As everybody knows, Vermont has a bad business climate.

Everybody knows it because everybody’s been told it early and often. Politicians, led by none other than Gov. Jim Douglas, regularly bemoan the hostility visited upon businesspersons and entrepreneurs. The business leaders themselves rarely miss a chance to proclaim that were only Vermont’s regulations weaker and its taxes lower, especially on the wealthy (meaning, often, them) they would employ far more workers. Even more rarely do most newspapers and TV stations fail to report those contentions, or to cite “studies” asserting that Vermont’s economy is stifled – if not strangled – by state policies.

It’s almost unanimous.

Oh, except for the actual data.

They (the data) say Vermont is one of the more affluent states, with an economy that grows (and, these days, shrinks) roughly in concert with the rest of the country and/or the region. They say that the state’s economy has its problems, but so do all the others states, and raise the question of why, if Vermont’s business climate is so bad, business in Vermont (until the Recession) isn’t.

Now comes a new report indicating that the business climate couldn’t be that bad because (again until the Recession) Vermont’s economy was quite healthy, another way of saying that business was good.

Better, according to several measurements, than in most other states, including those where taxes are lower and regulations looser.

For instance, according to the report, The Vermont Job Gap Study, Phase 10, Part 1, from 1998 to 2007 Vermont’s rate of job growth was the highest in New England, the 17^th highest in the country, and higher than five of the nine states which have no personal income tax, including neighboring New Hampshire.

During those same years, the study shows, the per capita Gross State Product, grew (in inflation adjusted terms) faster in Vermont than in 45 other states.

“If Vermont was ‘anti-business,’” the report said, “we would not see this result.”

Not that everything is economic peaches-and-cream here, the study acknowledges. Vermont lost manufacturing jobs during those years. But so did 43 other states, 35 of them at a faster rate.

For at least two reasons, this study should be viewed with some skepticism. The first reason is that all studies should be so viewed, in accordance with The General Law of Studies: Every study reaches the conclusion its studier wished to conclude before he/she obtained his/her first datum.

The second reason has to do with its pedigree. The study was written by Doug Hoffer, the Burlington-based policy analyst whose politics are decidedly left of center, on behalf of the Peace and Justice Center, whose politics might be to the left of Hoffer.

In addition, Hoffer used economic statistics from something known as the National Establishment Time Series, not from the standard U.S. Government sources, the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But it isn’t as though the NETS is some kind of Marxist cabal. It’s associated with the Dun & Bradstreet financial services empire, putting it smack dab in the Wall Street mainstream. Firms that subscribe to it base some of their business decisions on its information.

Hoffer said the NETS statistics are better for assessing a state’s economy. Their samples are much larger, he said. In addition, BLS employment figurers are based on payroll surveys, which omit many single practitioners, who are quite common in Vermont.

(For instance, the News Guy probably would not be considered an employed person by the BLS, but might be by NETS. Which appraisal is more accurate will be left to others).

There is no indication that Hoffer cherry-picked either his numbers or the dates he used to make Vermont look better. Not much happened in Vermont between 1998 and 2007 that did not happen in the rest of the country. And his findings are consistent with those of other studies, including (see below) some undertaken by those on the other side of the political spectrum.

So the data – the actual, empirically testable evidence – leads to the conclusion that a business can thrive and prosper in Vermont about as well as in most other states. This is not to say that there are no problems facing businesses in the state, some of them worse here than elsewhere. For many firms, Vermont is far from raw materials and big markets. Some companies have trouble finding enough qualified workers. The state is small, rural, and atypical, all in an economic climate that confers advantages on metropolitan areas, dense population centers, and standardization.

But what about the argument from politicians and some business leaders that Vermont does have a poor business climate? It has to be based on something.

It is. But it is not based on data. Take a look at the presentations made last year to the Blue Ribbon Tax Structure Commission by the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Burlington Industrial Corporation.

They are not insubstantial. They are full of facts, suggestions, anecdotes, proposals, and assessments, some of which are undeniably correct and some of which are debatable. But they make no statistical case that Vermont’s economy is weaker than any other state’s.

Then there are several business-sponsored studies reporting that many business executives in the state (and a few outside it) find Vermont “unfriendly” to business. But with one exception, these are not based on data either, but on the impressions of the business executives surveyed.

Some of their specific complaints are no doubt legitimate. But any survey of business people, or lawyers, or teachers, or (let’s not omit) journalists is going to elicit complaints, because (a) ours is a culture of victimization whose real motto is “woe is me and mine;” (b) under the “squeaky wheel gets the grease” rule, they’d be fools not to complain.

Besides, some of these surveys are weird. Take the one by the very conservative American Legislative Exchange Council which put Vermont next-to-last for pro-business policies between 1997 and 2007 (similar to Hoffer’s time period). But in those years, the study had to concede, personal income per capita grew by 61.2 percent in Vermont, the seventh highest in the country.

Most residents of most states would love to have such a poor business climate.

In fairness, many Vermont business leaders do not complain about state policy. Among the business organizations here is the liberal Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. Not every business leader always agrees with the lobbyists from the Chamber, the Business Roundtable, and the GBIC. Nor do those organizations contend that the state’s business climate is all that terrible.

