Raising taxes is, as a general matter, a lazy proposition.  It sounds politically difficult, but if a politician is clever about making it look like only those dirty rich people (or some group of Others) are taxed, it’s really not. (It also helps to be ensconced in a safe district.) That isn’t to say that taxes don’t need to be raised or changed, but those who raise taxes without focusing on improvements on how or on what we spend the money are the kind of people who like to take credit without accepting actual responsibility.

Too often, taxes get raised, no problems are solved, and people who benefit from the higher taxes use the lack of problem-solving (usually a self-inflicted wound) to justify further tax hikes.  Rinse, lather, repeat, and all of a sudden we find ourselves with a bloated, indebted, ineffective, and financially wasteful government.

Republicans, of course, run for office promising to stop this cycle, and I usually vote for them in the hope that they will.  Sadly, they far too often either join the circle, or they try to attack it in the least helpful way possible – by focusing on the tax part of it rather than the spending part, and in doing so, ironically exacerbate both aspects of the problem.

Here’s an example.

In 1979, Nevada’s rural counties were provided authorization to tax new housing developments for the purpose of building the new schools those new neighborhoods would inevitably need.  Why only the rural counties?  Who knows.  But it meant that urban counties had a more difficult time planning new neighborhoods with kids in mind, and had a harder time paying for the new schools.  Fast forward four decades, and here we are (at least in Washoe County) literally trying to convert hallways and boiler rooms to classroom space because we don’t have enough physical square-footage to put all of our kids.

I live in a relatively new area of Reno.  In 1979 it was all desert or ranchland.  A few housing developments started cropping up, and in 1989 my kids’ school, Brown Elementary, was built.  That year, Washoe County had less than 250,000 residents – today, we have about 450,000 and rising fast.  The former ranch land in the south part of town is today a seemingly endless sea of suburban neighborhoods, and yet we hadn’t been building the community infrastructure to go along with it.  It’s not even apparent that space for future schools was ever set aside or planned for.  Brown is more than three miles away from my neighborhood by the shortest route, and I’m closer than many.

The builders were (and are) “protected” from paying a per-unit tax on their new houses, which of course would have been passed on to consumers buying the houses.   But what were those homeowners/taxpayers “protected” from?  Their kids’ schools are overcrowded to a degree which requires converted closets to be classrooms, and cumbersome “multi-track” schedules are being implemented as a stopgap.  Not only is the quality of education endangered, but the value of our homes themselves is reduced when potential buyers consider where they want to move their families.  And new school site plans are stymied by vocal minorities of residents and short-sighted city councilmembers who want to “preserve communities,” when those plans should have been an integral part of the housing development from the beginning.

Instead of building necessary community infrastructure as we went, we walked ourselves right into a predictable and avoidable crisis.  

“Starving the beast” (as some of my conservative friends like to describe fighting any and all tax increases) hasn’t led to a more fiscally accountable or responsible school district. And in the end we all still had to eat massive tax increases to deal with the problem, both locally and on the state level.  Worse, that money came with too many strings attached – strings which hampered efficiency and accountability of the local school administrators.

While we can’t undo the current crisis, we can prevent the next one, and a bill coming through the Assembly, AB120, is seeking to do just that.  In a nutshell, AB120 allows any county, regardless of size, to assess housing developers a fee for building schools along with the homes.  It requires school boards to consider the impact of those new developments, and to plan accordingly.  Because it authorizes the individual counties to raise the taxes rather than mandating those taxes be raised, it keeps those decisions as local community matters, where (theoretically) those decision makers are the most accountable to the people who vote for them.

It’s the best kind of tax, too – a near perfect user fee for the people taking advantage of the government service, as well as the businesses who create an infrastructure need in furtherance of their own profit margin.  It’s the sort of tax base that grows in direct proportion to the need for it.  It is earmarked for a specific purpose, and yet not so restrictive as to make the government spending inefficient or local government spenders unaccountable for the consequences of their decisions.

AB120 passed out of the Assembly on a straight party line vote, with all Republicans opposed.  I suspect that the opposition had everything to do with voting for a tax increase in general rather than sound consideration of the policy in this particular case.  That is a shame, and a blind spot Republicans too often fall victim to – at the expense of better public policy.  

Back in 1979, this ridiculous law set us up for weaker schools, and didn’t prevent large tax hike in the end.  Republicans who are interested in a lower tax burden and more local, efficient, and effective government should embrace this fix, no matter what the party affiliation of the bill’s sponsor.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007.  He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016.  By day, he is a deputy district attorney for Carson City.  His opinions here are his own.  Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].