID) for refusing to comply with the Nevada Public Records Act. TDSID has failed to respond — as legally required — to NPRI’s request for the district’s employee compensation records.
NPRI’s Center for Justice and Constitutional Litigation filed its Petition in the Ninth Judicial District Court and is asking the court to order the special district to disclose its employee compensation records, as is required by Nevada’s Public Records Act (NPRA), NRS 239. In addition to TDSID, the lawsuit also names District General Manager Janet Murphy as a Respondent, in her official capacity.
In January, NPRI telephoned Murphy to obtain an email address for submitting a public records request. Murphy refused to provide an email address where the records request could be submitted, instead insisting that any public records request be made via U.S. Postal Service on official letterhead.
The NPRA states that any member of the public may make a public records request in either written or oral form, without providing identifying information, or submitting the request on official letterhead.
NPRI seeks TDSID’s payroll records for its TransparentNevada.com project. TransparentNevada is a website dedicated to serving Nevada’s public by providing easily accessible and searchable compensation records for state and local government employees.
In April, CJCL Director and Chief Legal Officer Joseph Becker sent a certified letter to Murphy, providing her — de facto — with a written request, on official letterhead, for the records. The NPRA requires government agencies to respond to all public records requests within 5 business days, but as of today, the Tahoe Douglas Sewer Improvement District has failed to respond to NPRI.
In his letter, Becker also warned that its letter was NPRI’s final attempt to obtain the records before resorting to litigation.
After filing the lawsuit, Becker released the following statement.
The vast majority of Nevada’s government employees and agencies understand that it’s important for government to be transparent. Government must be transparent, both because the public has a right to know and because transparency is needed to provide the information citizens need to hold government accountable.
To date, over 100 Nevada government agencies have complied with the Nevada Policy Research Institute’s requests for government employee name and compensation information.
In the seven years NPRI has run TransparentNevada.com, the Tahoe Douglas Sewer Improvement District has been the least responsive government agency in Nevada. It has violated the public records law by imposing illegal requirements on the public records request itself. Yet, even when NPRI met those unnecessary requirements, the District violated the Public Records Act by not responding with the records or a timeline for providing them.
We call on the Tahoe Douglas Sewer Improvement District to follow the Nevada Public Records Act immediately by releasing its payroll records and to revamp the way it handles public records requests to ensure compliance with Nevada law.
Becker noted that the Nevada Legislature acknowledged the importance of government transparency in passing NRS 239 and in mandating that NPRA “be construed liberally.”
TransparentNevada.com contains over 700,000 payroll records spanning seven years from over 100 government agencies. TransparentNevada is frequently used as a resource by elected officials and citizens and has earned over 2 million page views to date in 2014.
Case documents:
The Center for Justice and Constitutional Litigation is a public-interest law organization that litigates when necessary to protect the fundamental rights of individuals as set forth in the state and federal constitutions.
Learn more about the Center for Justice and Constitutional Litigation and this case at http://npri.org/litigation/.
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Update: On September 2, 2014, upon receiving, in large part, those records sought, NPRI voluntarily dismissed its case without prejudice against the Tahoe Douglas Sewer Improvement District. Information provided thus far by the District has been posted to TransparentNevada.com and the remaining information previously requested and not yet received will be pursued in a new Nevada Public Records Act request.
LAS VEGAS — Responding to today’s release of a study paid for by margin tax proponents and purporting to show that the tax would have a positive impact on Nevada’s economy, Geoffrey Lawrence, NPRI’s research director, released the following comments:
The analysis funded by the margin tax sponsors through UNLV’s Center for Business and Economic Research suffers from several major shortcomings.
First and foremost is that the economic-impact model employed by the authors fails to account for the negative impact of short-term capital consumption in the medium- to long-term. While not all details are provided, the purported job “gains” from the margin tax appear to result entirely from diverting corporate funds from capital investment toward government spending programs that are more labor-intensive.
Even the most basic economics textbooks, however, teach that capital investment is the primary determinant of growth in labor productivity, and consequently, wages. Private industry investments are the base of the economy.
The authors claim that this diversion of capital investment will result in an immediate boost to state gross domestic product, supposedly because converting these resources into wage income will accelerate cash flows and produce a “stimulus” effect.
Likewise, the benighted may grow fatter in the short term by eating their seed corn. Farmers, however, never prosper by eating their seed corn and neither can advanced economies.
Sustaining and growing Nevada’s capital supply is vital to Nevada’s long-term economic growth and increasing the earnings of private workers. Ph.D. economists should know this.
Additionally, the authors appear to intentionally mislead readers about the impact that higher spending has on public education. While the authors acknowledge the large body of academic research showing no relationship between spending levels and outcomes, they purport to represent an offsetting body of research that finds such a relationship.
