The subject of today’s exercise is money – yours and theirs.

‘You,’ in this context, is the Vermont citizen taxpayer. ‘They’ are the six people with ambition to lead the government of said citizen-taxpayers, all of whom have recently released their 2009 federal income tax returns.

Let’s deal with “them” first, because it’s simpler and quicker, starting with this indisputable and somewhat surprising piece of information: Not one of them is filthy rich.

Peter Shumlin, the Senate President from Putney (and a Democrat, as are they all except Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, so we won’t have to keep specifying party labels here) comes closest.

Shumlin reported $974,732 in total income last year, most of it – more than $617,000 – from rents and royalties, and about $286,000 from wages and salary. He paid $271,870, or about 27 percent of his total income, in federal income taxes.

He sure wasn’t cheating on his taxes. Many taxpayers at that income level pay far less of it to the feds.

Shumlin is in Vermont’s top income bracket, but he’s small potatoes compared with – just to take one example out of the blue – Barack Obama, who cleared more than 5 million clams last year, mostly royalties from the books he’s written.

Not to mention compared with Sen. John McCain, who couldn’t remember exactly how many houses he owned when he ran against Obama in 2008. By national political standards, Shumlin is a piker. Even in Vermont, that kind of income doesn’t quite meet the “filthy rich” level, unless someone earns it for so many years that he acquires huge amounts of property and other capital.

Shumlin, a businessman who is, among other things, a director at Putney Student Travel, which arranges foreign trips for students, seems to be in the early stages of that process. But it would take him a while to get to the filthy rich level, and if he gets elected, being governor might prove too great a distraction.

The rest of the field doesn’t even qualify as rich, though all would seem to be comfortably affluent. The incomes range from a low of $95,969 (Sen. Susan Bartlett) to $198,435 (former Sen. Matt Dunne). In the middle were Dubie ($165,395); Sen. Doug Racine ($136,192) and Secretary of State Deb Markowitz ($122,614).

The lesson here appears to be that one need not be a multi-millionaire to get elected governor of Vermont. While it’s probably not true that anyone can be governor – all the contenders earn substantially more than the typical Vermonter – a whole lot of people can reasonably aspire to the state’s top job.

Taken together, the only outstanding revelation in the tax disclosures is that…there is no outstanding revelation in the tax disclosures. Judged by their tax returns at least, the gubernatorial field is a bunch of moderately successful, law-abiding, respectable folks.

Oh, and maybe bland.

In fact, the returns are so unexciting that there is no point in going into detail about them here. Whoever is interested can get them on line, though not via the candidate web sites. Try the web sites of the major newspapers or TV stations.

Now to your money, or at least the part of it the state is going to tax. There were a couple of interesting if tentative developments at the Statehouse yesterday.

One is that the Senate seems to be intent on raising the statewide property tax two cents higher than the House voted for or the Douglas Administration proposed.

It’s right there in a document the Senate Appropriations Committee prepared to explain the differences between the two houses over H. 783. The Senate would set the education property tax rates for Fiscal Year 2011 at $1.37 for nonresidential property, and $0.88 for “homestead property,” in both cases two cents higher than the House version.

This displeased some House members, especially Rep. Ann Manwaring of Wilmington. She said the Senate was supporting an Administration proposal to shift $6.89 million in federal funding for Special Education Revenue into the General Fund, thereby shorting the Education Fund, where these monies had gone in the past.

Actually, she didn’t just say this; she had a document to back it up, a list of proposals from Senate Appropriations.

But the document had the word “Draft,” penciled on top in big capital letters, and Shumlin warned, “at this stage in the session, don’t take seriously anything the House says about the Senate, or the Senate about the House.”

Perhaps some bargaining is taking place.

As it seems to be on another issues, raising taxes on people who don’t earn a lot of money and therefore qualify for the “income sensitivity” rebate on the statewide school property tax even though they might live in a million-dollar home and have other assets.

