Republican governors are raising taxes, and the New York Times couldn't be happier!

“My jaw dropped,” Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, a conservative Republican in Nevada, said after hearing Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican, propose a $1.1 billion tax increase for education this month. “Whether we kill it by five votes or 15 votes or 25 votes, we are going to kill it.”

At least eight Republican governors have ventured into this once forbidden territory: There are proposals for raising the sales tax in Michigan, a tax on e-cigarettes in Utah, and gas taxes in South Carolina and South Dakota, to name a few. In Arizona, the new Republican governor has put off, in the face of a $1 billion budget shortfall, a campaign promise to eliminate the unpopular income tax there.

“It’s not based on partisanship; it’s based on common sense and good government,” said Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan, a Republican who has urged voters to support a ballot measure that would raise $1.9 billion by increasing the sales tax and gas tax. “We’ve been underinvesting in Michigan for some time, so I view it as a way to, long term, save us resources.”

It's not a tax increase; it's saving resources!  And Michigan has been "underinvesting" anyway!  I love it when liberals (am I talking about the New York Times or Governor Snyder?  You decide!) talk of the government making "investments."  The government doesn't make investments.  Businesses make investments.  Governments aren't businesses, no matter how hard they try to be businesses.  They don't spend money to make money.  If they did, socialism and Marxism would work, and we'd have zero unemployment and zero debt, and Barack Obama would be president for life.

The state also had done some belt-tightening, he said, and taxpayers would get a dedicated funding source for road improvements. “What we’re doing is following some principles that our taxpayers wanted, I believe,” Governor Snyder said.

Let's have a look at Michigan's belt-tightening.  In 2014, they approved a $36-billion budget that increased spending nearly 12% in just one year.  This isn't Snyder engaging in "belt-tightening"; this is Snyder dropping his pants.

Snyder also said that the revenue increase will be a "dedicated" source of funding for road improvements.  Since all money is fungible and can be used for anything, his statement cannot be believed.

The fact is that he wants to raise money and claims that the increase will go to roads.  But what else does the State of Michigan spend money on?  Ten percent is spent on salaries, health costs, and pensions.  Government employees have notoriously generous health plans and pensions.  Why not bring their health plans and pensions in line with the private sector before raising taxes for roads?  Why not make sure that the state doesn't fund six-digit salaries for any of its employees, so public servants don't get paid more than the people who pay them, the taxpayer?

Fifty-one percent of Michigan state government spending is spent on payments to local governments.  This is a shell game.  Local governments typically spend far more than they can afford to based on their prime source of income, the real estate tax.  So they get the state government to remit part of the income tax back to city governments.  It's as if city governments operated their own income tax.  All the while, they can keep property taxes low, pretending to be responsible, but can spend like drunken sailors because the state will bail them out.

Here's a radical idea: how about making towns and cities support themselves based on their own revenue streams?  Cut state income and sales taxes in half.  If towns and cities need more money, let them raise the property tax.  At least this way residents will see who is taxing them for what, and towns and cities will have more incentive to keep costs down, because if they don't, they will be directly responsible for raising taxes to pay for them.

Meanwhile, in Nevada, the Republican governor there wants to raise taxes, also for a compelling reason:

Governor Sandoval, in laying out his tax increase plan to the Nevada Legislature, said he expected it to face opposition, but argued that the state needed to do something to improve its education system. “What we must all agree on is that another generation of young Nevadans cannot move through our schools without more resources, choice and reform — and that we must modernize our revenue system,” he told lawmakers. If Republicans were distressed by Governor Sandoval’s speech, Democrats were nothing short of ecstatic.

All he wants to do is "modernize the revenue system," right?  Sandoval even talks like a liberal.  But let's look at some facts.

Schoolteachers in Nevada make about the national average income for schoolteachers – about $56,000 a year.  That's not bad for a job that requires work only about nine months out of the year.  For all his talk about choice and reform, he's really talking about pouring more money down the rat hole of the monopolistic public education system.  If he were really serious about reform, he'd dismantle the public monopoly and give everyone vouchers.  Instead:

His overall education package for pre-kindergarten through high school would increase spending $782 million over the two years, including more than doubling current spending levels[.]

This reminds me of the classic Star Trek episode called "This Side of Paradise."  In it, a governor of the planet Omicron Ceti III, also named Sandoval (!), was sprayed by alien plant spores and as a result became rather lazy and leftist.  Sandoval ran a collectivized farm that produced just barely enough to feed his people but no more.  He took the path of least resistance to keep the slowly failing system going.  Governor Sandoval of Nevada has much in common with the governor of Omicron Ceti III.  I can only wonder what he's been sprayed with.

Pedro Gonzales is editor of Newsmachete.com, the conservative news site.