With half-hearted apologies to Ronald Reagan, the most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m a Trump-loving “America First” Republican running for office, and I’m here to help.

Michele Fiore, when she pivoted her failed gubernatorial campaign into a failed state treasurer campaign, did so with a promise to do something about sky-high inflation and “nearly $7 a gallon” gas (this might almost be true if you’re buying diesel in Kings Beach, which is in California). Secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant is also beating on that drum, promising to “end the gas tax” and address both inflation and supply shortages.

That’s all well and good, save for one obvious problem — state treasurers and secretaries of state have absolutely no control over fuel taxes, much less worldwide inflation. One would think candidates belonging to a party which ostensibly supports limited government and a strict separation of powers would be aware of that.

Ignoring the rather limited roles of treasurers and secretaries of state for a moment, it beggars belief that anyone could seriously believe any politician representing a state largely surrounded by more populous states with bigger economies (according to the U.S. Census and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the only neighboring state Nevada beats in population and gross domestic product is Idaho) could do much of anything about global inflation. 

Sure, Nevada’s politicians, assuming they were elected to the legislative branch, could abolish the state’s 23 cent per gallon gasoline tax. No, that’s not nothing — I certainly wouldn’t mind saving $2.30 every time I fill my compact car’s tank, which I do every three or four days (commuting nearly 70 miles a day round trip adds up). However, at the risk of exercising a dangerous amount of logic, I don’t think our state’s fuel taxes, which haven’t changed in over a decade, are why inflation has risen worldwide since 2019.

Then again, maybe the problem lies with our two most populous counties and their inflation-indexed fuel taxes. A lot of people drive to Clark County, after all. Maybe that inflation-indexed 15.71998 cent per gallon county fuel tax, which is likely to increase the full 7.8 percent permitted by statute next year (an eye-popping 1.22616 cents per gallon next year — those hundredths of a thousandths of cents are significant to someone, I’m sure), are why fuel prices doubled and nationwide inflation is at 8.5 percent. Or maybe it’s Washoe County’s nearly 40 cents per gallon of inflation-indexed fuel taxes that finally drove the nation’s economy over the edge. 

If only our nation’s cross-country drivers knew to drive past Reno and refuel in Fernley on their way to Salt Lake City! Perhaps the economy could have been saved.

More seriously, there’s very little anyone elected to office in Nevada can do about the main reason we’re all paying more for less stuff — the world as a whole makes less stuff than it did before we learned the hard way about COVID-19. Nationwide auto sales, for example, decreased more than 16 percent between 2021 and 2022 — not because Americans didn’t want to buy cars, but because manufacturers can’t make anywhere near as many of them as they used to. One reason is that persistent shortages of microchips and other manufactured goods that China used to reliably and cheaply produce in quantity — used to, that is, until China combined the vaccine skepticism Democrats accuse Republicans of having with the thirst for draconian, neverending lockdowns Republicans accuse Democrats of having and called it a “zero-covid” strategy. The result is that workers in cities like Shanghai — a city which, on its own, has as many people as the Greater Los Angeles metropolitan area if said metropolitan area had two more Los Angeleses in it — are spending their time sheltering in place at home instead of building the goods we buy or turn into finished goods.

There is, I regret to inform you, absolutely nothing anyone in Carson City, population 58,639, representing Nevada, population 3,104,614, can do to put nearly 25 million residents in Shanghai, over 6,000 miles away, back to work.

It’s not just finished goods we’re running short on, though, as our plateauing price of fuel attests. Russia, one of the world’s largest oil producers, invaded a neighboring country. As I observed a month ago, when large oil producers invade neighboring countries for the purpose of conquest — like when Iraq invaded Kuwait three decades ago — that causes the price of oil to spike and, correspondingly, the price of fuel to skyrocket as well. Additionally, Ukraine produced roughly half of the world’s semiconductor-grade neon, which is used to manufacture microchips — because of Russia’s invasion more generally and the siege of Mariupol specifically, Ukraine now produces roughly none of the world’s semiconductor-grade neon.

No, there’s nothing anyone in Carson City can do to stop an invasion, nor the economic dislocations caused by said invasion, happening nearly 6,000 miles away, either. 

That’s not to say Fiore and Marchant aren’t on to something. Inflation is, according to the Pew Research Center, rising faster in the United States than most developed countries, which suggests our country is making mistakes other countries aren’t — and we are, though most of our mistakes are bipartisan in nature. 

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know our institutions overlearned the lessons of the Great Recession — which was triggered by a financial crisis, not a supply crisis — and responded to the potential economic dislocations caused by the pandemic by throwing money anywhere and everywhere they could. The $1.3 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act was the most expensive bill signed by Donald Trump, but it wasn’t the only bill he signed which authorized hundreds of billions of dollars of additional spending. President Joe Biden, in turn, followed Trump’s example by signing the American Rescue Plan Act, which authorized another nearly $2 trillion of federal spending.

Politicians in Carson City could, in theory, reject federal spending in Nevada. Doing so, however, would be purely symbolic — other states would happily spend our share of the multi-trillion dollar pie.

Additionally, prior to the pandemic, Donald Trump raised a series of tariffs against imported goods through a series of executive orders. At the time, many of Nevada’s Republicans weren’t particularly enthusiastic (to say nothing of Democrats) about supporting the tariffs. Even so, many of them still remain. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, if Biden removed Trump’s tariffs, it would lower inflation by 1.3 percent — but he won’t. Instead, despite our nation’s unemployment rate falling near all-time lows, Biden expanded the federal government’s “Buy American” rules, placing even greater expectations on America’s workers to produce more of the goods we already don’t have enough workers to produce.

The effects of the labor shortage, by the way, aren’t academic. Though Republicans enjoy blaming Biden’s waffling on domestic oil drilling for the high price of gas, the bigger issue is there aren’t enough workers willing to work in already productive oil fields, like the ones in North Dakota. This, contrary to conservative dogma, isn’t the product of overly generous unemployment benefits — benefits which, in Nevada, still take months to start collecting despite our statewide unemployment rate (the second-highest in the country) being only 5 percent. If people collected unemployment instead of going to work, it would show up in our unemployment rate — instead, our state and our nation are both actively employing historically large percentages of our labor force.

Politicians in Carson City (not treasurers or secretaries of state, mind you, but other politicians) could actually help address our labor shortage, at least at the state level. Nevada, like the rest of the country, needs more workers. Trouble is, as our state’s rapidly rising housing prices demonstrate, Nevada has nowhere to house them. 

Part of that problem is the labor shortage again — it takes trained labor to build housing and, like all labor, it’s in short supply — but that’s only half of the story. Over the last year alone, according to Strong Towns, the value of existing residential real estate in the United States grew by $6.9 trillion — more than ten times the total pre-tax income of the bottom 20 percent of American households. The reason? A steadily increasing body of local zoning and land-use regulations, each designed to preserve and increase the value of existing housing, is making it increasingly difficult to produce new housing in the cities where people want to live.

This is something where politicians in Carson City could actually be of some assistance — all they would need to do is copy Oregon’s and Minnesota’s homework. If the Legislature prohibits Nevada’s municipalities from infringing upon the right of existing property owners to redevelop their housing properties into more dense, efficient and affordable forms of housing, that would decrease pressure to develop new housing on Nevada’s public lands, reduce homelessness, and improve labor productivity — it’s kind of hard to have your mind on work, after all, when you’re living on the street.

The next step would be to actually let workers into this country. Contrary to what Democrats like Sen. Cortez Masto and Gov. Sisolak think, the best time to overturn Title 42, which prohibits refugees from entering the United States, was immediately following Biden’s inauguration. The second-best time, however, is now. We don’t need a “comprehensive mitigation plan” to bring refugees in — it’s not like we have one when Californians move here. Stop detaining refugees at the border and put them to work.

Besides, it’s not like wrapping anti-immigration rhetoric in human resource bureaucratese is going to appease “America First” Republicans like Fiore and Marchant or their supporters. As far as they’re concerned, the border opened on January 6th after Trump’s coup failed. So why are Democrats pandering to them?

Neither secretaries of state nor state treasurers, however, have the unilateral ability to pursue any of these policies — not that Fiore and Marchant are proposing any of them anyhow. Those two, and Trump-loving “America First” Republicans like them, instead propose to reduce inflation by… checks notes… replacing electronic voting machines our state and constituent counties already paid for with paper ballots at a time when newspapers around the state, like the Reno Gazette-Journal, are printing fewer newspapers because the costs of paper and ink, as well as the costs of distributing physical newspapers, are skyrocketing. Oh, and if we count those ballots by hand for the first time in decades instead of using far more efficient machines to do the work for us, that’ll somehow reduce inflation, too, or so they seem to think.

I understand public policy is hard. I also understand reading job descriptions before applying for one (or, in Fiore’s case, two, as she gave up on her gubernatorial campaign at the last minute) can also be difficult. Statewide elected positions, however, are not entry-level work and voters should, at a minimum, expect candidates to put in the same care and attention into their job applications as we might expect from teenagers applying for their first job. 

Fiore, Marchant, and their fellow travelers are failing to clear even this pinky toe-level bar. Here’s hoping they trip and fall when the primary concludes in June.

David Colborne ran for office twice and served on the executive committees for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered nonpartisan voter, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].