Oh, the poor, pitiful people of Vermont.

They wander the streets, bearing on their aching backs their worldly possessions, perhaps in a knapsack, perhaps in a bindle. As darkness nears, they seek shelter. Under bridges and overpasses, in a nearby barn, perhaps on the porch of a general store or the doorway of a church. They are , by the tens if not the hundreds of thousands, homeless.

They must be. The headline of the lead story in yesterday’s Burlington Free-Press proclaimed that “Most in Vt. still cannot buy a home.” That’s what the story said: “Most Vermonters can’t afford to buy a home.”

A calamity, especially because just 15 days earlier came word that Vermonters were having an awfully hard time renting a home, too.

“For Vermont’s renters, the news isn’t good,” noted a report from the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition. The study it released that day concluded that to afford a decent two-bedroom apartment, one full-time earner would have to work 87 hours a week. Clearly, nobody can work 87 hours a week.

Most Vermonters, it seems, are unable to buy a home and can not afford to rent one. Ergo, they must homeless.

Ergo fly a kite.

Clearly, neither an editor at the Free Press nor any of the authors of  ”Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” the study on which the story was based, knew this little fact: At least 71 percent of the people of Vermont — more than in most other states — live in owner-occupied houses. Almost every one of the other 29 percent somehow rent houses or apartments even though the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition would have you believe that they can not afford to pay the rent.

Either this state has a lot of very forgiving landlords or there’s something fishy about that report.

Probably there’s something fishy about both those reports, and about the near-universal acceptance of them as objective, reliable, sources of information. It isn’t that they are put out by people who don’t mean well and don’t do some good. The Affordable Housing Coalition doesn’t just put out reports. It helps low income people find places to rent and works with both public officials and the private sector to encourage the construction of moderately-priced dwellings.

And it isn’t that these two reports are wrong exactly. Lots of people in this state have trouble finding decent housing at an affordable price. There’s no point going through all the figures in this exercise. If you want the details, read the originals about rentals here and home-ownership here.

But remember, these studies are by advocates, not objective observers. They are honorable advocates trying to find solutions to genuine problems. But like all advocates, they tend to get parochial. Their cause is housing. So they see the problem – that a lot of people can’t afford to buy or rent adequate housing – as a housing problem.

Isn’t it? Well, yes. Or then again, no. It’s a relationship problem – the relationship of income to housing costs. True, housing costs have gone up over the years. But just as important is that income – especially income for the not-so-wealthy – has not.

As it happens, the issuance of both reports coincides roughly with the granting of the John Bates Clark award (for the best American economist under the age of 40) to Emmanuel Saez. Among Saez’s recent discoveries is that, as White House Office of Management and Budget chief Peter Orzag put it, “the very highest earners…(captured)  almost three-quarters of total income growth in the economic expansion of 2002 to 2006, while the remaining 99 percent of the U.S. population split among themselves the final 25 percent of the increase.”

And the farther down you go among that 99 percent, the smaller the share of the pie. No wonder lower income people find it hard to rent a decent home.

But because these two studies have been undertaken by organizations devoted to housing, they assume that  the problem is essentially a housing problem with a housing solution. But maybe it’s at least as much a wage problem with a wage solution. Does Vermont need more dwelling units or stronger labor unions?

Almost without exception, advocacy group studies accent the negative. It’s only natural. If the situation weren’t so dire, why…why, you might not even need the advocacy groups.

OK, that’s a little unfair. Housing affordability is a real problem for some people, and good for the advocates for their reminders. But both of them tilt the evidence to make the situation look worse than it really might be. Read the rental report carefully, for instance, and you discover that the typical two-earner family actually can afford a decent two-bedroom apartment. As it turns out, a typical two-earner family can even afford to buy a house.

Yes, there are a lot of one-earner households, especially among renters. But some of them are one and two-person households who don’t need a two-bedroom apartment.

“Between a Rock and a Hard Place” by the Housing Council and the Vermont Housing Awareness Campaign concludes by saying, “The perennial answer to Vermont’s housing shortage is more housing, particularly more housing affordable to Vermonters of low and moderate incomes.” But it never really established that there is a housing shortage as opposed to a disconnect between incomes and rentals.

Both studies also suggest (though, in fairness, they never actually state) that these housing problems are peculiar to Vermont, and therefore somehow can be eased if only Vermont changed one policy or other. But nothing in the “Rock and Hard Place” study supports any such conclusion.

The rental study, “Out of Reach,” does point out that Vermont is “the 15^th most expensive state in the nation for renters,” which seems to mean that the gap between the median wage and the median rental is 15^th largest in the country. No surprise. Vermont is in the expensive Northeast.

The “Rock and Hard Place” study also assumes (though, again, it never overtly states) the superiority of home-ownership over renting. A questionable assumption. For many people, especially those who have modest incomes and not much of a nest-egg in the bank for a down payment, renting might make sense. Spending money and creating programs to help lower-income earners buy their own homes could be a waste of time and money, and perhaps a disservice to the supposed beneficiaries. The current economic mess stems in part from too many people buying houses they couldn’t really afford. Policy-makers might want to reconsider the wisdom of encouraging such purchases.

Yup, there’s a housing problem in Vermont. Maybe an exaggeration problem, too.

Oh, no, not the local angle.

Always be wary of the veteran newsie who can find the parochial aspect of the most universal story. Sometimes it’s a stretch. Were all life on earth in danger of ending tomorrow, the likely implications for Vermont would be indistinguishable from those in Botswana.

And so one might think about the two major news stories (so far) of the current week – the swine flue outbreak and Sen. Arlen Specter’s switch to the Democrats. There’s a “Vermont angle” to these developments?

Specter

Yeah, actually, there is. Or, more precisely, there are. The local applications are indirect, and less than earth-shaking. But that renders them no less real. The first connection is scientific, and a reminder to be prudent. The second is obviously political, and a reminder that the politics of the region is changing rapidly enough to shock the average Vermonter.

Not that it should. Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that another moderate Republican senator left the Republican Party. That was Vermont’s Jim Jeffords, in a prelude of sorts to what happened yesterday.

The flu outbreak has no direct Vermont connection. But it has a possible Vermont application if the virus first leaped from pigs to humans near the site of a massive pig-farming operation in Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz.

That’s not certain. The first cases were reported in Vera Cruz, but that falls short of proof that the big pig farm was the culprit. Still, that does seem to be the working hypothesis, because it is consistent with the connection between certain diseases and  human-caused dense concentrations of animals. For example, many fish biologists think the whirling disease that has decimated the rainbow trout populations in many Western rivers originated in hatcheries.

Vermont does not have any huge pig farms. It does have some fairly large dairy and chicken farms, and proposals to create more. It also has elk farms, and captive elk have been associated with chronic wasting disease (CWD), the always-fatal transmissible spongiform encephalopathy which can spread to wild deer.

That’s why the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department has a moratorium on any more captive elk hunting preserves, though the existing facilities in Irasburg and Fairlee have been “grandfathered in.”

Even these, though, will have to get permits by next January, according to David Englander of Fish and Wildlife, who said the permits will be granted only if the hunting preserves meet “very specific objective requirements” about the size and strength of the fences they put up to keep the captive elk in and the wild deer out. And if the fences don’t work, “if there are repeated intrusions or escapes,” the Department can order further steps.

In addition, there are several farms that raise elk (but do not allow hunting of them) in the state. These are under the jurisdiction of the Agriculture and Markets Department, which also imposes regulations designed to keep elk from mingling with wild deer. There have been no reports of CWD in Vermont, but at least one case was reported at an elk farm in nearby upstate New York.

So beware of artificial concentrations of swine, cervids, fish, fowl, and quite possibly, humans.

The political news also affects Vermont indirectly, but sweepingly. It illustrates a reality somewhat obscured within the state’s borders: the Republican Party is close to dead in the Northeastern corner of America.

The obscurer, of course, is Gov. Jim Douglas, who has won every election here since the Pleistocene (OK, it only seems that way) and looks like the early favorite, if by no means a cinch, to win a fifth term next year.

But look at the rest of the region. In the ten New England and Middle Atlantic States there are three surviving Republican senators. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire will not seek re-election next year, and is likely to be replaced by a Democrat. That leaves the two ladies from Maine, Olympia Snow and Susan Collins, now lonelier than ever as Republican moderates.

They know it.

“I’ve always been deeply concerned about the views of the Republican Party nationally in terms of their exclusionary policies and views towards moderate Republicans,” Snowe told a Huffington Post reporter yesterday. And to Politico, she said “Ultimately, we’re heading to having the smallest political tent in history, the way things are unfolding.”

Snowe said she would remain a Republican, but she sure didn’t seem enthusiastic about it. No one should be surprised if she or Collins or both do what Jeffords did in 2001, leave the GOP to become an independent. The Jeffords switch did not set off a general Republican exodus as some predicted. But that was largely because the September 11 attacks a few months later gave President George Bush the opportunity to rally the country behind him (and because the Democrats then entered some three years of befuddlement).

