The legislative session is done and the teabaggers won, according to a second-tier lobbyist for Barrick Gold Corporation.
For months, the lobbyist has taken to one of the internet's more obscure corners to full-throatedly advocate a broad based business tax.Then when the Democrats unveiled their nice new tax plan, the lobbyist went full pundit and publicly pronounced it dead on arrival. His analysis is a bit vague, but a key component of it seems to hold that Nevada's "progressives" are to blame because they didn't do what mining said.
So is this lobbyist right? Is there no chance the tax package will pass?
Judged by the accuracy of his prior assertions, his prognostication might be the most promising thing that has happened in Nevada for months. For instance, he has continuously contended that "progressives" were not interested in supporting a tax on businesses that currently pay jack because "progressives say it's all fixed if you pass a mining tax." His repeated mischaracterization of Nevada progressives is profoundly, indisputably and, of course, deliberately wrong. So if he asserts that the tax package is dead, maybe there's hope for it.
Then again, broken clock twice a day, etc. What's more, it's safe to assume that his latest "objective analysis" is similarly a deliberate act of misdirection.
By declaring that, dang, the stars just didn't align correctly in the 2011 legislative session, mining lobbyists are rationalizing their failure to lobby legislators to stand up to the Sandoval/NPRI/teabagger axis of weevils. The industry's excuse goes like this:
Gosh, mining would do everything it could to persuade its closest allies in the Legislature to support perhaps the most sensible tax reform package ever proposed by legislative leadership in the history of Nevada. If only other interests -- business, gaming and of course, those misguided progressives -- would get on board. Or if only the tax package would have been proposed earlier. Or if only ... whatever. And Nevada so desperately needs tax reform, too. But with reform dead in the water, it would be unfair to our fine and good legislative friends (and unwise for the industry) to ask them to stop singing the jolly no-new-taxes jingle at this juncture. Oh well, maybe next time!
Early this year before the session started, I had a spirited discussion with another mining lobbyist, the Nevada Mining Association's Tim Crowley, in a parking lot after we both appeared on Ralston's show. Expanding on a suggestion that had come up in the broadcast, I told him that leaders from mining, gambling and other businesses who keep saying they support a business tax needed to work together to form a broad coalition, announce their support for tax reform clearly and publicly and lobby for it forcefully. Crowley flat-out told me that it just wasn't going to happen.
If Crowley's prediction proves true, special interests will point fingers at each other and the Democratic leadership, all saying that they were willing to support reform but everyone else was dragging their feet and, well, it just couldn't come together, so boo hoo. Right now, the biggest obstacle to tax reform isn't Sandoval and the teabaggers, but powerful lobbyists saying the tax package won't pass because powerful lobbyists are saying the tax package won't pass.
Mining has staked out a prominent position in that collective meta-declaration of impotence, and evidently fully expected to do so well before the Legislature convened -- a head start that truly reflects the industry's historic leadership role in Nevada.
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