The studies they cite, however, don’t actually make this comparison at all. They instead relate class size to achievement levels in the early grades — a body of research that is not in dispute.
Other comparisons made by the authors, such as the impact that an additional year spent by residents in college can have on an area’s economic output have nothing to do with the margin tax and appear intended only to further mislead the reader.
Of course there is a positive association between attainment in higher education and labor productivity. But the margin tax has no bearing on how much higher education is received by residents precisely because of the lack of relationship between K-12 spending levels and student outcomes — a fact the authors acknowledge before trying to mislead on that topic.
Lawrence shared that NPRI’s recently released study on the impact of the margin tax was authored by Paul Bachman, Michael Head and Frank Conte of the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University and used Beacon Hill’s Nevada State Tax Analysis Modeling Program (NV-STAMP®). The program used five years worth of data to simulate the consequences of the new, higher taxes flowing through the Silver State’s economy.
The Beacon Hill study found that the margin tax would destroy 3,610 private sector jobs and decrease Nevadans’ real disposable household income each year by $240 million.
Lawrence also said that there are many ways to increase student achievement without needing to raise taxes and noted that his recent report, 33 ways to Nevada education without spending more, offered numerous recommendations and a rich history of the academic debate on spending and student achievement.
Read more:
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LAS VEGAS — The Nevada Policy Research Institute is spearheading a campaign of 81 organizations in 45 states dedicated to letting employees know about the freedoms they have to leave their unions.
The campaign, called National Employee Freedom Week, runs from August 10 to 16. As part of it, NPRI released a poll showing that 82.8 percent of Nevadans support the concept of right-to-work.
The poll, with a sample size of 500 Nevada residents, asked this question: "Should employees have the right to decide, without force or penalty, whether to join or leave a labor union?"
The coalition also released a poll showing 82.8 percent of Americans nationwide support the right-to-work principle. As a right-to-work state, union membership is optional in Nevada, but once an employee joins, many find that the union restricts her or his right to leave — restricting departure to narrow and inconvenient “window” periods.
“All union employees should be able to make the decision about union membership that best fits them,” said Victor Joecks, NPRI’s executive vice president and executive director of NEFW. “As our polling shows, that’s a concept that the overwhelming majority of Nevadans support.
“All too often what happens is that, once they join, union members are never informed when or how they can leave, should they decide that membership isn’t for them.
“That’s why the work of National Employee Freedom Week is so important.
“NPRI and our 80 coalition members are empowering unionized employees around the country with the knowledge the unions don’t give them — and thus allowing these employees to make the decisions that are best for them.”
Working with the Association of American Educators, NPRI created National Employee Freedom Week in 2013 after it saw success informing Nevada teachers of their ability to opt-out of union membership. Over 1,450 Nevada teachers have left union membership as a result of NPRI’s yearly campaigns informing teachers of the July 1-to-15 drop window.
The inaugural edition of NEFW had 65 organizations in 37 states participate, and NPRI estimates that coalition members reached more than 4 million people in 2013.
The Nevada poll was conducted by Google Consumer Surveys, between July 14 – 20, 2014. It surveyed 500 people and has a margin of error of approximately 3.76 percent.
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Nevada Policy Research Institute ∙ 7130 Placid St., Las Vegas, NV 89119
Phone: 702-222-0642 ∙ Fax: 702-227-0927 ∙ Web site: http://npri.org
CARSON CITY — An expert-witness report just filed in a constitutional challenge to the State of Nevada’s “Catalyst Fund” says taxpayer-dollar subsidies like the $1.2 million the state is attempting to give SolarCity, Inc. “do not provide any net benefit to the state or to its citizens.”
Dr. Randall G. Holcombe — DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University — made the comments and is an expert witness in the lawsuit brought by NPRI’s Center for Justice and Constitutional Litigation (CJCL) to defend the Nevada Constitution’s ban on the gifting of taxpayer funds to private corporations.
Article 8, Section 9, of the Nevada Constitution reads, “The State shall not donate or loan money, or its credit, subscribe to or be, interested in the Stock of any company, association, or corporation, except corporations formed for educational or charitable purposes.”
Dr. Holcombe is the author of 15 books, more than 150 peer-reviewed articles published in academic and professional journals, and more than 30 articles and reports for think tanks and public policy organizations. He has testified before committees in the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature.
CJCL is representing a clean-energy entrepreneur, Michael Little, whose competitor, SolarCity, has a commitment from the Governor’s Office of Economic Development of a $1.2 million taxpayer-funded subsidy.