“This can become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Tom Torti, head of the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber. “You play with fire when you say things are always bad.”

And Seth Bowden, the Director of Business Development for the GBIC, said his organization is “not trying to make a case that we have a bad business environment. Every state has got its pluses and minuses.” Bowden even said Vermont may have been wise in “trying to control growth in particular ways,” though he added that “sometimes that doesn’t work out for some of the businesses.”

It isn’t that neither man had complaints about the state’s economic policy. Not surprisingly, those complaints had to do with taxes, and here the business community is not entirely without statistical evidence. Though even the Tax Foundation has given up arguing that Vermonters shoulder the highest state and local tax burden in the country, there is no doubt that taxes here are higher and more progressive than in most other states.

There is substantial doubt, though, that the current tax structure is bad for business, especially when there is so much evidence that business isn’t bad, or wasn’t before the Recession, and is still not as bad as in many other states.

The tax angle, however, deserves a separate discussion. Tune in Friday.

First, a little housekeeping: Readers who clicked in early Wednesday morning saw the old post from Monday on the site. Sorry. The demons who, it seems, occasionally usurp control at Word Press, disobeyed their orders to publish a new post at a few minutes after midnight.

Plans for subjugating these demons are afoot. Meanwhile, be assured that every Monday Wednesday, and Friday, the News guy will either: (a) have a new post; or (b) make known that there will not be a new post, and also explain why. So if you click in early and find nothing but the old post, you will know that the demons have been active again. Click in again an hour or so later. (And let me know, via email or Face Book; see below).

Had you done so Wednesday, you would have not only read about how almost all Vermonters want the budget cut, just not the parts they like, but also:  praise (really) for the Burlington Free Press; news of a special Thursday posting, which in turn revealed the News Guy’s liaison with the VT Digger web site.

Finally, several readers have noted that they wanted to get in touch via email but the News Guy’s email address is not on the site. They’re right. The address is not immediately visible. But just click on “send a news tip” under “pages.” The message will get through, and it doesn’t matter that it isn’t really a news tip. We won’t tell the demons. Or try via Face Book,

Now on to today’s post…

Diogenes (painting by Jean-Leon Gerome)

Vermonters who choose to peruse the news might be yearning these days for the reincarnation of Diogenes of Sinope, who lived some 2,400 years ago and was famous for walking around Athens with a lantern vainly searching for an honest man (Sorry, ladies, women didn’t count back then).

First and most famously were the statements, some under oath, by top officials of Entergy, that there were no pipes containing radioactive material underneath the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant it owns and operates in Vernon.

Statements uncorrected until an underground pipe at the plant began leaking radioactive material, at which point Entergy officials conceded that there was one such pipe, or maybe a few, or as it turns out 47 and maybe counting.

Then we have the new study by a couple of New Hampshire economists, the subject of a good story in Saturday’s Burlington Free Press by the Associated Press’s Lisa Rathke, that our ski resorts seem to hype the weekend snowfall outlook.

Economists Jonathan Zinman and Eric Zitzewitz, skiers themselves, found that ski resorts (not just in Vermont) reported more snow on weekends than during the week, and substantially more than the nearby weather stations reported.

Sacre bleu! If we can’t trust ski resorts, whom can we trust?

(Perhaps no one. Remember this adage first heard from a Roman Catholic priest: “love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe”).

The ski resorts, needless to say, deny any mendacity, noting that it wouldn’t make sense because it would enrage more skiers than it would attract, and pointing out that there’s nothing unusual about ski slopes, which tend to be up there in the altitude department, getting more snow than the nearest weather station.

Rathke dutifully reports their side of the story. Zinman and Zitzewitz, however, have actual empirical evidence on their side of this argument. Their conclusion is based not on the difference between snowfall at the weather station and (reported) snowfall at the ski slope, but on the difference between reported snowfall during the week and on the weekend. The weekends, or course, are when the resorts can sell more tickets, and when they report 23 percent more snow than they do for Monday through Friday.

Obviously, there is no comparison in the importance of these two examples of…well let’s just say shortage of candor. Vermont Yankee provides a third of the state’s power. Whether to relicense it for another 20 years is perhaps the thorniest public policy question before the body politic. That goop leaking from its underground pipes can be toxic.

Skiing is fun. These days, as the AP story noted, there are “apps” for determining how much it snowed, where. Besides, the skier who gets fooled by the resort’s snow report has him or her self partly to blame. Why believe someone who wants to sell you tickets? You want weather info? Try the National Weather Service, or, in Vermont, the Lyndon State College Meteorology Department. It isn’t that government agencies and colleges never lie. It’s that in this case their only interest is getting the weather right.

In another sense, though, the same phenomenon lies beneath the lack of candor from both Vermont Yankee and the ski resorts. The cynical explanation of that phenomenon is to go back to Diogenes (often called “Diogenes the Cynic”) and conclude that had he managed to stay alive these two millennia plus, he’d still be travelling around with that cotton-picking lamp looking for an honest person, as we would now say, and never finding him or her.

