Study: 90% of NLV Firefighters Don't Live in NLV

The City of North Las Vegas has the worst economic problems of any municipality in the Las Vegas area. A combination of a drop in property and other tax revenues due to the recession, overspending and powerful public employee unions has driven the city to the verge on bankruptcy. The situation is so bad the state of Nevada may take over the city's finances.

Yet, through this, some of the city's public employee unions have only grudgingly given ground. A recent study may have revealed the reason.

NPRI's Nevada Journal reports that only 7% of NLV's firefighters live in North Las Vegas.

This creates a situation in which these workers have no interest in low taxes or maintaining services other than the ones they provide. Since their only connection to city taxes or services is as a consumer of tax revenue, their only concern is to increase that consumption.

They do not pay taxes to the city so they don't have to care whether taxes are low or high. In fact, being only tax consumers and not taxpayers they only receive benefits from high taxes and do not have to suffer any of the negative effects. Thus, higher taxes only have the potential to benefit them.

They do not use the city's services so they have no interest in the city expending money to maintain any of them, other than the services they provide. So their only concern is in increasing their share of the city's revenues, even if it is at the expense of other city departments and employees.

These workers are insulated from the effects of high taxes and reductions in the city's services. It is to their benefit to work to impose higher taxes and to consume a larger share of those taxes for themselves.

Emergency services are at the top of the list of those for a city to provide. But that does not mean that the ability to pay for them is, or should be, unlimited.

Just like any other government "services" the revenue used to fund them reduces the ability of the city's residents to support other things, like the private sector economy. Which makes it even more important that government workers are also participants in the economy as something other than tax consumers.

This is a very unhealthy situation for the city and one that is going to make it even harder for NLV to recover.

Economic illogic

...sigh...

Justin McAffee - editor of the Nevada View and I believe a spokesman for the Clark County Democratic Party - accidentally admits the inherent logical fallacies of left-wing economic theory.


Check out his recent op-ed in his own online newspaper the Nevada View.


First he states,

No, it’s true, taking money out of the economy will lead to a spiral of less demand, higher unemployment, and a smaller economy for the U.S. government to draw tax revenue from.

Paul Krugman offers a more detailed, but wrong, explanation for why this MIGHT occur (its based on the fallacy that government spending is always efficient, always necessary and that if people had more of their own money wouldn't spend it). However, there is a major fallacy lying here which Justin (and Krugman) doesn't recognize. Cutting the governments budget does not take money out of the economy. Cutting the government budget only takes money out of the government. 


Think of this another way. If you have  $10 in your wallet and move $5 from your wallet to your left hand do you still have $10? YES!!! Cutting the government budget results in the economy having the same amount of money, its only that different people decide how to spend it!


Justin - and other certifiably silly folk - literally believe that cutting the government budget makes money disappear from the economy. That is, you either spend it on government services or the money vanishes all together. Ask 100 people if they could keep more of their paycheck whether they would spend/invest the money or if it would simply vanish into thin air.


Justin's comments are patently absurd but his commentary gets better. He actually ADMITS he believes the money vanishes (not even Paul Krugman will do that and he's gone plum nuts!). He states,

The debt reduction plan simply takes money that would otherwise be a part of the U.S. economy during a vital recovery period, and burns it up into thin air. 

You read that right, cutting government spending means no one else will do anything with the dollars. Americans won't buy or invest and neither will foreigners (dollars are only green pieces of paper and only have value if you can trade them in for goods, services or other capital).


About the only thing Justin gets right is that Ronald Reagan really didn't do anything for shrinking the size of government and that George Bush II was a bigger spender than all Democrats before him going back to Johnson in the late 1960s!!!! And given how wrecked the economy was after GW II left office, that isn't a ringing endorsement for more Keynesian economics and big government.

Cutting your government budget is far more successful at reducing the debt-ratio

 than increasing revenue.

In other, more rational, fact-filled news....Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University writes in Reason Magazine that far more nations solve their debt problems by cutting budgets not increasing taxes.