The lawsuit was filed by CJCL on Feb. 19, 2014. On March 24, The Nevada Legislature filed a motion to intervene in the case. Permission to do so was granted by the Court on April 11, 2014.
Attorney Joseph Becker, director of NPRI’s Center for Justice and Constitutional Litigation has characterized the Catalyst Fund as — in addition to being patently unconstitutional — being “fundamentally unjust, since it makes a business owner subsidize his competition.”
“Today’s report,” he continued, “provides additional expert reasons as to why the Court should end these taxpayer-funded subsidies. History has shown that companies receiving government handouts — like Solyndra, Abound Solar, Fisker and ThromboVision — often fail, personally enriching the politically connected but wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. This history is reinforced by Dr. Holcombe’s Expert Report.”
Becker noted that, for decades, the Legislature acknowledged that Article 8, Sections 9 and 10, of the Nevada Constitution prohibited the state from providing subsidies to private businesses. In recognition of the clear words of the Constitution, the Legislature even tried three times — in 1992, 1996 and 2000 — to amend the Constitution to allow subsidy schemes similar to the Catalyst Fund.
Voters, however, overwhelmingly rejected those proposals.
Discovery in the case will continue through early November.
Case documents:
The Center for Justice and Constitutional Litigation is a public-interest law organization that litigates when necessary to protect the fundamental rights of individuals as set forth in the state and federal constitutions.
Learn more about the Center for Justice and Constitutional Litigation and this case at http://npri.org/litigation/.
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LAS VEGAS — Over 3,600 jobs will be lost if voters approve Question 3, commonly called the margin tax, this November, a study released today by the Nevada Policy Research Institute finds.
The new study, entitled The Fiscal and Economic Impact of Establishing a Margin Tax for Nevada, reports sophisticated econometric modeling of how the margin tax most likely would impact the Silver State economy.
Both private-sector and overall employment would be lowered by the margin tax, the model finds. Investment in Nevada would also be reduced.
Authored by Paul Bachman, Michael Head and Frank Conte of the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University, the report also sees the margin tax decreasing Nevadans’ real disposable household income each year by $240 million.
“The margin tax isn’t just bad for business,” said NPRI President Andy Matthews. “It would also destroy the jobs of thousands of hard-working Nevadans.”
To illustrate the jobs that would be lost, NPRI set up 3,610 dominoes in a display that spelled out the phrase “Question 3 kills jobs.” Matthews, with “Q 3” written on his finger, used his finger to topple a single domino, demonstrating how jobs would fall like dominoes if voters use their fingers to vote for Question 3.
“Today we watched 3,610 dominoes fall — representing the jobs that Nevada would lose, should the margin tax become law,” Matthews said.
“But these jobs — of individuals and families — are not just statistics. These are real families who will struggle to pay rent or their mortgage, or to put food on the table. Their children could well be marked forever by the family stress resulting when their moms and dads lose their jobs.
“It only took the simple push of a finger to knock down these 3,610 dominoes,” Matthews said. “Likewise, for the voter to push the “Yes” button in support of Question 3 would be akin to voting to knock down the jobs of more than 3,600 Nevadans, stressing their families and reducing the opportunities available to their children.”
To determine the impact that implementation of the proposed margin tax would have across the entire Nevada economy, the econometric study used Beacon Hill’s Nevada State Tax Analysis Modeling Program (NV-STAMP®). The program used five years worth of data to simulate the consequences of the new, higher taxes flowing through the Silver State’s economy.
The loss of jobs, investment and disposable income would also affect other tax sources. Local governments should expect to operate with $8.5 million less, were the margin tax to pass.
“The creation of a margin tax would result in fewer individuals deciding to invest in starting or expanding businesses in Nevada, thus decreasing investment and employment, incomes and retail sales,” the study’s authors state. “This decline, in turn, drives sales, property and other tax collections lower.”
Under the ballot measure, businesses that bring in at least $1 million in gross revenue would be subject to a 2 percent tax on each dollar brought in, minus some deductions. Because the tax is on revenue, not profits, even struggling businesses or those losing money will be forced to pay.
Though supporters claim the tax is not applicable to small business, simple math shows otherwise. For example, a mom-and-pop restaurant would only need to bring $2,739.73 through its registers each day to be subjected to the tax.
Proponents of the tax claim that Nevada needs to spend more on education, but numerous studies have shown little to no correlation between spending more on education and student performance. Moreover, Nevada already spends more on education than most of its neighboring states — while getting worse results.
To address the real sources of the state’s chronically inferior public-education results, NPRI earlier this month released a study titled 33 ways to improve Nevada education without spending more. It details many proven innovations that could make Nevada’s broken education system truly superior, but which the teacher union has successfully fought, tooth and nail, in the state legislature.