The reality may be more nuanced. On Vermont Public Radio’s Vermont Edition last Friday, Rep. Pat O’Donnell, the Republican who represents Vernon, said she trusts the Vermont Yankee officials because she knows them and considers them honest.

There’s no reason to doubt that she feels that way, or that, on one level at least, she’s right. Let’s stipulate that each of the Vermont Yankee officials is, as a person, a decent and honorable person. Let’s make the same stipulation for the ski resort promotion folks who handed out those snow reports.

But in neither case was any of these persons acting as a person. They were acting as part of a corporate entity.

Don’t misunderstand. This is no populist rant against for-profit corporations, which are necessary in the modern world. This is “corporate” in its more generic definition – two or more people (two or more anythings, really) “united or combined into one body,” as the dictionary says.

It makes no difference whether that “body” is a utility company, a university, a foundation, a government, or the church-run food bank serving the poor. Once a person becomes part of one of those bodies, the person is no longer acting as a person, however honorable he or she may be as a person. He or she is acting on behalf of the corporate entity.

It isn’t the job of a ski area employee to tell the truth. It’s to get people to rent a room, buy ski tickets, eat in the restaurant, drink at the bar. Nor is it the job of Vermont Yankee officials to tell the truth. Their job is to advance the interests of Vermont Yankee.

In the latter case, they may have retarded the company’s interest by not being forthcoming about the pipes. But that’s a detail. The point here is that when it comes to believing anyone speaking in the interests of his or her corporate body, the wise citizen will love as he or she chooses, trust almost no one, and either paddle his own canoe or measure her own snow depth, or both.

BAGS

To illustrate how difficult it is likely to be to reduce the cost of public education in Vermont without also reducing the quality of same, please allow a local example or two.

These postings come to you from Barton, up in the Northeast Kingdom, where 153 children attend the Barton Academy and Grade School, not surprisingly referred to as BAGS by some, a standard kindergarten-through-eighth grade school.

For years, the school employed a professional, highly regarded school librarian, and the pupils had regular access to the library, where they could look up information, browse the shelves, get help selecting a book.

At the end of the last school year, she retired. To save money, the school decided not to replace her, at least for this year. Instead, the head of the computer room would do double duty at the library. By all accounts, she’s doing a great job. She’s capable, energetic, dedicated.

But she’s not a librarian. And because she has other duties, the pupils don’t have quite as much access to or guidance in the library as they did last year, and for many years before.

The decision not to replace the librarian was reasonable. That’s one less FTE (full-time equivalent) employee whose salary and benefits have to be financed by the taxpayers. In a tight economy, with school officials reluctant (as they should be) to raise taxes, leaving that position vacant is, at least debatably, the right choice.

But here is what is not debatable: A school with a fully functioning library presided over by a professional librarian is better than a school without them. It isn’t that BAGS isn’t a good school. Principal George Vanna said the library is “not boarded up” and is open almost as much as it was last year. The younger pupils still get their story hours. But Vanna also acknowledged that he’d rather have a librarian, even if only a part-timer. Maybe next year, he said.

In other words, saving money reduced educational quality. Perhaps not by much. Perhaps saving the money justified the reduction. But reduction it was.

As it almost was up the road at Lake Region High School, where the board decided to save money by cutting both the music program and the Spanish language program from full-time to half-time.

Again, a decision quite reasonable under the circumstances. But – again – a school with full-time music and Spanish instruction is better than a school with half-time music and Spanish instruction. Better enough to be worth the $68,000 needed to keep both programs fully functioning? Who knows? Either way, Lake Region would be a slightly worse school after the cuts (which were partially rescinded earlier this week after a public outcry; the board will try to keep both programs full-time).

The point here is not to express opposition to any of these cutbacks. In fact, it’s hard to see how anyone who served on a school board wouldn’t at least seriously consider approving those cost-saving steps. Whether those programs were worth the money is a legitimate question. But there is no question at all that they were worth something. So eliminating, reducing, or diluting them eliminates, reduces, or dilutes…something, a something which has value.

A lesson worth remembering as Vermont thinks about holding down school spending. In addition to Gov. Jim Douglas’s renewed call to “freeze” school budgets (not much more likely to be heeded than last year), Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca is campaigning to reduce the number of supervisory unions and school districts, and even lots of Democrats speak openly about urging schools to consolidate. In Montpelier, at least, the established point of view seems to be that, in the current Washington health care jargon, something has to be done to “bend the curve” on school spending.

Making it all the more important to be wary of the commonly-heard claim by partisans on all sides that it is possible to cut costs without cutting quality. In theory, it may be. In practice, as the above examples demonstrate, it’s somewhere between hard and impossible.

Besides, some of the cost-cutting steps might not cut costs all that much. Vilaseca recently wrote of his supervisory union consolidation plan that, “my staff and I estimate this would save the state several million dollars a year.”

Kind of vague. Asked for elaboration, Education Department spokesperson Jill Remick supplied a Department study indicating that consolidation in Essex could save more than $600,000, or almost 25 percent, in personnel costs.

To put all this in some perspective, former Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union Superintendent Bill Mathis, who is skeptical about most of the cost-cutting proposals, pointed out (and Education Department statistics confirmed) that only 2.4 percent of the roughly $1.3 billion Vermont spends on public education (not including federal aid) goes to these central administration expenses.

“Let’s say we combined and saved one third of the money,” he said. “That’s less than one percent.”

Not a compelling case against consolidation. Less than one percent of $1.3 billion can be several million bucks. But Mathis’s larger point has merit. Almost everyone agrees that the big driver of school costs is the number of paid employees in and around the classroom, not the central offices. For several reasons (which will be examined in subsequent posts) Vermont has a lot them – teachers, teaching aides, counselors, librarians, technologists. The quickest way – if not the only way – to “bend the curve” of school spending is to have fewer of these educators.

Raising the threat of worse schools. A little-mentioned factor in this discussion is the real question of whether that “established point of view” in Montpelier is all that established among the electorate. Last year there was no “taxpayers revolt” against school spending at town and school meetings, as relatively few school budgets were rejected. With the lingering recession, it would be no surprise if more were defeated this year even though, in response to falling enrollments, schools around the state are cutting back.

Nobody likes high property taxes, but those were not a bunch of raging liberals who pressured the Lake Region School Board (raging liberals are not plentiful in this precinct) to put back the money for Spanish and music classes. A few made clear that if it took higher taxes to preserve today’s level of educational quality, then taxes should be higher.

Quite possible a minority outlook. But nobody’s really taken a poll on the matter, and there was the comment not long ago by one man whose politics are relatively centrist and who has no children in the public schools. When someone pointed out that Vermont spends a lot of money on education, he asked, “where else should we spend a lot of money?”,

NOTE: You could have read the following, almost word-for-word verbatim but updated just slightly, as early as Tuesday afternoon at the web site of VT Digger, with which the News Guy will be cooperating from time to time in pursuit of our mutual goal of providing Vermonters with more quality, in-depth journalism.

Any day now, the 30-member state Senate, perhaps unanimously as the House did Friday, will vote to cut the salaries of state legislators by 5 percent, thereby saving the state treasury, and hence the taxpayers, something like $105,000.

The “something like” is necessary because most legislators don’t get annual salaries. They get paid only for the weeks they are in session, so the longer the session lasts, the more they earn.

In this case, that means the longer the session lasts the more the pay cut would “save” even as the lawmakers earned more in the aggregate.

The weekly rate is now $637; 5 percent of which is $31.83, so the pay cut will bring down the total salary to $605 a week, or about $10,890 per lawmaker over the course of an 18-week session.

Multiply that $31.83 by 178 legislators, and the savings works out to $5,666 a week. Now assume the usual 18-week session. And the total saved comes to $101,983.

But that’s not all, as a famous cat once said. The two legislative leaders, the speaker of the House and the president pro-tem of the Senate, rake in bigger bucks — $704.70-a-week each, plus an annual salary of $10,895 each. Their combined weekly salary comes to $1,409. Together, their weekly pay is $25,369 for an 18-week session. Add in their combined annual salaries of $21,790, and together their total pay comes to $47,159.

Five percent of that is $2,358. Add that to the $101,983, and you get $104, 341 (rounding off to the nearest penny), which is close enough to “something like $105,000” for government work.

Not a bad piece of change, a hundred and five large. Most Vermonters could live on it comfortably for a year or even two.

On the other hand, at about one-tenth of 1 percent of the Fiscal Year 2011 projected $151 million budget deficit, its actual fiscal impact could be described as something between tiny and inconsequential, which lends some support to Rep. David Zuckerman’s contention that the value of the pay cut was political and symbolic, not budgetary.

“We’re doing this to put out there that we’re taking the pain,” he said. “It works well from a political perspective.”

Zuckerman, a Burlington Progressive, was the only legislator to express outright opposition to the pay cut, though it wasn’t very strong; he voted for the 70-page Budget Adjustment bill (H.534) in which the salary reduction was one small sentence.

Another lawmaker, Democrat Kenneth W. Atkins of Winooski, said he would not oppose the pay cut because state workers had just accepted lower pay. But he agreed with Zuckerman that lawmakers “earn less than the average working wage in Vermont,” and are by no means overpaid. He referred to a 2004 study on legislative pay by the Snelling Center which concluded that lawmakers should get higher salaries.

Pointing out that legislators get no health insurance or retirement plan, Atkins also refuted what he called the common misconception that they get subsidies for using their home phones, or free auto registration and license plates.

“Not true,” he said. “No one is here for the money.”

Whenever a Legislative session drags on for a week or two, letters to the editor and news reporters suggest that lawmakers want the extra weeks for extra pay.

Besides, senators and representatives get more than their salaries. They also get expense allowances for travel, meals, and lodging. Aren’t these payments also part of their total compensation?

No. Economists consider salary, deferred benefits, stock options, and an employer’s share of fringe benefits (health care, retirement plans) to be compensation. Reimbursement for expenses, whether in an itemized system or as per diem allowances, are not part of compensation.

