Every scheme everywhere all at once

Hectic and absurdist, the 2023 session of the Nevada Legislature has strived mightily, or at least habitually, to assign legitimacy to outlandish farce.

And so a fresh new round of tax breaks for Tesla. Five billion dollars over 20 years to giant film corporations. Hundreds of millions to a billionaire by birth whose baubles happen to include a baseball team. A lottery, the universal symbol for public officials who pretend to help people by implementing policy that preys on them.

Why would a state even consider doing any of these things? 

Oh sure, a substantial segment of the public likes shiny objects, so politicians like shiny objects too.

Also, if you build it – it being a trough full of public money – influential and powerful insiders will come. To stick in their snouts.

And then of course there are the rationalizations, whereby Very Important Grownups make one almost rational decision after another, and the next thing you know irrationality is elevated to conventional wisdom. 

In fairness to Nevada officials, everybody does it. In fact that’s often the argument most strenuously asserted by the aforementioned VIGs. (Nevada influencers and the government officials who love – or at least heel to – them often declare and celebrate how “bold” and “innovative” Nevada is. The “everybody does it” mantra suggests otherwise.)

“Everybody does it,” is a flat and uninspiring argument. It isn’t even a policy defense. It’s a lazy excuse for a common ideology which holds the highest calling of government is to help business, and then prosperity will trickle down to everybody else. It’s easy to mockingly say (I have) those are Nevada’s values, and that’s the Nevada way, but it’s also a little unfair. It’s not just the Nevada way, it’s the American way (underscoring yet again that Nevada is not the precious snowflake it likes to think it is.)

But maybe there’s another explanation for a bunch of horrible policies emerging as the most high-profile and “innovative” proposals of the 2023 Nevada legislative session, an explanation that is at the same time stupidly simple and infinitely complex:

If it’s happening, it had to happen, just as it is happening.

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics envisions an infinite number of parallel universes and worlds, where everything that can happen, will happen, has happened, is happening. It’s one of the premises/inspirations of last year’s Academy Award winning Best Picture (not a Sony Pictures production, by the way) that this column’s headline is riffing on.

Yes, it sounds bonkers and incomprehensibly wild. Guess that’s infinity for you.

But if real, the many-worlds scenario would dictate that this 2023 Nevada legislative session was bound to happen, exactly as it is happening. 

In our world.

And in another, parallel world, another 2023 Nevada legislative session is happening – one where instead of handing out $5 billion of public money to subsidize film corporations, that $5 billion is being allocated for the development of rapid, affordable, accessible, green, and realistic public mass transit. 

Instead of handing out an additional $412 million in tax breaks for Elon Musk and Tesla, $415 million in taxes that will be paid by Tesla is being allocated to affordable, high quality child care and elder care.

Instead of handing out $380 million to some rando billion dollar baby with a baseball team, that $380 million is being allocated to programs to house and help financially stabilize people experiencing homelessness.

Instead of establishing a regressive lottery that might possibly, maybe, but by no means certainly finance mental health services for Nevada youth some day in an indeterminate future, the lowest-in-the-nation gaming tax is being dramatically raised and restructured so additional revenue can help Nevada immediately start improving its infamously inadequate mental health services for people of all ages now.

And in that other world, that other Nevada, the state’s largest tax burden isn’t disproportionately placed on its poorest people.

Oh well. We’re stuck with this world, and this dopey 2023 Nevada legislative session, where the highest and most flashiest priorities are not just cynical insults to intelligence, but examples of aggressively malign neglect of the well-being of the state and the people who live and work in it.