Opinion

Just two short years ago Democrats howled and shrieked over the Bush administration’s proposed 2009 budget. The $3.1 trillion spending plan was projected to rack up a record $407 billion deficit.

I agree that during this ongoing state budget crisis there is a group of citizens shouldering an unfair burden. But that group is the taxpayers who are struggling to put food on their tables and roofs over their heads while at the same time paying for the fat salaries and exorbitant benefit and retirement packages of government employees.

Businesses need all the help they can get these days. Businesses brave enough to launch or expand in this economy deserve even more — a standing ovation and a bear hug, for starters.

With the stimulus boondoggle, the health care fiasco, failed bailouts, Haiti, underwear bombers, people sneaking into White House events and the other nonsense the two parties force citizens to endure, how can anyone have confidence in anything associated with Washington?

Samantha Burton, a 26-year-old unmarried Florida mother of two, was 25 weeks pregnant last March when she displayed signs of premature labor. At the urging of her obstetrician, she sought care at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital.

Our last two Democratic presidents have wasted a year each by pursuing the perceived moral imperative of comprehensive health care reform aimed at universal insurance.

State and local governments must cut more than $1.3 billion in spending to balance their books through June 2011. It’s going to be a brutal process for public employees, whose salaries and benefits consume the vast majority of operational expenses. After more than two years of slumping economic conditions and tax revenue declines, sizable layoffs and pay cuts are unavoidable.

I was glad to see the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada taking on the inequity of Nevada’s mining tax (Jan. 16 Review-Journal). John Winthrop, the early American Puritan, once noted that “the rich and mighty should not eat up the pool.” The mining industry has been eating up Nevada, raking up gross profits while leaving the state little to show for 100 years of exploitation and environmental degradation.

Last year, a Review-Journal report exposed the abuse of University Medical Center’s emergency room by 80 illegal immigrants with failing kidneys. The dialysis treatments provided to these noncitizens costs more than $2 million per month, with the bills forwarded to Clark County taxpayers. … Nevada’s congressional delegation agreed the situation demanded a response.

Reversing a District Court decision, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the groundwater applications underpinning a multibillion-dollar plan to pipe groundwater to Las Vegas from east central Nevada may not be valid.