Legislators get per diem allowances, and they do not set their own rates. The federal government does. Nathan Lavery of the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office said the state uses the U.S. General Service Administration’s travel expense rates. Those rates are computed for each locality, Lavery said, so that, for instance, Vermont legislators don’t get Manhattan hotel rate reimbursements for staying in Montpelier hotels.

For this year, the meals and lodgings reimbursement rates were increased from $54 and $93 a day to $61 and $101, respectively. The mileage rate, on the other hand, reflecting lower gasoline prices, fell from 55 to 50 cents per mile. A lawmaker could easily rack up more than his or her salary, in lodgings ($9,000 or more), and food ($4,590). Legislators pass almost all that money to hotels and restaurants. A few lawmakers may end up with a small surplus from their expense allowances, and a few probably spend more than the per diem allotment.

Even for the most frugal, the reimbursement rates don’t appear to provide an opportunity for lawmakers to rake in big bucks. Legislators get a special $85-a-night rate at the Capitol Plaza Hotel near the Statehouse. Add in the 9 percent rooms and meals tax and their total is $92.65, giving them an $8.35-a-night “profit.”

That’s probably soaked up by the unpaid phone calls, car trips, restaurant meals and occasional hotel bills the lawmakers spend – and for which they are not compensated – while the Legislature is not in session. Not to mention the time that could be spent doing something more immediately useful to them, like making money. They get a $118 per diem for official legislative meetings (which is subject to the 5 percent cut), but only if they actually attend them (and the Legislative Council checks).

While no one can prove or disprove that members of the Legislature are “in it for the money,” it does seem that anyone who is in it for the money lacks either the incentive or the intelligence or both to deserve getting elected. Putting the same thought and effort into another enterprise would likely prove far more remunerative. No doubt over the years a few lawmakers have plotted their travels and meals to cadge a few extra dollars from the system. For the most part, they could have earned more putting that time and effort into honest work.

There are also, of course, what might be called the secondary economic benefits of serving in the Legislature, almost all of whose members earn most of their money in other pursuits. A lawyer, accountant, or other professional can make contacts and get publicity that can help bring in clients and customers. The business executive who lobbies a legislator today might offer him or her a high-salary position tomorrow.

To use the office for personal gain, then, the smart lawmaker will stick to doing the job right, and not spend time trying to eke a few extra bucks out of the rooms and meals allowance.

Forenote: There will be an extra News Guy posting tomorrow, Thursday (as well as the usual Friday posting), along with an announcement about some new developments at the web site which we trust will be received favorably.

Actually, it might be more accurate to consider today’s post the “extra” one. Tomorrow’s will have more news; what follows is a bit of musing on Vermont and consistency.

Back in the day, Sen. Russell Long, the Louisiana Democrat who chaired the Senate Finance Committee for a century or so, used to sum up the average person’s attitude toward taxation as follows: “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree.”

Bad poetry, but good political analysis.

As Vermonters are now learning (and proving), the same phenomenon applies to spending. From Gov. Jim Douglas on down, the attitude of the body politic is: “Cut the other guy to the bone, but leave my favorite program alone.”

Poetry no better. Perspicacity identical.

Exhibit A comes right from the top. For years, Vermont farmers and woodland owners have gotten a tax break thanks to the “current use” tax assessment. Nobody opposes this policy in principle; it’s kept thousands of acres open and green by removing an incentive for landowners to sell to developers.

But it’s also expensive.

According to whom?

According to the Douglas Administration, whose tax commissioner, Richard Westman, just a few weeks ago identified the Current Use policy as one reason everybody else’s property taxes keep rising.

As it happens, over the last year or so, the various “stakeholders” of Current Use – farmers, foresters, environmentalists, local officials – have been meeting to try to figure out a way to get a little more money for the state treasury without seriously diminishing the advantage to landowners.

And they succeeded. Or at least most of them thought they did, and they presented the Legislature with a plan that would bring in another $1.6 million in revenue.

Oh, no, said the Douglas Administration, represented in this case by Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Jonathan Wood. Yeah, we need money. We’re $150 million in the hole. But we don’t want money from these landowners because…well, because it’s a good program, Wood said.

Yeah, but they’re all good programs. Maybe what he really meant was—These are our friends.

Then there was the Governor’s major power play to get a special Legislative Board to approve spending several more million dollars for one of his pet programs even as he insists on cutting almost everything else. This was the cap-raising of the Vermont Economic Growth Incentive . (See VEGI Burgher,” the January 13 post)

Assume for the sake of discussion that this, too, is a valuable program. But it never seemed to have occurred to Douglas to apply the same standards to it that he wants imposed on other agencies—spend less than you have in your budget this year because we all have to tighten our belts.

Do not suppose, though, that this “cut everybody but me” attitude is limited to Douglas and his fellow Republicans. At a Democratic fund-raiser a couple of weeks ago, former Gov. Howard Dean scolded lawmakers who might be willing to consider reducing the budget of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board.

“We need that program,” Dean said. “It is the perfect public-private partnership.”

It may be, and like Current Use, it has been useful as a conservation mechanism. But it couldn’t survive a year or two with a little less money?