Stories about such incidents, including this one in the Burlington Free Press have annoyed if not enraged some folks, many of whom would agree with Senate Finance Chair Ann Cummings, who said “they should probably sell (their expensive house) and pay taxes on a smaller house.”

The annoyance is understandable, but in some ways this seems like a fake issue. As Sen. Mark MacDonald of Williamstown noted, the statewide property tax isn’t really a property tax. It was designed to tax most people on the basis of their income, not on the value of their property. Only the wealthiest, he said, are really taxed primarily on the value of their property.

This is not entirely true. A $70,000 household whose statewide property tax bill was only about $1,700 would be taxed on the value of its property, because the bill is less than 2.5 percent of its income, the current maximum.

But this is probably rare. Like other Americans, most Vermonters no doubt buy as much house as they can afford, if not more, so most households earning less than $90,000 (and that’s a large majority of households) have their tax capped on the basis of their income.

The proposed changes, MacDonald said, would “create a tax on these people that never existed,” forcing them to pay on the basis of the value of their property rather than their moderate incomes.

The beneficiaries, he said, would not be modest-income people in more modest houses, whose tax would remain capped according to their income, but the very wealthy, most of whom pay no more than half a percent of their income in the statewide school tax.

But Cummings said the change might bring in as much as $10 million. Considering the budget crunch, lawmakers are unlikely to resist some formula for raising taxes on the opulently housed but moderately paid.

USA Today came to Vermont last week to write about the Vermont Yankee squabble, and in Friday’s paper the reporter quoted Yankee spokesman Larry Smith describing the nuclear power plant’s opponents as “hippies from the ’60s who want to be against something, and it’s nuclear power.”

Not a very smart thing to say, at least not in the judgment of one Larry Smith, who said Tuesday, “not the smartest thing I ever said.”

Not what he meant, either, said Smith, who didn’t deny saying it. But he was referring, he said, only to some of those who oppose relicensing the plant for another 20 year run, “many of the same people who attended those (anti-nuclear) hearings” 40 years ago.

“The people who moved up here in the 60s, sort of counter-culture folks,” he said. “But it was not a general characterization. I would never characterize all our opponents that way.”

Good enough. But here’s the interesting thing. If he had meant it as a serious description of those against the relicensing (and we take him at his word that he did not), he would have had a point.

Not literally, of course. If the latest polls are accurate, most Vermonters don’t want the plant licensed to run past March of 2012, and surely most Vermonters do not fit the definition of “hippie”: “a person who opposes and rejects many of the conventional standards and customs of society” (American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition).

But broadening the definition a little (well, OK; a lot), the description fits. At least the leaders of the anti-Yankee forces tend to be political liberals, environmentalists who are suspicious of all large corporations, who might go out of their way to eat locally grown, organic food, who listen to public radio.

To a corporate executive at a nuclear power plant, these people would be not only wrong on the issue, but also…not my kind of people. Conversely, on the other side of the debate, those executives would be not only wrong on the issue, but…not our kind of people.

At some point this political tribalism becomes as significant, if not more so, than the differences over the issues, real though they are. On both sides, beating those other guys (not our kind of people) becomes the real goal.

This is not a phenomenon unique to Vermont. Take the dispute over drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The oil industry does not support drilling as fervently as do conservative commentators and operatives (the industry isn’t sure there’s that much oil there). The conservative commentariate has no economic vested interest. They just want to “stick it to the hippies,” or, more accurately, defeat environmentalists, who are not their kind of people (and who in turn delight in the conservative discomfort about continuing to lose this battle).

Something similar is going on in Vermont with regard to “permit reform,” which apparently isn’t going to happen again this year. But it’s a perennial. It will be back, promoted by the business community (especially the building contractors) and supported by most Republicans.

Their argument is that the hoops through which developers must jump before they are allowed to begin construction projects suppress economic growth in the state. Were it easier, quicker, and cheaper to get permits, they say, there would be more construction projects, hence more jobs and faster economic growth.

