Posted on 02/04/2006 4:56:29 PM PST by writer33
The 2006 race for Nevada governor promises to be one of the most closely watched political contests of the year as five well-credentialed candidates -- three Republicans and two Democrats -- vie for the office to be vacated by Gov. Kenny Guinn.
State Sen. Bob Beers is one of the Republicans expected to face Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt and U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons in the GOP primary.
Beers, a three-term state assemblyman since 1998, stunned 20-year incumbent Sen. Ray Rawson in his 2004 Senate campaign. During his time in the Legislature, Beers has championed efforts to reduce government growth and taxes and initiated the effort to rebate money to Nevadans after surplus taxes were collected.
He considers one of his big advantages in the race to be his connection with business -- the practicing certified public accountant is vice president of corporate communications of Payroll Solutions, a Nevada employer services company that conducts business in eight states.
Beers talked with In Business Las Vegas about his bid for governor, part of a continuing series of interviews with candidates for that office.
Question: What can you bring to the Nevada businessperson that your opponents can't?
Answer: The first big one is that I've been in business. After three years with a big CPA firm, I started an accounting software company that ran for well over a dozen years. I sold that recently to a CPA firm and now I politic more than I used to. It's the experience with business, it's the CPA-accounting background. Most importantly, I think the long experience with the business environment in Nevada -- not the way it's been the last four years but the way it was prior to that.
As a state senator and assemblyman, what do you think has been your most important contribution to the Nevada businessperson?
The time I spent on the Commerce and Labor Committee in the Assembly was really a time of learning. I was in the minority there and we weren't given as much latitude. I did bring some bills to elderly needs and regulatory problems when we encountered them. Those were part of the ones I thought were good. This last session, the decrease in the payroll tax was pretty much my doing at the end of the '05 session. There were a couple of big relief measures in the identity-theft arena that I think are going to prove in 10 years' time to be big weapons that people have to prevent identity theft. In small business particularly, your personal credit is often your business credit. To protect that, you're really protecting small business.
Many of the stances you take have a distinct libertarian flavor. What differentiates you from the libertarians?
The one thing I've learned is that labels really are meaningless. We have pro-business Republicans and anti-business Republicans. I've been a Republican for a long time and certainly disagree with some of the stances that Republicans take, particularly at the national level. Certainly here at the state level, the 2003 tax-and-spend hike would be a big one. I don't know about libertarian and Republican. I think I'm a Nevadan and individual liberty is why we have established government. The protection of individual liberty is what the mission of government should be and everything should derive off of that role. I've been in business so I have that experience as well.
You are the chief architect of the Tax and Spending Control for Nevada amendment to the state's Constitution. In a nutshell, what would TASC do for citizens of Nevada and for the business community?
TASC takes the decision to make government a bigger percentage of our lives out of the hands of politicians and special interests and puts it into the hands of people and voters. That question of absolute expansion is one that we've got some recent experience with here in our state. We're in the middle of a four- or six-year period where our taxing and spending has increased at more than twice the rate of population growth and inflation. We've done that with a very real and painful tax hike.
I can easily see a family of four someplace in the Las Vegas Valley that has had to curtail the number of youth sport leagues that their children are allowed to participate in because their income has been pinched by all these tax hikes that have occurred. In addition to the pinching of individual families, I also can see how this has contributed to the significant increase in cost of living here in Las Vegas. If the cost of living and the cost of visiting becomes too high, we could very easily choke this place off. I don't want to see that happen. That's really why I brought this Tax and Spending Control initiative forward.
TASC opponents may argue that Nevada is so far behind in so many areas that it is going to require intensive spending to catch the state up to national averages. What's your response?
Bring me some specifics. It turns out that the lists that we're at the bottom of are lists measuring individual behavioral choices.
Give me an example.
Teenage pregnancy. How is having a couple of more bureaucrats telling teenagers to not have sex going to impact teen pregnancy? Those are functions of people's choices. Government can't do an awful lot to solve them. When government gets bigger trying to solve them, the added strain on Nevada's families, trying to fund that activity, I believe is very harmful. So I would say bring me some statistics.