The liberals are somewhat less inconsistent than the conservatives here, because some of them openly call for some targeted and temporary tax increases to help the state over its $150 million budget shortfall. But everybody agrees that programs will have to be cut.

Just not their favorites.

OK, some folks are willing to take less. State workers took a three percent pay cut. Yes, they did it under pressure and to avoid more layoffs, so it wasn’t just an act of noble sacrifice. But it was a sacrifice, as was the five percent pay cut taken by their bosses, the “exempt” state workers who earn more than $60,000 a year. The Stowe teachers agreed to give up the 5.5 percent pay hike they had negotiated for this year.

But these seem to be the exceptions. The default position for Vermont advocates left and right remains a firm and forthright conviction to cut spending. On everybody else’s programs.

Aftnote: Because the News Guy rarely misses an opportunity to ridicule or insult the Burlington Free Press when it deserves ridicule or insult, it’s only fair that the paper’s triumphs be recognized. Last Sunday alone it had three pieces of first-rate journalism: Sam Hemingway’s lead story about tritium contamination at nuclear plants nationwide, Nancy Remsen’s story about the potential impacts of state budget cuts, Candace Page’s fascinating account of niche marketing agriculture in Vermont.

Sen. Leahy (from his web site)

Until now, Vermont’s 2010 political diagnosis has been stable:

1–The governor’s race would be competitive, but Brian Dubie looked like the early front-runner;

2—Democrats, pretty much maxed out in the State Legislature, might lose a few seats, but would easily keep control of both houses;

3—Sen. Patrick Leahy and U.S. Rep Peter Welch, both Democrats, would waltz to re-election.

No longer. Last week’s sweeping decision from the U.S. Supreme Court in the Citizens United v Federal Election Commission case has altered politics everywhere, even in Vermont. It would be an exaggeration to say that Leahy and Welch are in trouble. It would be accurate to say that their re-elections are no longer certain.

Thanks to that ruling, corporations will be allowed to spend as much money as they choose on political campaigns. Top executives can flood the airways, cables, and post offices with as much advertising as they think their boards and shareholders will allow.

That could be quite a lot, especially for industries whose profit margins depend on what the federal government does – or does not.

That’s almost all of them. But just as an example, let’s take the oil industry. It has oodles of interactions with the government – land use, air and water pollution, anti-trust, tax preferences, and more. It is clear that the industry does not like most of Pat Leahy’s votes – he got a 100 percent rating last year from the League of Conservation Voters — and would be quite happy were he replaced by another senator, preferably a Republican.

The year before last, the five biggest oil companies earned $100 billion in profits. As prices fell last year, so did profits, but they remained in the tens of billions. Halfway through the year, for instance, Exxon-Mobil had earned more than $8 billion. The final 2009 figures have not been reported, but it’s reasonable to assume that the entire industry earned at least $50 billion.

It would not be irresponsible for the leaders of that industry to devote one percent of their profits – half a billion dollars – to political campaigns. It might even be irresponsible for them not to do so. How they would allocate the money remains uncertain, of course, but it’s not unreasonable to suppose that they would divide it evenly between races for the Senate and the House of Representatives.

That’s a quarter of a billion bucks for this year’s 36 Senate races. Until now, corporate political operatives, limited to spending the money specifically contributed to their companies’ political action committees, would have avoided states like Vermont, where the outcome seemed certain. But now that they can spend their own (meaning their companies) money, they can take a flyer on other states.

Of the 36 seats, 11 are in safe Republican (meaning mostly pro-oil industry) hands in the South and West. With $250 million to spend, the oil leaders could decide to get involved in all the other 25 states, spending $10 million in each.

And that’s one industry. Considering all the others who would like Leahy replaced, and who have money to spare, there could easily be $50 million spent in Vermont this year on behalf of Leahy’s Republican opponent.(So far just Len Britton, a relatively unknown lumber store owner; see if some other Republicans start expressing interest).

To be sure, Leahy has raised a lot of campaign money, with $2.56 million in the kitty according to the latest information from the Federal Elections Commission. And he will have more. Labor unions were as liberated as corporations by the Citizens United decision, and there are deep-pocket Democrats in Hollywood and on Wall Street.

But combined, their pockets are not nearly as deep as those on the other side. Leahy and Welch this year, Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2012, could easily be outspent 2-1.

Well, so what? After all, U.S. Senate seats can’t be bought, can they?

Good question, and the one that no one seems to want to answer. Not President Barack Obama or the others (not all of them Democrats) who have assailed the court’s decision. The problem is that answering the question risks insulting the American people, implying that they are sheep, easily fooled by glitzy – and often dishonest –TV commercials.

Those of us who are not running for anything have the luxury to consider the possibility (because all possibilities should be considered) that the American people deserve to be insulted, though probably no more than any other people.

No, they are not sheep. Sheep make no decisions. People do. But they do not (and this is what everyone, and perhaps especially Americans, resist acknowledging) make all their decisions as completely autonomous actors unaffected by impersonal forces and skilled, calculated, persuasion. “Men are convertible,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said, and were they not, businesses would not spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year trying to convert them to buy this product or that brand.