“Until now, the margin-tax discussion has primarily focused on the businesses it would hurt. But this study makes clear the tax will have just as much, if not more, effect on the individual residents, employees and families of Nevada,” Matthews said. “The tax is burdensome, complicated, void of transparency and, worst of all, it would do irreparable harm to thousands of Nevada families.”
Robert “The Domino Wizard” Speca created the domino spectacle for NPRI, which included special effects such as the Tarzan Swing, the “Bahama Tom Inverted Cascade Slide for Life” and “Up the ladder, walk the plank.” Speca originated the Guinness Book of World Records category for Domino Toppling, and he has held the World Records five times.
The study, The Fiscal and Economic Impact of Establishing a Margin Tax on Nevada, can be accessed here: http://www.npri.org/docLib/20140722_BeaconHillmargintaxstudy.pdf.
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LAS VEGAS — There are dozens of ways to increase student achievement in Nevada without enacting job-killing tax increases or even spending one dollar more, finds a new study from the Nevada Policy Research Institute.
The report, entitled “33 ways to improve education without spending more,” details how school choice and other innovative educational options can lead to better outcomes in the classrooms by more effectively using the money Nevada already spends on education.
Authored by NPRI deputy policy director Geoffrey Lawrence, the study digs into why, despite decades of increased education spending, Nevada’s educational results have failed to improve and what to do about it.
“Better education in Nevada is one of the top priorities for most parents, taxpayers and lawmakers,” said Lawrence. “Unfortunately, a disconnect exists between increasing education spending and increasing education performance — and not just in Nevada, but nationwide.
“In response to this disconnect, an education reform movement has arisen and produced dozens of ways to cost-effectively increase student achievement. Our study reviews the literature and the evidence concerning alternative education policy and offers specific suggestions that will improve education for young Nevadans — and do so with existing tax dollars.”
The study is especially timely, because the Nevada State Education Association is yet again pushing for a large tax increase — this one called “the margin tax” — to funnel even more taxpayer dollars into the state’s current, dysfunctional, education system.
“Although state taxpayers have spent ever-increasing billions of dollars on that system over the last several decades,” said Lawrence, “the educational achievement of Nevada’s students has actually decreased.
“While the need to improve Nevada’s educational system is obvious to all, spending more money on a broken and rigid system is obviously a waste.
“That’s why this study offers specific and proven suggestions to increase student achievement,” he said.” These reforms — from rewarding the best teachers and removing the worst teachers to enacting school choice to ending social promotion — are ideas that are working in other states.”
Before laying out the ways that Nevada can increase student performance without spending more, Lawrence explores the history of public education, student performance in the Silver State and the evolution of the education-reform movement.
The ideas of that movement — examined in detail in the analysis — fall generally into four categories:
Research has shown that the talent level of a child’s teacher is more important to a student’s academic development than any other school-controlled factor, demonstrating the need for policies that put effective educators into the classroom and remove the non-effective. Alternative routes to licensure, longitudinal data tracking and generous merit pay programs for the top performing teachers are among the reforms that other states are using to improve teacher quality.
“The education reform movement has been met with great resistance by government bureaucrats, union officials and other entrenched interests because the movement directly challenges some of the traditional practices in public education,” Lawrence said. “These groups have responded to this challenge by launching an intellectual counter-reformation that would only broaden and expand the current, dysfunctional system.”
Lawrence also lays out the case for school choice, explaining:
The lack of competition in Nevada’s education system is a fundamental problem. Public schools are entitled to taxpayer support regardless of how effectively, or ineffectively, they educate students. This lack of accountability allows administrators to use public education resources inefficiently. Empowering parents to pick the school that best meets the needs of their child will force school administrators to allocate resources in the most cost-effective manner because waste cannot be tolerated if parents can simply take their business elsewhere.
Lawrence noted that at $9,650 dollars per student, Nevada taxpayers contribute more to the state’s public education system than their counterparts in a majority of neighboring states, yet Nevada students perform lower on standardized tests.
The political Left in Nevada, he said, is either unfamiliar with or intentionally ignores the decades of academic research into what makes schools successful and sophomorically asks fiscal conservatives, “Where’s your plan is to fix education?”
“Well,” said Lawrence, “here it is — in one document.”
For decades, he said, the state has continued to try the prescriptions of teacher unions and other entrenched interests and the result has been tens of thousands of academically damaged students.
“For the sake of Nevada’s kids, Nevada’s lawmakers should redeploy the state’s already-ample existing revenues and implement these proven school reforms right away,” said Lawrence.
The full report, “33 ways to improve education without spending more,” is available at: http://www.npri.org/docLib/20140708_NPRIStudy-33waystoimproveeducation.pdf
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