Certainly, we have historically had a very low rate of poverty in Nevada per capita. Therefore, our spending programs that are anti-poverty in nature should, on a per-capita basis, be fairly low. When you look at those same programs on a per-recipient basis, I believe that's a far more telling measure. (With) Medicaid, for example, the far left is fond of pointing out that we have virtually one of the lowest per-capita rates of Medicaid spending in America. Well Medicaid is a program for the poor. If you don't have poor people in the same rates that you have in other parts of the country, then you're spending should be fairly low, per-capita. It turns out that when you measure that spending on a per-recipient basis, we're over 20 percent higher than California.
The most common complaint businesspeople have about Nevada is that its workforce isn't as educated as others. Yet you have commented that "educrats"-- your word -- deceptively cook the books on education spending. Should the state spend more for education and how should it be accounted for?
Well, whether the state should spend more for education seems to be a moot point until you get the education system fundamentally fixed. In 2005, Las Vegas became the 50th largest metropolitan area statistical area in the country and had the fifth-largest school district in America. That tells you a couple of things. Nobody does it like us. The next thing it tells you is that there's got to be a better way.
We didn't plan it like this. Back in 1960, when we set up one county per school district, Las Vegas was smaller than Washoe County was. No one ever anticipated that it would grow this large. You've got 240 people who are administrators who are not assigned to a school site. What do they do? I don't know what they do, but I worry that they lose track of the point of the exercise because the last thing they did before they sat down at their desk was not drive through a school zone. That worries me greatly.
We have some of the largest high schools in the country and, per-capita, the largest high schools in the state. There's plenty of research indicating that larger schools turn in poorer performance and that smaller schools turn in better performance. There's research that performance improves when school starts at a reasonable hour of the day and yet here, our education bureaucracy insists -- although we're making some headway on this issue -- on starting high school at 7 a.m. No place else in the state does that and there's no good reason for that to happen. I would suggest looking at starting them at 10 a.m. They would learn more and the incidences of after-school altercations might go down as well if school were started later in the day.
So I guess what I'm hearing is that we don't necessarily have to cut spending in education, just spend it more efficiently.
I think you can do that by breaking the school district up into smaller districts. I'm a big fan of that as one of the solutions. If we can get some reasonably functional school districts and schools going, then we can come back and analyze the spending question.
What are your thoughts on Gov. Kenny Guinn's Millennium Scholarship program? Would you continue it as governor?
The Millennium Scholarship program has had a number of unintended consequences that I think deserve our study. In Nevada, you have the smallest percentage of higher-ed costs paid for by students and, conversely, the largest percentage of costs paid for by general taxpayers. We take a bunch of kids who are not normally college bound and thrust them into the college environment with a voucher for 20 percent of their education and then fail to budget for the other 80 percent of their education. It causes pinches of dollars. I think that's probably the biggest source of pain in our university system today.
Then when you get down to the impact of the caliber of student that we're sending to college, understanding that now, after six years of the Millennium Scholarship, two-thirds of our graduating seniors have a B average or better. That's kind of a high number. Then you take a look at the number of kids coming into higher ed from Nevada high schools that have to go into remedial classes, which has gone from 20 percent seven years ago to 40 percent today. It would appear that we're taking kids who are not really interested in college at this point in their lives and putting them in college. That may turn out to be, long term, a strategic error as well.
We also now know that the Millennium Scholarship yearly costs are twice as much as its revenue. So perhaps coming up with some way to scale that program down to existing revenues of the tobacco program would not only improve the caliber of kids that we involve in the program, but as well improve the caliber of education that is offered at our university system.
Amid the rising cost of living, officials in this state continue to proclaim that Nevada is still cheaper than California. Is it enough to pin Nevada's future on the economic problems of a single state, even if that state is as big as California?
In terms of marketing for new companies, yes. By the same token, I have colleagues in the Legislature who seem to think that a big tax hike here is OK because it's not as big as the one in California. Or blatant, stupid decision-making on the part of our government is OK because it's not as stupid as the decisions that California's government has made. I think that's a dangerous game of chicken that makes absolutely no sense for us to participate in. Nevada is its own state with unique, long-held and developed philosophy of personal liberty and personal responsibility and a smaller government. If you move away from that, I think it's a mistake, particularly if it's done without asking voters if they think we should move away from those core values. And we've never had that election.
With competition so rigorous, shouldn't the state be putting much more money into economic development?
