Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally in Las Vegas on Aug. 10, 2024. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
When costs went up – and in a lot instances, stayed up – after the pandemic, it hurt Nevadans more than most Americans.
The pain of higher prices is made even worse in Nevada because Nevadans pay one of the nation’s highest sales tax rates whenever they buy clothes, pet food, a sandwich for lunch, and countless other consumer items, from cleaning supplies to lightbulbs to toothpaste to a car.
Speaking of cars, insurance premiums have been skyrocketing, and that rising cost also hits Nevadans even harder than nearly all other Americans, because Nevada’s tax rate on those higher insurance premiums is the nation’s second-highest, and nearly twice as high as the rate in most states.
Nevadans pay among the nation’s highest tax rates on consumer items and insurance premiums because Nevada is one of only eight states that collects no tax on the income of corporations or millionaires/billionaires.
But Nevada’s state government still needs to get some money somewhere, for a lot of things, not least to pay the state’s share of the costs of Medicaid and education.
So the largest single source of government revenue for the state of Nevada is the sales tax – the taxes paid when Nevadans buy some new shoes for their kid, or a used Kia, or the aforementioned sandwich for lunch.
As a result, Nevada has one of the most fundamentally unfair and inequitable tax structures in the nation. The system is upside down, a system where the less money you make, the higher the portion of your income is paid in taxes.
Which brings us to the presidential race.
Bananas
Kamala Harris, who is scheduled to campaign in Las Vegas Sunday, released an 82-page paper providing a few more details about her economic plans this week.
The document reiterates planks of her economic agenda she’s already outlined, including “making big corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share” and “establishing a minimum income tax on billionaires.”
The paper also repeats the Harris campaign’s practice of calling Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on multiple imports a “national sales tax.” Even coffee and bananas wouldn’t be safe, the Harris plan notes.
In Las Vegas Sunday, Harris can be expected to repeat some of those lines and phrases.
Among the crowd will be assorted Nevada elected Democrats, who will likely shake their heads in disapproval when Harris says Trump will create a “national sales tax.”
Yet those same elected Democrats, just like their Nevada Republican counterparts of course, have been quietly content to allow Nevada’s lowest-income households to shoulder the most onerous tax burden of anyone in Nevada thanks to a tax structure that relies on the regressive sales tax and hits the poor the hardest.
The vast majority of Nevada elected Democrats rarely can be bothered to even acknowledge that Nevada’s tax structure is grossly unfair, let alone do anything about it.
Democrats at the Harris rally Sunday will also cheer and applaud when Harris says something about cutting taxes for middle and lower income households while making corporations and the super wealthy pay more.
Yet Nevada state and local Democratic elected officials have demonstrated very little appetite for “making big corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share” of taxes here in Nevada.
During last year’s legislative session, Democrats in control of both chambers wouldn’t even approve legislation to study a version of taxing Nevada’s multi-millionaires and billionaires.
Another point in the Harris economic plan would quadruple the tax rate on corporate stock buybacks.
MGM Resorts International spent $8.3 billion on stock buybacks from 2019 to 2023.
That’s more than twice as much as the entire Nevada gambling industry paid in gaming taxes over the same period.
The second largest source of state government funding is the tax on gambling revenue, which is about half as much as revenue collected from the sales tax.
Nevada’s gaming tax rate is by far the lowest in the U.S.
Elected Nevada Democrats have indicated their position on that is the same as their position on forcing low-income households to provide a disproportionately large share of state government revenue: They’re for it.
They wouldn’t dare
Harris might lose. The outsized pain inflicted on Nevadans – pain that’s only been made worse by Nevada policy choices – has disillusioned some of them so much that they just won’t vote, or dismayed them so much that if they do, they’re willing to say what the hell, let’s give autocracy a chance.
(If any of those voters are reading this, for what it’s worth, Harris is right about Trump’s tariffs reigniting inflation.)
Harris could also win. But there’s no guarantee she will enjoy a Democratically controlled Congress. Republican control of either chamber would block her proposed tax credit of up to $3,600 per child, as well as legislation to enable the growth and benefits of collective bargaining (hi workers at Amazon, Starbucks, etc.), raise wages, and implement other items in her economic agenda, each of which would be far more consequential to far more people than “no tax on tips.”
Every four years the presidential race is routinely referred to as one of the most important in the nation’s history.
This year it’s true.
And yet whoever wins, a substantial segment of economic and tax policy in Nevada will still be stacked against working people, as a result of policy choices crafted, implemented, and tolerated here in Nevada, by Nevadans.
That’s a Nevada economic problem, not a federal one. If Nevadans want to fix it, they’re going to have to fix it themselves.
Don’t hold your breath.
Nevada Democrats are on the cusp of perhaps winning supermajorities in both legislative chambers. That would empower them to make sweeping and long overdue reforms to unfair tax and economic policies.
Democratic legislators and candidates have given no indication that they plan to do anything of the sort if they win supermajorities.
There are those (Nevada’s governor comes to mind) who warn Democrats aren’t campaigning on tax and economic reforms because they’re keeping their mouths shut, lest such talk hurt their chances on the campaign trail.
But this is one of those situations where the right explanation is the most obvious one: Nevada legislative Democrats aren’t campaigning on shifting the states’ tax burden away from the poor and on to the rich and corporate because they would never do that.
They wouldn’t dare.