I bet your commute felt smoother today, your road rage ebbed, your tardiness for a meeting hardly bothered you. Thanks to Gov. Jim Gibbons, Southern Nevada's highways and byways will be clogged no more, thanks to a fix-it-all plan that does not raise taxes.

If only.

As many tourists, who are supposed to pay to keep our roads traffic-free, learn after they swoon over signs blinking about 97 percent slot payouts, if it sounds too good to be true ... well, you know the rest. Gibbons is presenting the rosiest of scenarios, one apparently implanted in his psyche by some kind of Tony Robbins/Dr. Phil-like therapy from Gondolier Numero Uno Sheldon Adelson. I think the governor may actually have convinced himself - maybe after listening to "Adelson guts the convention authority" tapes as he drifts off at night - that this not only will salvage him politically but will do no harm.

But you cannot keep a "no new taxes" pledge in the fastest-growing state in the country, where the canard of growth paying for growth has been repeatedly exposed, and not cause a Newtonian effect. For every tax dollar taken from one pot and placed in another, there is an equal and opposite loss of revenue from another sector.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. There is a financial impact of this plan that is as inexorable as the political juggernaut - the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the gaming lobby - revving up to defeat the governor's plan.

There will be those who say if the gaming industry is against something, they are for it. And some of those people will not just be populist flame-throwers but business types who enjoy seeing the bull's-eye on gaming and not them. I understand the politics of "tax anyone but me." And so does the governor, who since he proposed a two-thirds supermajority requirement a decade ago to approve tax increases in Nevada has made a career out of this notion that tax-haters make a sturdy political base.

This, of course, is not consonant with the reality of a state where the roads, education and social service infrastructure is stretched to the limit and will soon break - thus resulting in either a popular uprising and crazy ballot initiatives or the usual short-term fixes with long-term consequences.

The Gibbons road plan will have long-term consequences. This is not an opinion; it is a fact. The only question is how severe the consequences will be.

"They are doing a great job," Gibbons said this week of the LVCVA during an interview with friendly radio hosts on KXNT 840-AM. "I am not looking to take money out of their pockets."

But, of course, he is. Gibbons can throw out numbers such as $2.2 billion - the amount of aggregate revenue that the LVCVA will amass during the next years - to help make his case. But what he doesn't include is what the money is spent on, whether it is well spent and whether gradually taking more of that money could hurt efforts to market the city. Before you were to take money from an organization, wouldn't you want to show the public that the organization doesn't need it - instead of throwing out large numbers to spin your case?

What the governor is doing instead is parrot the same arguments that Adelson has used over the years because of his frustration with the quasi-public entity competing with his convention center. I find it amusing that the governor actually tells people that the authority charges low rates to its clients - exactly what Adelson has said for years.

And how would other business folks feel about a governor telling them what they should charge? I wonder.

Maybe the governor is correct, though. Maybe this won't hurt the authority, even though other number-crunchers believe it will. But what Gibbons can't explain is how he will make up for the lost general fund revenue from the other components of his roads plan - sales tax on vehicles and live entertainment tax. All he can offer is that those revenues will grow and that there will be no budget hole in two years.

Everyone better hope he's right if his plan passes (which is doubtful). If he's not, the 2009 session will be all about how to fill that hole - and my guess is the governor will not propose any tax increases to do so, so the budget sword will be unsheathed.

But at least all the traffic will be gone.