Is the economy good?

For a majority of voters in Nevada and throughout the country, the answer is apparently no — or, at least, not good enough.

Not good enough to refuse to re-elect him.

Not good enough to refuse to re-elect a man who had to be forcibly evicted the last time he was president.

Not good enough to refuse to re-elect a man who wants to “be a dictator for one day.” Just one day, that’s all. Just long enough to fix the country, you’ll see. Then we won’t have to vote again. The country will be fixed so good, we’re not gonna have to vote. But after that? He never wants to be a dictator. Everybody knows it.

It’ll be alright. According to his supporters, “We already know what kind of president he will be because he already served.” Surely he won’t do anything differently this time around than he did last time around. Certainly his allies won’t.

Certainly.

Surely those “mass deportation now” signs at the Republican National Convention — a call to forcibly detain and remove as many as 20 million people, more than triple the number of people displaced by the Russian invasion of Ukraine — are just talk. Nothing to worry about.

Look, the press and Democrats lied about President Joe Biden. They lied about how his age was affecting him. We all saw it on the debate stage. So what if the only reason President-elect Donald Trump isn’t claiming there was massive voter fraud in this election, despite making those claims in 2016 and 2020, is because he won the popular vote? So what if everyone knew he was planning on lying again? So what if his allies were saying the election was rigged as recently as two weeks ago?

Democrats lie about being old. Trump lies about losing elections, raping women, paying off adult film stars, storing classified documents in his bathroom, and a million other things. They’re both liars — that’s the important thing.

Sure. Fine. Let’s talk about the economy.

On the one hand, according to American Progress, wages are higher than they have ever been, even after adjusting for inflation. Employment is near an all-time high. The bottom 10th percentile of workers saw their inflation-adjusted wages increase by 15.7 percent during the past four years. Thanks to several policy changes enacted during the Biden administration, including the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, manufacturing construction is through the roof. Unprecedented investments are being made in affordable clean energy, such as the Gemini project outside of Las Vegas, which has the potential to supply 10 percent of Nevada’s peak power demand.

On the other hand, manufacturing productivity has been worse than flat for more than a decade. Even with higher interest rates, home and rent prices continue to rise faster than the rate of inflation — in no small part because home vacancies are still at historical lows and rental vacancies aren’t much higher. New vehicle prices, which skyrocketed during the tail end of the pandemic, remain near historic highs; used vehicles, though cheaper than they were in 2022, remain more expensive as well. 

Additionally, visitations at national parks, such as Yosemite, Crater Lake, Lassen and Great Basin have never recovered to their pre-pandemic levels. Revenue at the Strip is flatlining. More than half of Americans don’t plan on using all of their paid time off this year even though American workers receive fewer days of paid vacation than any other industrialized country.

Restaurants are more expensive. There are more computer screens and apps taking the place of person-to-person customer service. Food deliveries are increasingly expensive even though driver pay has been stagnant since the pandemic. Every screen, even at the drive-through, asks for a tip.

Is the economy healthier than it was in 2019?

Not for Nevada. Unemployment before the pandemic was slightly more than 4 percent. Now it’s at 5.5 percent. That’s still not bad — it’s about the same as it was during the 1990s — but it has been increasing a little during the past few months.

Even so, a 5.5 percent unemployment rate is nowhere near the realm of catastrophe of the Great Recession, much less late-Weimer Germany — or, if that comparison offends you, late-Tsarist Russia. We didn’t have to elect someone who openly fantasizes about political violence to “make the trains run on time” or whatever.

Twice.

It’s undeniably true that incumbents worldwide have been losing this year. Vice President Kamala Harris and the rest of the Democratic Party actually lost less voter share than most incumbent parties this year — but they still lost. People around the world want more and better from their governments. Nevada’s and the United States’ voters more generally are not wrong to want that.

Nevada’s voters also aren’t wrong to have higher expectations of our local, state and federal governments. 