There is now not a single Republican member of Congress from New England, and only a handful from the entire Northeast, one less now that a Democrat just won a special election in an upstate New York Congressional district that was drawn to be overwhelmingly Republican.

Specter’s switch was an act of self-interest. Had he stayed a Republican he would probably have lost a primary to a candidate who would then have lost to any Democrat who could breathe and who had not been indicted.

But the political reality behind that likely outcome illustrates what Specter meant when he said that the Republican Party had moved too far to the right. Not long ago Pennsylvania was a swing state. It now appears reliably Democratic. It is also (unlike Vermont) a party registration state where only registered Republicans can vote in Republican primaries. Over the last few years, as Specter pointed out, some 200,000 Republicans have re-registered as Democrats or independents.

This leaves the Republicans – and not just in Pennsylvania – an increasingly conservative party in an increasingly not so conservative part of the country.

Douglas stays in office and retains fairly good (though slipping) approval ratings partly because he’s faced three straight weak Democrats, but also because he’s not all that conservative. But because he has been so successful, it’s easy to lose sight of how heavily (totally?) the Vermont Republican Party depends on him. After him, for the GOP, comes not the deluge, but the draught. It isn’t just that there seem to be few if any good candidates to replace him; there seems to be no spark, no energy, no pizzazz.

And not much in the way of ideas. Nor is it just the politicians. Take a look or listen to the Republican-leaning commentators, academics, or activists. It would be somewhat unfair to suggest that they have nothing to say. It would be reasonable to wonder whether what they say has much relation to reality.

Not that the Democratic-leaning commentators, etc, are always models of restraint and accuracy. But they are (usually) coherent and comprehensible. The Republicans often seem to be stuck in another world. Now that the real Alan Greenspan has conceded that market fundamentalism was a mistake, why can’t his one-time idolaters figure that out?

In a sense, the Recession has helped Douglas, and it could help the Vermont Republicans. With revenue so short, the state either has to cut deeply into its programs or raise taxes. The Democrats have opted for the latter, and being against tax increases is never without some political advantage.

But the advantage could prove fleeting. Or non-existent. It’s quite possible that a majority of Vermonters would rather cough up a few more bucks in taxes than see all those programs get slashed.

Besides, even Jim Douglas will not be governor forever. When he isn’t, his party in Vermont could be in even worse shape than the one Arlen Specter just left in Pennsylvania.

The very first program Gov. James Douglas proposed cutting to close the budget gap was V-Pharm, which helps lower-income Medicare patients pay for their prescription drugs.

It was also the first cut the Legislature rejected, though the rejection, like almost everything else about the budget, is subject to revision or reversal in the end-of-days (fiscally speaking) negotiations now under way in Montpelier.

It’s easy to see why Douglas said V-Pharm should be eliminated. Getting rid of it saves a lot of money, roughly $8.6 million.

It’s also easy to see why the lawmakers wanted to save it. The program serves a lot of people, 12, 548 of them according to the official document of the Office of Vermont Health Access. More precisely, 12, 548 people who are at least 65 years old. Legislators are quite sensitive to the wishes of people who are over 65 years old, at least in part because they vote

Douglas called his proposal to eliminate V-Pharm, during his January 22 budget address to the Legislature, “particularly difficult.” He’d been in favor of the program when it was created in 2005. But, he noted, getting rid of it is not going to leave elderly patients dying in the streets.

“Seniors eligible for assistance will still receive a prescriptiondrug benefit through Medicare.,” he said. Meanwhile, the money that has been going to Medicare-covered seniors under V-Pharm should be used “to ensure continued health care coverage for Vermonters with no other options.”

Wherever one stands on the issue of this or the other proposed budget cuts, the Governor’s case deserves to be taken seriously. When money is tight, priorities have to be set. Channeling the money to the very poorest makes some sense.

V-Pharm beneficiaries are not poor. Some of them make as much as two-and-a-half times the poverty rate, meaning an elderly couple with a $35,000 a year income can still get the benefits. That’s not a lot of money, but it should be enough to pay for life’s necessities, including most of the “wrap-around” costs (co-payments) of prescription drugs.

The same holds true for Douglas’s other proposed cuts in social service programs. If the Legislature agrees to all of them (and that’s not likely) Vermont’s social safety net will be weaker, but it will not be in tatters. In fact, the level of services would still be more generous in this state than in than most of the others.

No one has lately starved to death in Vermont, and no one is likely to in the coming year, even if there is a cut in state aid to food banks and homeless shelters. (One Vermonter did die of starvation in another state in 2007, the Health Department said). State and local governments, churches, synagogues, and other private agencies will provide enough food to keep everyone alive.

