‘Onward’ to film tax credits, and beyond

“It has been a ride,” Democratic Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager tweeted Wednesday night after he shepherded public funding for a billionaire’s baseball team through his house of the state legislature.  “Appreciate the hard work of all of my colleagues and especially our hardworking staff. Onward.”

Onward to what?

Another prominent Democrat, former Gov. Steve Sisolak, shared his vision for what he thinks his successor and state lawmakers should do next. 

“The former state leader,” KSNV reported earlier this week, “took credit for initiating film tax credits in Nevada and was hopeful Senator Roberta Lange’s massive film studio tax bill that could lure Sony Studios to Southern Nevada would get its own special session.”

So hopefully, if you’re Sony and Howard Hughes Corp., anyway, the guy who beat Sisolak will give himself and legislators a little time to decompress, and then once everyone is tanned, rested and ready, call another special session this summer to approve billions of dollars in public subsidies for the film industry.

But why stop there? 

Multiple industries, corporations, and billionaires would be happy to accept eye-popping amounts of public money they don’t need. After the film thing, who/what should be next in line?

Here’s one idea that is every bit as credible, logical and, most importantly, shiny as subsidizing the A’s or Sony.

After the film credit thing sails through, Gov. Joe Lombardo should also call a special session so Yeager and other Nevada legislators can award a generous sum – let’s say a billion dollars – to Southern Nevada’s very own national billionaire slumlord, Robert Bigelow.

Bigelow has been called out for preying on tenants, during the pandemic no less, so that speaks volumes to the sort of savvy no-nonsense business acumen that is so admired in Nevada.

While not as prominent in the field as current recipient of Nevada public financial largesse, Elon Musk, Bigelow is also something of a junior spaceman – although with the exception of a couple brief flights and a space station experiment several years ago, his vision for inflatable orbital RVs or whatever never really got off the ground. 

But far more importantly, Bigelow is absolutely convinced that right here on earth, right now, space aliens are among us.

Cool. Because there is no better place to create an industrial infrastructure dedicated to finding beings from other planets who are hiding in plain sight on this one than Las Vegas. That’s just a fact.

And talk about workforce development and economic diversification. Imagine the ripple effect on the economy of creating a workforce of highly educated if outlier and lightly regarded fourth-tier scientists, along with a zealously dedicated support staff of true believers, all employed within the new Nevada Space Aliens on Earth Research and Entertainment Tax District.

It could even make publicly subsidized pseudoscience documentaries at the publicly subsidized film studio, loaded with images of Las Vegas to entice viewers to visit and spend money at our resorts. Synergy!

Democratic legislators might initially balk at granting a billion dollars to Bigelow. If not for Bigelow’s checkbook, Republican Joe Lombardo would not be governor today. Bigelow is also spending heavily to back Ron DeSantis’s campaign to become the alternative to Donald Trump if Trump, oh, gets hit on some Iowa farm by Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign bus.

But just as Democratic legislators “fought” for improvements to the Very Very Very Important community benefits agreement in the A’s deal (occasional complimentary use of stadium suites for economic development groups!), Democratic legislators could also “fight” for equally consequential concessions from Bigelow in his CBA. For every dollar Bigelow spends on Republican candidates and causes, he has to contribute a penny to a fund assisting people he evicts from his weekly motels. Something like that.

And Democratic lawmakers’ allies in the building and trades unions would back the space alien tax district. Ok, maybe they’re not the greatest example. They’d back public subsidies for a factory to build robots to take their own members’ jobs if the factory’s CBA committed to paying a prevailing wage.

Of course the easiest way for Lombardo to give Democrats political cover for something a critical mass of them would want to support anyway because “ooh shiny object” would be to invoke Bigelow’s long and dear friendship with the late Harry Reid.

Democrats could honor the memory of their dear departed leader – a man who never saw a Nevada state government giveaway he didn’t like – by just cold giving some cash to Bigelow to pursue a passion both he and Reid shared for finding beings of extraterrestrial origin right here on earth. They could even make Bigelow name his project after Reid, just like the airport.

Yes, some legislators would balk, citing the absurdity not only of the project’s purpose, but of giving a billion dollars of public money to a billionaire who doesn’t need it. But enough Democrats, including and especially Yeager and his Senate counterpart, majority leader Nicole Cannizzaro, would be on board. Both demonstrated conclusively during the A’s special session that they are fully behind what is unquestionably the state of Nevada’s top policy priority of the 21st century: Needlessly subsidizing rich people and corporations.

There are far better things Lombardo and lawmakers could do. One very modest example: A special session could be called to increase taxes on the lithium mining industry by merely requiring it to pay exactly the same taxes and rates on mineral production that the gold mining industry pays, and allocate that revenue to Nevada’s infamously inadequate and inaccessible mental health services and infrastructure.

But that sounds boring. 

So on to the Sony giveaway. And beyond.