One of the nice things about Nevada is that it has a relatively low tax rate and, consequently, a fairly small government. For example, in 2006, Nevada ranked 43rd in per-household expenditures. Unfortunately, though Nevada has a relatively small government, it also has a profoundly inept one that can’t seem to spend what limited money it has wisely. Consequently, cost overruns are all too common as Nevada’s legislature signs off on random projects that have a “low” initial cost but, upon implementation, prove to be much more expensive.

The latest example of this? An environmentally-friendly wood-burning power plant… for a prison.

A wood-burning power plant hailed by Nevada officials as an environment-friendly project to save the state money on power bills is beset with so many problems it might cost more than it earns for 17 years.

[…]

At the time, prison officials argued the project would pay for itself within 15 years, power the prison and produce enough excess electricity to sell back to Sierra Pacific Power Co.

An analysis by the Legislative Counsel Bureau, however, said the plant likely will have a negative cash flow for 17 years.

Cost overruns happen. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true. However, what’s truly comical about this is the assumptions they made in order to concoct the initial budget number:

Lawmakers were forced Wednesday to approve an emergency $540,000 to hire a contractor to operate the plant because the state doesn’t have qualified staff to run it.

Prison officials planned to have a staff person supervise inmates to run the plant. But they scrapped that plan when it was discovered inmates lacked the technical expertise and would have enough access to the power system to “shut down our facility,” said Lori Bagwell, deputy director of corrections.

That’s right - the entire plan was to have inmates run the plant… because, when you have less common sense in your head than a fruit fly, this makes perfect sense. After all, people that don’t have enough sense to stay out of jail are precisely the kind of people we want running and maintaining complicated machinery. I mean, we wouldn’t trust most of these people to vote or drive a car - why not let them run a power plant, right? Really? Nobody saw a problem with this?

If politicians in this state could be trusted to spend what little money they have wisely, Nevada might be a little less miserly about government expenditures. However, when things like this are the norm, well, can you blame us for being a little cheap?

An article at the Christian Science Monitor points out that slightly over half of all Americans now receive income from government programs:

Slightly over half of all Americans – 52.6 percent – now receive significant income from government programs, according to an analysis by Gary Shilling, an economist in Springfield, N.J. That’s up from 49.4 percent in 2000 and far above the 28.3 percent of Americans in 1950. If the trend continues, the percentage could rise within ten years to pass 55 percent, where it stood in 1980 on the eve of President’s Reagan’s move to scale back the size of government.

Also courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor (notably, this article about the AMT):

Graphic detailing tax spending per capita

The big item to note from that graphic is that, even if you trim out the “other” that might be defined as pork, we’re still running a deficit. Plus, the big item on that pie chart is none other than Social Security/Medicare. What this means is that shrinking government spending isn’t going to be as easy as telling politicians to spend less on entitlements and line items - if anybody is going to be serious about smaller government, it will mean cuts from existing social programs, and, as Baby Boomers grow older, those existing social programs will only take up more and more money.

So, what do we trim? Defense? It’s also a big money hog, and not the most efficient organization in the world. We currently spend almost as much on defense as the rest of the world combined, or, if you prefer, almost 804,000 times the defense spending of Sao Tome and Principe - this might be a bit overkill. That said, funding is a bit messy at the moment due to our current foreign policy engagements; consequently, cutting the defense budget at the moment is almost certainly out of the picture.

Unfortunately, what’s going to have to happen is people will either need to realize that we need to increase taxes, cut spending, or probably both.