In a letter to Chancellor Jim Rogers, released Wednesday, the Republican governor repeated his long-standing opposition to new or higher taxes and noted state lawmakers in their recent special session, convened to cope with a $1 billion-plus revenue shortfall, didn't propose higher taxes.
Gibbons also said he found it "impossible to believe" that there's no way to cut higher education spending. He said there are more than 1,300 university system employees who each make $100,000 or more yearly.
The governor said he remains an advocate for increased K-12 and higher education funding — once the state's weak economy "goes back into the upswing."
Gibbons also said he'll ask the 2009 Legislature to restructure a spending cap that in its current form "does very little to restrict spending and needs to be revised in order to better protect the state's finances."
Rogers last week wrote Gibbons to say that the governor seems "silently pleased" with Nevada's economic problems and wants to "use this misery as an excuse to gut education and health and human services without the need for any public policy debate for a position that you could not hope to defend."
Rogers said Gibbons has called for budget cuts of more than 7 percent for higher education in the current two-year budget cycle, and has asked the system to calculate the impact of a 16 percent cut in the coming cycle, which will start in mid-2009.
"You want limits that reduce government beyond growth and the cost of living," Rogers said. "You want services to shrink while costs and population grows and you somehow want us to believe that this is a philosophy that will encourage and sustain this growth."
Rogers said the last major change in the state's tax structure was in 1955 when the sales tax was enacted, adding that it doesn't make sense to "run a 21st century economy for one of the fastest-growing states in the union on a tax structure that was conceived in the middle of the last century."
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