79% of Businesses Rate Nevada Tax Climate Good or Better

From the "Where You Stand Depends on Where You Sit" Department:

The Las Vegas Review Journal reports that in a survey of Nevada small businesses, the vast majority think the tax system is just fine, thank you:

Overall, 30 percent of respondents rated the Silver State's tax climate as excellent, while 49 percent rated it as good.

But that doesn't mean they're short of things to bellyache about:

A plurality of companies -- 37 percent -- said taxes will be the most important issue the Nevada Legislature will address in its 2007 session.

Two specific issues are mentioned in the article. First, there's the question of whether the tax hikes enacted in 2003 should be scaled back or even repealed:

A pending budget surplus of nearly $500 million has convinced some business owners that taxes imposed in 2003 -- a 0.65 percent tax on payroll and a doubling of the real property transfer tax from 0.25 percent to 0.5 percent of assessed value, for example -- are unnecessary today.

Second, it turns out that the property tax caps imposed by the legislature in 2005 aren't making business all that happy:

Chavez also said small-business owners were hoping for relief on property taxes. When state lawmakers capped annual property-tax increases on residential properties at 3 percent in 2005, they put a ceiling of 8 percent on commercial land and buildings.

Which just reiterates what we've said before: restrictive tax caps on residential property should be thought of not just as a tax cut, but as a tax shift. Someone else is gonna pick up the slack.

The interesting thing is that by comparison to most other states, Nevada is hardly a fiscal basket case. The list of grievances businesses have with the Nevada tax system is really quite short. So maybe the lesson here is that given an opportunity to complain publicly about taxes, pretty much anyone will.