Given the dismal performance of many of our state’s institutions, I completely understand why voters would want to see something different. Clark County’s schools, for example, have been a constant embarrassment for decades — so sure, try some fresh faces. Maybe they’ll ban books, maybe they won’t, but it’s not like the students can read them anyway, right?

Nevada’s voters also aren’t entirely wrong to be skeptical of Democrats, especially given how many of them moved here from Democratic Party-run California.

Progressives in the Golden State, concerned about the unchecked power government and business exerted in the state, spent decades building complex webs of checks and balances to ensure nobody could do anything to anyone without everyone's permission. The result is a state where everyone — including the governments run by progressives themselves — is powerless to do anything for anyone, including themselves.

When San Francisco explored the possibility of installing a single public toilet in a public park already equipped with plumbing fixtures, the city first had to submit the plan for the toilet to the Civic Design Review Committee — to ensure the toilet’s design is “appropriate to its context in the urban environment,” of course. After multiple phases of public and committee review, the toilet next had to be reviewed by the Recreation and Park Commission. Following that commission’s review, the toilet was reviewed by the Board of Supervisors. They, in turn, had to subject the toilet to review under the California Environmental Quality Act, which requires state and municipal governments to “consider the environmental consequences of discretionary actions.”

Only after all of those levels of review were completed could the city think of putting the toilet up for bid — at an estimated cost of $1.7 million.

Thanks to some newsworthy schadenfreude and a generous private donation from a Nevada-based toilet business, the final price to the city came in less than $200,000. It still took eight years for the toilet to be installed, though — and if the press hadn’t noticed the price tag, the final cost to the city likely would have been much closer to the original estimate.

Then there’s the story of La Sombrita, a small bus shade in Los Angeles that quickly achieved internet notoriety. The small shade was built as part of the city’s Gender Equity Action Plan by a nonprofit that assembled three focus groups of women and gender minorities who use public transportation to ask them what their priorities were.

After three years, 412 community surveys, 74 travel interviews, 12 meetings, multiple in-person workshop and site visits, and consulting multiple existing data sources, they determined the riders prioritized shade and lighting. The nonprofit, in turn, took that information, applied it against existing design and regulatory requirements, and built a tiny green metal structure that provided neither shade nor light.

One year later, Los Angeles is still waiting to learn the results of that pilot — but it does have three more La Sombritas and a documented objective to “gather data about the patterns and challenges faced by women, low-income and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) individuals.” Perhaps if Los Angeles spent less time and money paying professional data gatherers and report writers and more time and money building actual bus shelters for the individuals who already told them they want shade and light, the city would be able to finish the 3,000 bus shelters it plans to build before the end of this millennium.

It is deeply frustrating that Democratic governance sometimes gets hopelessly lost in bureaucracy and abstruse symbolism. It’s unacceptable. If liberals and progressives truly believe that the government can act in the public interest, they need to actually let the government do something other than say no. Stop spending so much time asking what people want and start delivering it — or, failing that, let people deliver it themselves.

Am I upset that Nevadans elected some Republicans? Do I blame Americans for wanting someone else in the White House?

Not particularly. 

I think Biden and Harris said yes to a lot of projects that will make life less expensive for Americans and I think Democratically run places, including California, are starting to straighten themselves out. Our oft-dysfunctional neighbor to the west is beginning to clear bureaucratic hurdles so developers can build housing again.

But I get it.

As frustrating as the paralysis-by-analysis that consumes sapphire-blue California’s governance can be, however, it’s ridiculous that hapless dithering and report generation somehow rates worse in the minds of voters than a man who’s promising to deport as many as 20 million individuals, including many of the people Los Angeles struggles to build bus stops for.

It’s maddening that a majority of voters see more hope in a man whose followers are calling for mass executions and rape squads than they do in a party that, at its worst, wants one more committee meeting to ensure everyone’s on board.

But they do. Given a choice between feckless inaction for charity’s sake and decisive action for malice’s sake, a majority of voters want action.

Here it comes.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected].