You�d never know it from the incessant calls for new taxes on Nevadans, but Silver State residents already pay some of the highest taxes in the nation.
Recently the Tax Foundation in Washington, D.C., reported the percentage of income taken by local, state and federal taxes from individuals in different states. Nevadans bore the fifth-highest burden in the nation, with only residents of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and the District of Columbia paying more.
Last month, the Nevada Policy Research Institute released a new study identifying the remarkable strategies by which Silver State politicians have hidden from taxpayers the full extent of Nevada�s increasingly heavy tax burden.
Authored by NPRI�s Vice President for Policy Steven Miller, the study (titled �Getting Plucked in Nevada: How Government Covertly Increases Your Tax Burden�) documents how the politicians� stealthy methods of increasing the tax burden on Silver State citizens has over the years severely eroded Nevada�s status as a safe haven from higher taxes elsewhere.
�Tax-consuming special interests in the state,� he writes, �have successfully stripped away much of the state�s unique taxpayer-friendly heritage.�
In the study, Miller says some of the explanation is relatively benign. �When an economy does well, as Nevada�s has, it produces a larger proportion of successful people who end up paying federal income taxes at the higher rates. In such a healthy economy, even average-income people pay more income taxes, because many more of them are working and earning.�
Among the most dubious examples of Nevada tax policy cited by Miller is the farcical now-you-see-it now-you-don�t 1981 �tax shift,� in which homeowners were promised big reductions in their rapidly escalating property tax burdens in exchange for accepting big hikes in sales and other taxes. After a few years had passed, however, even the property tax burden was higher than before the so-called �shift,� while all the other taxes also were much higher. Additionally, Miller focuses on the state�s �hidden income tax� and how Nevada politicians led the nation in misleadingly labeling a huge quantity of taxes as �fees.�
The NPRI policy analyst does offer a potential remedy to the problems that he spotlights, suggesting that the increasingly popular movement toward government transparency � which has caught on at the federal level and in some states, but not yet in Nevada � would help put a stop to these types of abuses.
Check out the study for yourself. A copy of it is online at npri.org/docLib/20080220_Getting_Plucked_in_Nevada.pdf.
