The New Rationality

What a hard week to pin down! It's been, by turns, disarmingly cute (the city setting out to count its urban trees), comically optimistic (Metro proposing a huge new HQ complex, tanking economy be damned), fiscally foreboding (airlines are cutting flights to Vegas) and heavily smoked (because California is on fire). In a hearing at which the feds, who oversee the shuttered Crazy Horse Too strip club, sought to stop Las Vegas from revoking its booze and babes permits, the city actually dismissed its own lost revenue in the deal as high ground: "We're rational," a city attorney announced, "because we're not lusting after that $2 million." That's the kind of week it was -- the kind in which turning your back on $2 million during an economic freefall is considered the sane move. Expect the assault on rationality to pick up speed once the Legislature (presumably) gathers in special session later this week, and cries of Don't tax me, bro! echo across the land, or at least across the Review-Journal editorial pages.

Still, there are small instances of rational behavior to be found. The county's air-pollution people are offering low-cost electric lawnmowers to residents willing to part with their fumey, gas-powered machines, according to the R-J. It sounds smart, ecologically responsible ... what's the catch? None, it seems. If the program retires 1,000 gas mowers, it will be -- to pluck a Rory Reid quote from the paper -- "the equivalent of taking 40,000 cars off our streets."

Of course, this being Nevada, you can count on someone to immediately fog things up again. In this case, it's a Chamber of Commerce study, splashed on the front of Monday's R-J, finding that public employees make 28 percent more than private-sector workers in comparable jobs -- a median income of $47,449, as opposed to the $37,039 that non-government-teat-sucking folks earn. (This contradicts an earlier state study that found the opposite.) If the timing of the study's release, right before the special session, strikes you as odd, well, you're just not thinking rationally. Of course the chamber didn't hope to impact the session. Of course the R-J didn't give it the big treatment because of its naked loathing for state government. "We aren't putting these numbers out there to make a point in the short term," a chamber official said. "If lawmakers find it useful, that's fine." And if they don't, one presumes that's less fine.

As for the newspaper, it certainly did its best to remain balanced: Readers who beaver-chewed to the last two paragraphs of the 34-paragraph story found this apparently not-very-newsworthy tidbit: "He [an official of the survey firm] found that ... Nevada has the fewest public employees on a per-capita basis in the nation." And Nevada's teachers? They're paid "about six percent less than the national average." Of course, under The New Rationality, that doesn't mean the state bureaucracy isn't bloated, as the R-J has always maintained, or that teachers aren't overpaid; it just means that next time someone had better find a space for the story that's two paragraphs shorter. Snip!