We just put a ton of more money into economic development. Right now, our eco- nomic development is much like our state. You've seen a boa constrictor that's just eaten a mouse and he has this big lump. Well right now, this big increase in spending that we just undertook is still in lump form and is not yet fully digested. So no, I don't believe, right now, we should put an immense amount of money into economic development.
Why has it taken so long for Nevada to diversify its economy, and do we need to somehow push that along?
We can always try to push harder and push better, but I disagree with the premise of your question. I don't think it's taken much time for economic diversification to work. Our program of promotion of economic diversification has been wildly successful and one of the real highlights of government's efforts.
Can you give me an example?
The Citibank complex up on the west side of town, there's Amazon and Barnes & Noble national warehouse facilities up in Northern Nevada, Microsoft has a licensing division in Reno, there's a bunch of places out in North Las Vegas' industrial corridor. It's all over. We have had some good successes in economic development.
How has the rising cost of living affected the state's -- and particularly Las Vegas' -- ability to compete in the economic development arena with cities like Phoenix, Albuquerque and Austin?
It's a factor and something we need to be cognizant of. From government's standpoint, there's a limited subset of that cost of living that government can cause. Certainly if the Legislature was interested in using some of our recent tax increases to reduce the negative impact, I'd be very interested.
Should Nevada continue to invest money in the development of tourism from China?
Yes. It's a giant market. They're clearly an emerging national player and they have interest not just in Nevada, but in the Western United States. There's a substantial portion of Chinese history that involves immigrants coming to the Western United States years ago. I don't know if that's part of their fascination, but I'll bet it is. And actually, through the efforts of Lt. Gov. (Lorraine) Hunt, we are now poised to become the West to China. That is a marketing advantage that we should continue to exploit. They think we're Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Arizona all wrapped up in one.
Government, particularly local government, has been undermined by a number of land and development scandals. What can be done to regain the public's confidence?
Convict and punish those who violated the public trust. There are two reasons we know about those things, one is the FBI and the other is the media. I guess the Ethics Commission might be a third leg, but really it had no part in any of this. In fact, by preventing a false impression that it is doing something about the problem, it may actually be exacerbating our perceptions.
How should Nevadans cope with the rising cost of health care? What's the solution for business owners as well as consumers?
I think two things are responsible for the rising cost of health care -- probably more than that, but two come to mind. First, there's that it's increasingly a technology-driven pursuit. New things are invented and the money goes into research and development and that must be recouped through fees and, ultimately, the benefit for that increased cost for the consumer is a treatment of greater effectiveness for more and more maladies. That's something that they're willing to pay more for. Perhaps one solution is the reduction of mandated benefits.
The other piece that is responsible for increased costs is the government. We've now got government with its hands on roughly a fifth of the delivery of medical service to the state and the government is extremely inefficient and uncaring. It's people playing with other people's money and they simply don't have the same level of care. I don't know what that answer is.
I saw an article about how Las Vegas has very high mark-ups. Except that that's fiction because virtually no one pays that mark-up rate. That is a system that evolved only after the government came along and started delivering medical services for some people. Soon, insurance companies followed along and now we have this fictional system of pricing that no one can make heads or tails of and nobody likes it. I don't think the doctors like it, I know patients don't like it. I'm waiting for one of these days for somebody to open up a neighborhood doctor's office for cash only. We don't take any insurance and here's our prices, no messing around.
What are the biggest challenges facing small-business owners? How would you solve those problems?
I think the three biggest challenges facing small-business owners are the cost of living, the quality of workforce and the impact of regulatory apparatus on them. Government isn't responsible entirely for the cost of living. To the extent it is, we can do things like reduce our spending and reduce our taxation.
The quality of workforce is a combination of the government side making our education dollars more effective and there are several ideas out there on how to do that. The regulatory burden is also a function of legislation and governing and, toward that end, businesses can be active and involved in their government.
You can't sit there and say government doesn't affect me, because it does. If you're in business, then you really need to know who your assembly person and your senator are and it's a really good idea to call them up and take them out to lunch and tell them what the issues are so that when they do come along and do something that could hurt your business you'll at least get the door open and let them hear your side of the story. Frequently, we go about doing something like that and never hear that other side of the story until after it's done.
Assess some of your opponents and tell us how you're different: Rep. Jim Gibbons?
