Vin Suprynowicz

I’m to do a “blog.”

“It’ll be easy, Vin. You type in your thoughts. The readers respond. You respond to their responses.”

“I already do that. I use lots of reader mail in this thing we like to call my ‘weekly column.’”

“This will be much faster. And it builds traffic!”

Ah. Just like a weekly column, but with even less emphasis on documentation, contemplation, or craftsmanship. No wonder the Web is awash in largely unsubstantiated but furiously fervent personal opinion. It’s like giving every kid his own radio show. More »

April 15 is not “tax day.” It’s “tax filing” day.

It’s not a new observation that, If this were a day when Americans were required to hand over in one lump sum a personal income tax applied to their wages and other gains of the previous calendar year, some form of revolution would not be far behind.

The stroke of genius that keeps the whole operation afloat, despite a combined tax rate much higher than that which got the people of France “up in arms” in 1789, or our own ancestors in 1776, is called the “withholding tax.”

The “withholding” levy — initially at a rate of 20 percent — was instituted in July of 1943. More »

Over the past six years, Nevada’s U.S. senators, Harry Reid and John Ensign, have successfully pushed public lands bills which facilitated the sale of tens of thousands of acres formerly managed by the federal government in Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties — basically, southeastern Nevada.

Although the federal government could show no title for those lands — no bill of sale approved by the state Legislature as required under Article I Section 8 — they have successfully been sold back onto the private tax rolls, allowing additional room for growth in Southern Nevada.

So far so good.

On the down side, the bills also designated more than 1.7 million new, additional Nevada acres as federally “protected” wilderness, stymieing the objective of a net reduction in the 90 percent of Nevada still controlled from afar by the bureaucrats of the Potomac. More »

One R. Lane wrote in on March 31:

“After reading his March 23 diatribe, it is clear to me that Review-Journal columnist Vin Suprynowicz has not yet learned the obvious: the more handguns a country has in circulation, the more handgun deaths that country is going to get — not less.

“The United States has some 200 million handguns in circulation, and the highest handgun death rate (per 100,000 population) of any industrialized nation, with the possible exception of Brazil. Japan has the fewest number of handguns in circulation and the lowest handgun death rate per 100,000.

“If all these guns make us safer, we should be the safest nation on earth.”

Thus endeth R. Lane’s succinct submission.

Wow. This really simplifies the question, doesn’t it? All we have to do is look to see if we can find any historic examples where a government has banned access to handguns for a sizeable portion of the population, and see what that did to handgun death rates among that population.

And you know what? It turns out R. Lane is correct!

Back in the 1920s and 1930s, the forward-thinking German “Weimar” republic effectively banned firearms possession by just about anyone but the military, the government police, and the ruling “Junker” class, who were allowed to keep their fancy hunting rifles. More »

I see where Clark County Superintendent of Schools Walt Rulffes here in Las Vegas has responded to the Feb. 14 drive-by murder of a 15-year-old Palo Verde High School inmate — shot by another one of Mr. Rullfes’ young charges — not by admitting a failure of his own tutelage, but instead by whining it’s difficult to prevent his young wards from shooting each other given today’s “easy access to guns” and television violence.

I’m not sure about the TV part — seems to me most of the drive-bys I’ve seen portrayed on the tube have concluded with the perpetrator going to jail, which Mr. Rulffes might explain to his young charges as “just like school only it doesn’t last as many years and you can’t take your boom-box.”

But as for the “easy access to guns” part, since the hoplophobes insist on referring to guns as “penis substitutes,” anyway (never explaining why any male but Hemingway’s Jake Barnes would need a “substitute,”) I await Mr. Rulffes explanation that some of his young darlings commit the crime of rape due to the currently excessive “easy access to penises.”

As attractive as the scheme might seem to the disciples of Andrea Dworkin, I suspect there might be some hint of a civil rights problem with a society-wide program of penis removal, even though the right to keep and bear those organs is not protected as explicitly in the Constitution as the right to keep and bear arms of military usefulness. More »

The “experts” seem to have overestimated the tax revenues our greedy Nevada bureaucrats will get their mitts on this year by about a billion bucks.

(What does this tell us about the folks who still believe “experts” can reliably predict global temperatures or mean sea levels 100 years from now?)

I submit three modest suggestions:

1) Dig up a couple of Nevada state budgets from 1958 and 1908. Not much need to examine the actual dollar amounts under the various headings, since the 2008 dollar is worth about 2 to 3 cents in 1908 dollars. (But the inflation rate is only 2.2 percent; I heard it from a government “expert” so I know it’s true.)

Instead, just compare the headings with this year’s proposed budget — the names of the state departments, divisions, offices, and programs. Cross out any headings from the 2008 budget that did not appear in the 1958 budget. After all, Nevada was a relatively happy and prosperous place in 1958, wasn’t it? Do you remember anyone back in 1958 squawking that Nevada “didn’t have enough government”? More »

By altering procedures and policies over the past several years, Bush administration officials have made it substantially more difficult to designate domestic animals and plants for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

President Bush’s appointees have “rejected or moved slowly on petitions to list imperiled plants and animals under the 35-year-old law,” The Washington Post reported last week.

As a result, new listings “plummeted. During Bush’s more than seven years as president, his administration has placed 59 domestic species on the endangered list, almost the exact number that his father listed during each of his four years in office,” the Post reports, while thinly disguised opprobrium. Indeed, “Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has not declared a single native species as threatened or endangered since he was appointed nearly two years ago,” the Post fairly wails. More »

On Feb. 23 the Los Angeles Times reported: “In a victory for gun-rights advocates, the federal government is preparing to relax a decades-old ban on bringing loaded firearms into national parks.

“Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said Friday that his department would suggest new regulations by the end of April that could bring federal rules into line with state laws concerning guns in parks and public lands. … Fifty … senators … from both parties have backed a drive to repeal the ban. …”

Note the change would see federal authorities — weirdly, given their almost universal insistence on federal pre-eminence — allowing different rules in different states, deferring to states that disarm interstate travelers. This is akin to the federal government saying blacks and whites must be treated equally in the parks — except in certain benighted Southern backwaters, where Uncle Sam will defer to local rednecks who prefer separate “white” and “colored” bathrooms, etc. More »

Prompted in part by government interventions including the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 — which required banks to make riskier loans to less credit-worthy borrowers to avoid charges of racist “red-lining” — America’s banks and mortgage companies created new sources of high investment return in recent decades. Home mortgages — both the secure and the less secure — were bundled up, sliced and re-sold like baloney.

The riches seemed to flow from nowhere. It reached the point where nearly everyone seemed to have a child or spouse or girlfriend — charming, yes, but not someone you’d expect to become a millionaire based on business acumen or educational attainment — driving around dressed to the nines, operating a real estate business out of a couple of file drawers in the back of a fancy new sports car, expressing amazement that you, too, weren’t getting rich flipping homes and condos, many before they’d even been built. More »

The current president, George W. Bush, is not a gifted orator.

Oratory seems to be one of those things no one thinks matters much in a president — until it goes missing.

Those who dislike the current president may cite any of a dozen policy issues. But they rarely fail to mention how they cringe when that marble-mouth begins to speak.

Freshman Sen. Barack Obama is campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president on a platform of “change.” One big change under an Obama presidency, make no mistake, would be the fact that the senator is a gifted orator, as he proved again Tuesday in his speech on America’s racial divide. More »