And unlike cereal and car ads, political commercials are not bound by truth-in-advertising laws. Kellogg’s may not tell us that Post cereals will give us the rheumatizz, nor General Motors warn us that Toyota brakes will fail unless they can prove it. But candidate Smith can tell us that candidate Jones is a child molester or a peeping Tom whether or not it is true. The remedy here, as it should be, is at the polls, not in the courtroom.

Those of us who believe in democracy have to agree with Lincoln that it is not possible to fool most of the people most of the time. These days, though, it may be possible to fool just enough of the people on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

There is an honest case to be made against any office-holder, including Leahy. But against an incumbent who has gotten more than 70 percent of the vote the last two times he ran, do not expect his opponents or their “independent” supporters to confine themselves to making an honest case.

And do not think that Vermonters are any less vulnerable to hucksterism than anyone else.

Does Vermont coddle the Middle Class?

Gov. Jim Douglas thinks so, and he may have a point.

No, the governor didn’t use those words. But take a look at his budget message of last Tuesday and some of his other recent proposals.

“Maintaining coverage for the greatest number of people will mean scaling back benefits for some,” he said in his speech to the Legislature.

At that point, he was talking about health benefits. But the same theme echoed throughout the speech: In order to protect the services and subsidies that go to the poor, Vermont would have to cut back on those services and subsidies for the not-so-poor.

And while some of those not-so-poor are very low income, many are not. In both tax and social policy, Vermont provides benefits to thousands of people whose earnings are close to – or higher than –the middle of the income spectrum.

For instance, a family of four can get health care assistance in Vermont if its total income is under $68,400. That’s way above the poverty line for a family of four ($21,834 in 2008). It’s even higher than the median household income in the state (about $66,000) before the Recession started.

Then again, it’s less than the median income in Vermont for a family of four. That’s was $71,382 a couple of years ago, one of the highest in the country. Still, by any reasonable definition, a family of four living on $68,000 a year is neither poor nor low income. It’s right there in the middle.

Meaning, at least according to conventional assumptions, it ought to be able to support itself. After all, this is America, the richest country in the world and the one that created mass affluence. Shouldn’t moderately affluent people pay their own bills?

Nor is health care the only example. A large family – two parents and six children – can get state help winterizing its home if its income is higher than $74,000. In all, Douglass said, “nearly one-third of our population receives services from the State… Since the beginning of the decade, overall spending for human services has more than doubled – a growth rate of three-and-a-half times inflation.”

Conventional assumptions, to be sure, ought to be challenged from time to time. As it happens, most Americans no longer live better than their counterparts in many other countries, partly because those counterparts don’t have to pay separately for health care at all. And in this country, health care has gotten so expensive that it could pose a heavy burden even on the moderately affluent.

Still, the case made by Douglas and other economic conservatives is not frivolous. If nothing else, they are asking a legitimate question: In a culture that values (or at least claims to) self-reliance, where should the line be drawn between personal and social responsibility?

Despite the claims of some of his liberal critics, Douglas remains a moderate, not one of those ultra-conservative Republicans who believe – as Newt Gingrich proclaimed in 1995 as he prepared to become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives – that government ought to do little more than defend the country and print money. Douglas proposed expanding several state programs in his speech, and did not call for abolishing any.

But he does want to save money, mostly by cutting services to middle-income and even some affluent people and by raising their taxes.

Again, he didn’t put it precisely that way. No sane politician is going to say, “I want to raise the taxes of middle-income and upper-middle-income homeowners.”

But that would be the result of Douglas’s plan to alter the “income sensitivity” provisions of the statewide school property tax. Instead of all households with income under $90,000 protected from paying more than 1.8 percent of their incomes on that tax, those earning between $60,000 and $75,000 could pay as much as 2.25 percent; for households between $75,00 and $90,000, the limit would rise to 3.5 percent.

Of course that might not be a tax increase if local school districts froze their budgets, as Douglas proposed. But they don’t seem likely to follow his advice. Either way, families who earn $90,000 a year, even big families, are in the top 20 percent of all earners. By any definition they are affluent. Why do their property taxes need to be subsidized?

Democrats claim that income sensitivity is not a subsidy, but a method of linking taxes to each taxpayer’s “ability to pay.” It may be that, but it is also a subsidy; whatever the homeowner saves on property taxes because of income sensitivity is made up for by funds from other taxes, mostly the income tax.

And that tax, in turn, is disproportionately paid by upper-income earners. When economic conservatives, including Douglas, complain that Vermont is a high-tax state, what they really object to is that it’s a high-tax state for high earners. Lower and middle-income Vermonters – even those up near the $90,000 range – pay little if any more in state and local taxes than do their counterparts in many other states, especially in the Northeast. But because the state tax structure is relatively progressive, the wealthy pay a bit more. Among other things, they are subsidizing, through income sensitivity, the affluent as well as the poor.

Unless income sensitivity is altered, then, there might be renewed pressure to raise taxes on the very wealthy to help make up for what the merely affluent don’t pay in property taxes. Douglas adamantly opposes any such tax increase. In fact, he wants last year’s small hike in taxes on the wealthy rolled back.