The argument is not provably false. But it is almost surely not true, raising the possibility that another motive is at work here, that what the “permit reform” advocates really want to do is “stick it to the hippies.”

Or to put it more responsibly, some Vermonters are still so bitter about losing the fight over the passage of Act 250, 40 years ago, and some other environmental laws since, that they want revenge. If not to repeal the law (a political impossibility) at least to weaken it.

This is not a sentiment confined to the right side of the ideological spectrum. Some feminists still (metaphorically speaking) froth at the mouth when reminded of the failure of the Equal Right Amendment 30 years ago.

But what is the foundation for concluding that Act 250 and the other environmental rules have not suppressed Vermont’s economy?

A good question with a simple answer: Vermont’s economy has not been suppressed.

By almost every measurement, the state’s economy has grown as fast as or faster than the economies of its neighboring states.  In the last 40 years, Vermont’s per capita income, once far behind the national median, has almost caught up with it.  The state now ranks 23^rd in personal income per capita.

The most recent statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that Vermont’s economy grew by 1.7 percent in 2008, faster than the country as a whole, faster than the New England region, faster than the rest of the Northeast, faster than the South or the Great Lakes, and just as fast as the Southwest.

And they got oil.

Furthermore, there are no data – none – indicating that Vermont’s permitting process prevents or even much delays development projects not likely to harm the environment.

According to a recent report by the Natural Resources Board, last year 82 percent of 380 Act 250 applications were approved without a hearing. Decisions on almost two thirds of all applications were issued within 60 days, and 81 percent were issued within 120 days.

Five, or 1.2 percent of the applications, were denied a permit.

But what about the applications that never get filed because the developer finds the process daunting or distasteful or expensive?

Well, one cannot prove a negative. But look at it this way: a smart developer seeing an opportunity to make a profit will file the application even if filing it is a pain in the neck.

Unless, of course, the developer is not sure the project will meet the guidelines. In that case, the law is working exactly as intended, stopping the environmentally damaging projects while allowing the vast majority of proposals to proceed.

This doesn’t mean that a developer has never given up on a project because of the permitting process. No doubt a few have. But it makes no difference. The site the developer was considering is still there.  Another developer will come along with another project.

None of this means that the permitting system can’t be improved. Anything can be improved, especially government bureaucracies, which often move at all deliberate dawdling. Nor is it intended to absolve  the other side of this discussion–the environmentalists–of their own tribal hostilities.

But next time someone says Vermont will go broke unless it does something about its environmental permitting system, remember that some folks have been saying this for the last 40 years, during which Vermont has gotten richer. Whoever spreads that message probably is less interested in prosperity than in sticking it to the hippies.

In absolute terms, Vermont is doing better than it was twelve days ago (See Census Sense, April 7) , but in relative terms, it’s lagging just about as far behind.

As of yesterday, the Census Bureau web site showed that Vermont had a 65 percent rate of returning 2010 Census forms. That was better than the 56 percent recorded April 6. But it still lagged behind the national rate, by the same four percentage points.

And this is supposed to be the most educated state in the union?

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The late Sen. William Scott

Thanks (or perhaps more accurately, no thanks) to missed phone calls and the varying schedules of both parties, the News Guy’s report on the wisdom, or lack thereof, of stocking Vermont rivers with “put-and-take” adult trout (Taking Stock, April 9) lacked the key information of how much the Fish and Wildlife Department spent on this activity.

Tom Wiggins (inexplicably called “Wiggin” in the original post; apologies to him) reports that the total cost of the program this year will be approximately $4.57 million, $2.85 million to staff and operate the hatcheries, and $1.72 million for to administer the actual stocking.

This money does not come from the taxpayers. Wiggins said about 75 percent of is from federal funds obtained from the excise tax on fishing gear, and the other 25 percent is from the money anglers pay for their fishing licenses ($20 for a Vermont resident).