Of course it’s always possible for someone to slip through the cracks, for a drunk to fall asleep where no one will find him or an old person to be left alone in her home and succumb to hunger and neglect. Such mishaps, though, can happen at any funding level.

But accounts of low-income people eating pet food, notably short of detail, are probably more urban legend than fact. They sound rather like the abortions actually performed with a coat hanger, which almost surely never happened, or, from the other side of the political spectrum, the grown children of the recently deceased small businessman who had to sell the family firm because they couldn’t pay the estate tax. Find them.

It would be absurd to claim that the cuts called for by the Governor would not degrade the quality of some people’s lives. They would. In a few cases, those cuts would probably even cause people to suffer. But not all degradation is suffering, and there is nothing inherently evil about taking into account the limits of the community’s (meaning the taxpayers’) obligation to care for people. If (as noted here yesterday) some business leaders and conservative commentators exaggerate the horrors of even the tiniest tax hike, perhaps some liberal activists equally overstate the consequences of modest budget cuts

Then there is the question of personal responsibility. Considering that 87 percent of all Vermont households have cable or satellite television service (so estimates the National Association of Broadcasters) It is almost certain that a substantial majority of the V-Pharm beneficiaries are hooked up, and a pretty good bet that so are many, if not most, of the people going to food bank (though of course the homeless are not).

Maybe before they get the free food or the drug benefits they should cancel the cable and spend the $40 or so a month on necessities. Nobody needs a hundred television channels (or a television set at all?) to live a decent life.

People do need health care to live a decent life, and because of the proposed cuts, some might go without it. This even includes some of the not-so-poor V-Pharm recipients. Patients whose drugs are so expensive that they hit the “donut hole” of the Medicare program, where they have to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket before their benefits kick in again might simply decide to do without their medications. Patients suffering chronic diseases – diabetes, some heart ailments and cancers – often do not have pain or other immediate symptoms for quite a while even if they stop taking their prescriptions.

Again, personal responsibility comes into play here. Many, perhaps most, or these people could dip into savings or get help from their grown (and often affluent) children and pay the bills. Perhaps some of them (as well as other recipients of public aid) should consider moving to a cheaper home or buying a less expensive car. These suggestions might be unkind. But so is ignoring the burden placed on middle-income taxpayers who might not have very much more money than the folks getting helped.

Others who might actually suffer from the Douglas budget cuts are the mentally ill, both children and adults. These patients don’t need money as much as they need caretakers, who have to be paid. If the public agencies and publically funded private non-profits who serve the mentally ill have to lay off workers, the decline in the quality of life of their patients could decline to a level many would find intolerable.

One unusual (and largely un-noted) aspect of the current debate is that, in their determination to protect spending programs for the poor and low-income,  the liberal activists oppose all spending cuts, even those that benefit the rich. There has been, for instance, no suggestion to cut the $3.6 million budget for Department of Tourism and Marketing, some of which subsidizes the promotion efforts of profit-making ski and golf resorts.

Or what about Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Susan Bartlett’s recent threat to close all the Interstate Highway rest areas and temporarily shut down the fish hatcheries? That’s money that could  be saved to help the poor and the sick, though in the case of the hatcheries several laws would first have to be changed; they are financed by hunting and fishing license fees and excise taxes on hunting and fishing equipment.

It’s good political tactics for the liberals not to endorse those cuts. Both the rest areas and the hatcheries are popular with middle-class constituencies. Setting them against the poor would be a risky move.

Barbara Postman, the policy coordinator for the “One Vermont” coalition fighting the budget cuts said her group didn’t want to play the “Don’t cut you, don’t cut me, cut the fellow behind the tree,” game, playing one interest against another

“We don’t have a spending problem,” she said, “we have a revenue problem. Before this economic downturn, the Governor signed off on this spending level. Now have a big drop in revenue. We (the “One Vermont” coalition) don’t have the capacity to analyze the budget at that intricate level” to say what else should be cut.

Perhaps nobody does. Try to find the Vermont State Budget, or the budget of any state agency on the Internet. It doesn’t seem to be available. It isn’t that the appropriations are secret. Through the Legislative web site anyone can find last year’s budget bills as passed, and see the appropriation for each agency.

But not a detailed, accounting of the item-by-item, function-by-function spending from year to year. On Thursday, the liberal Public Assets Institute and the conservative Ethan Allen Institute will unveil a new web site designed to make the Vermont budget process more transparent.

But their efforts will be limited by the information actually available from state government, which seems not to be much.

You don’t suppose some folks prefer it that way?