To tell the truth

Being the people who make a newspaper must be kind of like being the people who make hot dogs: There are things that you just can’t unsee. In the interest of not trying to predict the future of the most anti-tax legislature Nevada has ever had—and again, we’re not predicting, just saying it walks like a duck—we were going to attempt to withhold prejudgment.

But like the rest of the world, we read and heard what Gov. Brian Sandoval had to say at his swearing-in, and we can’t just hold our tongues. Fingers, that is.

Have you done a head count, Gov. Sandoval? The anti-taxers are in the majority. We have a tough time believing that the taxes that are scheduled to sunset this year won’t sunset. These guys are committed. Our colleagues in journalism around the state, too, have ignored the meaning of the election, continuing to predict “tax reform,” whatever that means.

It’s nice to put on a game face right before your career comes to a screeching halt—to be proudly optimistic—but while Sandoval’s popularity as a governor is unquestioned, his bona fides as a rabid righter among these wolverines isn’t even up for negotiation. To their minds, he’s liberal-to-moderate. So some of the statements like the ones he made in his swearing-in speech are difficult to parse. We know the right didn’t buy his arguments, and if we know it, we know Gov. Sandoval knows it.

We have to first recognize the problems are real before the governor and the Legislature begin to fix them. We’re just kidding about that last part.

We wish Gov. Sandoval and the 2015 Nevada Legislature the best of luck. We have high hopes that they will act contrary to their track records and instead make financial decisions that improve our education system, moderate the state’s regressive tax system, and not attempt to undermine the civil liberties of women and minorities.

But at the very minimum, everybody should at least stop pretending that everything’s rosy.

This editorial was substantially edited on January 8, 2015, to remove references to an earlier speech and the news website that published them. We apologize for any confusion our error might have caused.