Still, every penny the Department spends on stocking is a penny it can not spent on habitat protection, which all the biologists agree is the best method for providing healthy fish populations in the long run.

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Ken Page is a mentsch.

Page is the high school principal — indeed, the head of the Vermont Principals Association – teased (if not downright ridiculed) in last Monday’s post (“Three for Monday,” April 12 ) for ungrammatically saying “less students” instead of the correct “fewer students.”

A lesser man might have been resentful, or at least have ignored the attack. Not Page, who sent an email with the subject line “guilty as charged.” He was wrong, he knew it, and he said so.

And for whatever it’s worth, Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education of the entire United States of America, made the same mistake last week.

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Last Thursday was, of course, Tax Day, a day Americans have been conditioned to revile even though about 80 percent of all tax filers got or will get refunds, according to IRS figures. Furthermore, almost everyone is paying less in federal income taxes this year than last year.

That includes Vermonters. According to Sen. Bernie Sanders, 99 percent of Vermont working families and individuals “received a much-needed average federal tax cut of over $1,100 for 2009.” In addition, he said, “14,000 Vermont families were able to receive an expanded tax cut to send their kids to college last year (and) nearly 60,000 Vermont small businesses received tax cuts to purchase new equipment and other things.”

For those who find Sanders a less than reliable source, everything he said checks out, except calling the tax cut “much-needed” which is of course his assessment, but one that will not be disputed here.

Speaking of federal taxes, another reason Vermonters ought to temper their displeasure about them is that they got back more than they pay out to the feds.

According to the latest tabulation by the Tax Foundation, Vermont’s individuals, businesses, and governments get $1.08 for every dollar Vermonters pay to the feds (that’s total federal taxes, not just the income tax).

That puts Vermont right about in the middle – 26^th – of the rankings, which, truth to tell, might not mean much. The states that get back the most – Alabama led, getting back $2.03 for every dollar – tend to be the poorest, while those at the bottom – New Jersey got back only 61 cents – are generally the wealthiest.

Actually, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

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Some years ago there was a U.S. Senator named William Scott, a Virginia Republican. In 1974 New Times magazine published an article noting that Scott had been named “the dumbest Congressman” by an organization affiliated with Ralph Nader.

Since New Times had little clout in Washington and less in Virginia, Scott’s best option was obviously to ignore the designation. He did not. Instead, he called a press conference to deny the description, thereby confirming it.

An incident brought to mind recently when the Rutland Herald ran an editorial titled “Prism of Paranoia” arguing that Republicans were motivated largely by “festering anger.”

Like all editorials, this one was rebuttable. Alas, in his letter rebutting it, Steve Larrabee, the Chairman of the Vermont Republican Party, displayed no small amount of…well, anger.

The assertion that “all we have to offer is anger is false and misleading,” not to mention “reprehensible and unjustifiable,” Larrabee wrote, adding, “I can only conclude that this is intentionally so.”

Larrabee’s letter did not rise (or perhaps sink) to what we might call Scottian levels. He did provide some factual evidence to support his argument that the GOP has more to offer than anger.

But here’s some free advice to political operatives responding to condemnation: when criticized for being angry, respond with wry amusement, biting sarcasm, sardonic satire or the like. Not with anger. He may not be a model Republicans want to follow, but Robert Kennedy’s advice remains sound: “Don’t get mad. Get even.”

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And finally (and again, for what it’s worth) from Vermontbiz.com , the online version of Vermont Business Magazine, comes word that the folks at U-Haul International found that many more people are moving into Vermont than out of it.

In fact,  said U-Haul President of Phoenix Operations John “J.T.” Taylor, “for states with 5,000 – 20,000 families moving, Vermont had the highest (in-over-out) percentage, with a growth rate of 16.67 percent in 2009, moving Maine to second place after two years of ranking first”

Obviously, the U-Haul folks count only those who move in and out with U-Haul vehicles, and the statement read more like an advertisement than a data-based research report.

Still, for what it’s worth…