Commentary: What's a billion here or there among friends?

Hooo-weeee! You'd have thought somebody'd kicked a puppy to hear all the squealing and cater wauling coming from the bleeding heart, tax-and-spend, redistributionist socialist liberals over what amounts to less than a 10 percent "cut" in the budget; not the widely reported 34 percent or the astro nomical $2.5 billion cut we've been reading about.

That's not my figure. That's the figure by the guy who knows the figures, Andrew Clinger " the state's budget director.

According to an e-mail I received from Clinger this week, Gov. Gibbons' proposed general fund budget this year is "$632.9 million smaller than last biennium," a reduction of 9.3 percent. How to square the conflicting numbers?

To 'splain, I'm going to take great lib erty in rounding off some figures here, because I fully appre ciate that nothing makes a reader's eyes glaze over faster than trying to read a bunch of budget numbers with lots of decimal points in them. And in the interest of full dis closure, it's quite pos sible my math could be a little off thanks to several years of a public school education.

Let's hop in theWayback Machine and set the dial for 2003. During that session of the Legislature, taxes were increased by more than $750 million. There were no spending cuts. Indeed, then-Rep. Jim Gib bons famously dressed down then-Gov.

Kenny Guinn for not cutting $750 million fromthe budget rather than raising taxes $750 million.

Fast-forward to 2005. Turns out Nevada ended up with a budget surplus that leg islative session of almost ... $750 million. Go figure.

Recognizing that if he left the money in the hands of the Legislature they'd spend every red cent of it, Gov. Guinn put some of the surplus into the Rainy Day Fund and rebated another $300 million back to the taxpayers. Note that the general fund budget that year was around $6 billion.

Which brings us to 2007. Guinn is out; Gibbons is in. And what Gibbons should have done was propose a budget that included the $750 million worth of spend ing cuts he told Gov. Guinn to cut four years earlier. Adding a little for inflation, let's generously say Gibbons should have proposed a budget of $5.5 billion.

But instead, Gibbons broke his own words and proposed $1 billion worth of higher spending. His proposed budget weighed in at nearly $7 billion instead of $5.5 billion. And get this: The Economic Forum is currently projecting actual rev enues coming into the state coffers at around ... $5.5 billion. What are the odds?

So in essence the governor and the Leg islature wrote a check with insufficient funds in 2007 and had to roll back all that increased spending last year to the 2005 level when we had a budget surplus.

Meanwhile, the big-government crowd wants the 2009 Legislature to spend, not just the $7 billion the government already can't afford and had to roll back, but an additional $1 billion on top of that. Which means the liberals are demanding $8 bil lion in government spending when the state is only taking in $5.5 billion. And in their delusional minds, that's a $2.5 billion "cut."

Of course, we wouldn't be in this pickle today had Jim Gibbons put his 2007 bud get money where his 2003 budget mouth was. Had he made the cuts in 2007 that he told Gov. Guinn to make in 2003, our gov ernment spending and our tax revenue today would be right about even.

Instead, Jim Gibbons has now broken his 2006 campaign promise to Nevada's voters by proposing a massive $300 mil lion tax increase while simultaneously looting tax dollars from local govern ments.

Sadly, we've all come to learn you just can't trust Jim Gibbons. If he tells you the sun is going to rise in the east tomorrow, you might want to get a second opinion.

- Chuck Muth is president of Citizen Outreach, a non-profit public policy grassroots advocacy organization. He may be reached at chuck@citizenoutreach.com.