A big difference: I'm the only male candidate not named Jim. I think Congressman Gibbons is a fiscal conservative on taxes and a fiscal liberal on spending. You can do that in Washington. You can't do it in Nevada. He's never served on a state or local budget committee and so one of the big differences is that I have some experience in that. I've got that familiarity with the budget. I'm also concerned that there's a big difference in the education in Las Vegas and Reno. It's the size that makes that difference. We're four times larger and they think they have a large school district. So, I'm concerned that without experiencing Southern Nevada, you too quickly dismiss the real crisis facing us.
How about Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt?
She sings a lot better than I do. She's been in a constitutional role as lieutenant governor, focused on economic development and she's done a phenomenal job there. Regardless of what happens, she's going to be badly missed.
Assuming that you win the Republican nomination for governor, would you expect the gaming industry to back you?
I don't know what the gaming industry is thinking. I'm not sure they know yet. I think they're still thinking about what they're going to do when the dust settles. This has been a pivotal decade for them already. The 2003 session was truly seminal for that entire industry. I think they're still trying to recover and get back on their feet. The thing that we did in that 2003 session I don't think benefited them as an industry. I don't think they think it did either. They may have gone in thinking that they had a plan to benefit them, but in the final outcome, they didn't.
I certainly hope they would support me. I have a great deal of admiration for the industry and the role it plays as truly the engine of this state's economy. The opportunity it provides all Nevadans, whether they work directly or not, they're all affected positively and I'm very mindful that locals look at it somewhat predatorily -- we're going to gang up on them and make them pay for everything. But if you stop and think that right now our gaming resorts are competing with casinos in the next state over that pay 0 percent and it concerns me that there is a storm coming in that industry that we have to be very aware and careful to maintain our standing as the vacation place.
Just saw this guy in person. He's even better in person. And for you Nevadans lurking, he's something to consider.
Bob is the bomb. He is still so straight up conservative cool and he hasn't learned to censure himself about how corrupt the liberals are. He once said that the reason the schools were so messed up was that the unions cared more about protecting themselves than allowing us to fire bad teachers. He also held the legislature hostage leading a group of Assembly GOP members to kill the majority of a $1B+ tax increase proposed by the RINO governor a couple of years ago. The Dems had to get judges to get around him. It was true blue.
This guy sounds like a force to be reckoned with and has a big future ahead of him.
*Bump for Beers*
ANYONE but Jim "I gave Harry Reid another term" Gibbons.
Here's a BEERS for you, Hildy!
Can Beers win in NV if Coors couldn't in CO?
Ping for the Nevadans on the list!
:)
I think so. In the last six elections, there have been more Republican votes than Democrat votes. The problem is Clark County. Too many libs coming from California. We have to trump that in Northeast and Northwest Nevada.
Kenny's time is up. Thank, God.
MORE BEERS!!!
(Chris is buying,bartender,put 'em on his tab)
:-)
BTTT
Lots to like in this interview. I liked this:We have some of the largest high schools in the country and, per-capita, the largest high schools in the state. There's plenty of research indicating that larger schools turn in poorer performance and that smaller schools turn in better performance.
Our local school is small, and has the advantage of not having a high school. The school board pays tuition for our students at their choice of three neighboring districts. The state has a standing offer to subsidize a merger of our district into a neighboring one; that would suit the bureaucrats real good.But I don't know what good it'd do our neighbors' children. One of those kids struggled in the HS she had selected. After a lot of hate and discontent, she simply switched to another school. And excelled there. What if we had merged into that first district?
Make mine a double Drambue with a couple of BEERS to go.
Sounds like a guy that understands what the problems really are.
Sounds like a keeper to me.
Bob Beers clearly has a lot on the ball. And there's no question we need more CPA's (and fewer lawyers) in public office.
However, isn't he aiming too high too soon? IMHO, I think he should run for state Treasurer or state Controller.
Thanks for the pings. I wish the best to all the candidates. I'll see if I could scrap some cash for the coming elections.
In this instance, I think Governor is just fine. It is imperative to stop Jim Gibbons. Gibbons' repulsive example of putting his own personal career ahead of Nevadans, the GOP, and the nation (not to mention attempting to simultaneously install his wife in his Congressional seat) needs to be properly slapped down hard. NO rewards for handing Harry Reid another term.
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