On Friday, the Nevada Legislature passed a cumulative billion dollar-plus tax hike on Nevada’s citizens, car owners, businesses and tourists. Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio could have blocked the final $781 million leg of the Mother of All Tax Hikes, but he and four other “Arlen Specter Republicans” voted with the Democrats and Carson City’s big-government lobbyists to stick it to each and every one of us.
The GOP “rat heads in Coke bottles” who gave the Democrats the votes and political cover they needed were Raggio, Dean Rhoads, Warren Hardy, Randolph Townsend and, of course, Dennis Nolan.
On the Assembly side – thanks in large part to the ton of calls and emails many of you sent to Republican Minority Leader Heidi Gansert’s office over the final three days leading up to the vote – only one Republican, John Carpenter, voted for the billion dollar tax hike.
But he had a good reason: God told him to vote for it.
“I talked to the Lord,” Carpenter said on the floor of the Assembly. “And the Lord said, this is the thing to do.”
You know what, if God is going to determine our tax policies, why do we even waste our time electing a Legislature? I mean, why don’t we just send John Carpenter up on Yucca Mountain every other year, spend a few days with the Lord, and then bring back down a budget and tax formula for the next biennium on a set of stone tablets? It’d save a ton of money and an awful lot of time.
And would somebody please explain to me why God waited until the end of the session to weigh in on this matter? Why didn’t he just tell Assemblyman Carpenter what to do in February and save us all this aggravation? And here’s another thing I don’t understand: If John Carpenter has this direct line to the Lord, why wasn’t he made a part of the “core group”?
In any event, every one of the legislators who voted for this tax hike in the middle of this recession are “purely psychotic” – even the ones who weren’t told to build an Ark after the session. There should be hell to pay at the ballot box in 2010.