This debate, then, is, among others things, a class conflict. Not the traditional version in which the workers with their pitchforks storm the banks. Not even the more recent brand in which the bankers with their lobbyists and their pseudo-think tanks storm the government and the media.

This class conflict is more nuanced, more interesting, and perhaps necessary. It’s all about precisely who qualifies as “middle class,” who in that middle class deserves tax breaks and government services, and who will pay for them. A healthy debate as long as it does not degenerate into a situation in which everybody is trying to protect his/her own government benefits and tax breaks at the expense of everyone else.

It would be irresponsible to leave this discussion without noting that some of Douglas’s proposed budget cuts would hurt the very poor. For instance, he noted that Vermont’s Medicaid system allows an “unlimited number of emergency room visits” by recipients. “Capping ER visits that do not result in hospitalization at 12 per year will bring Vermont more in line with peer states – saving money to preserve this benefit for everyone in the system,” he said.

No doubt it would. Not only that, but it’s a good bet that some of those emergency room visits, being unlimited and free, aren’t really necessary. But those unlimited visits also probably help explain why Vermont is regularly designated the healthiest state in the union. The most obvious consequence of reducing health care services for the poor is that the poor will become less healthy.

Program Note: The News guy had a personal appointment Tuesday that kept him from Gov. Jim Douglas’s annual budget address to the Legislature in Montpelier. The contents thereof, however, will not be ignored for long. Tune in Friday.

As it happened, Tuesday’s activities did not leave enough time and/or energy for a full post today. But the following correction – or at least clarification –of part of last Friday’s post can not wait. So here it is.

In last Friday’s post (scroll down for the full piece), appeared the following: “Vermont’s old abortion ban remains on the books. It’s 13 V.S.A. § 101, and should (the Roe v Wade US Supreme Court ruling) ever be reversed, (the law) would have to be repealed or abortions would be illegal here.”

Not exactly.

The law is on the books. But so is Beechman v. Leahy, the 1972 Vermont Supreme Court decision invalidating the statute.

Meaning that even if the controversial 1973 Roe decision were overturned (itself hardly likely in the foreseeable future), abortion would not be illegal in Vermont.

At least not unless the Legislature amended the statute to meet the Court’s objection. And a quick examination of both the law and the ruling shows unlikely it would be for the lawmakers to do any such thing.

The statute and the court ruling both relate to the over-all subject of Friday’s post – the introduction of bills that would convey some right of personhood to the fetus. In this context, what is interesting about the law is that while it protects the fetus, it does not treat it as equal to the pregnant woman. If the woman dies, the penalties are harsher than if she does not.

The statute also says that only the person performing the abortion can be punished, but that “the woman whose miscarriage is caused or attempted shall not be liable to the penalties prescribed by this section.”

The court used that provision to invalidate the statute. According to a paper delivered in 2008 by Vermont Law School Professor Cheryl Hanna (Hanna writes more tersely than the court ruling, so she rather than it will be quoted here), “because the Legislature had failed to hold a woman liable for terminating a pregnancy, it had left her personal rights to here…since the Legislature had granted the woman a right to abort, it could not simultaneously deny her medical aid and expect to save her life. By granting her the right to abort, it must also grant her the right to safely

exercise it.”

To resuscitate the statute, Hanna said, the Legislature would probably “have to criminalize women along with providers in order for the law to be deemed reasonable.” It’s hard to imagine any Vermont Legislature taking that step.

This does not mean there is no reason whatever for abortion rights advocates to be concerned about the law still on the books. Beechman does not create a right to abortion under the Vermont Constitution, making it a slightly shakier protection than if it did.

Nor does it mean that laws creating “fetal rights” can not be used to prosecute women (and sometimes men). In one case cited in a document prepared by the National Advocates of Pregnant Women (an advocacy group, obviously, but its examples are backed up by news stories) a South Carolina woman who suffered a miscarriage was arrested and charged with homicide by child abuse.

But it does mean that the suggestion in Friday’s post that the Vermont statute could create a small political problem for Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie in this year’s governor’s race was probably overblown. Dubie may oppose abortion rights. But he’s not likely to veto a bill that the Legislature won’t pass because it won’t have to pass one to keep abortions legal in Vermont, no matter who’s on the U.S. Supreme Court some years hence.

A nuclear power plant (NOT Vermont Yankee)

In 13 months of existence, the News Guy has so far declined to deal with one of Vermont’s most important and most contentious issues: what to do about Vermont Yankee.

The subject has not been inadvertently overlooked; it has been deliberately avoided for two reasons.

The first is that the debate over re-licensing the nuclear power plant in Vernon for another 20 years has hardly been ignored by Vermont’s established news organizations. Sometimes it seems as though no one at the plant can sneeze without the Brattleboro Reformer, the Burlington Free Press and VPR recording how many co-workers said, “God Bless You,” and seeking comment from VY’s owner, the Louisiana-based Entergy Company.

Considering that one reason for the News Guy’s existence is to cover what others do not, not covering what others do made sense.

The second reason is that this dispute is both financially and scientifically complicated, and that one ought to know what one is talking about before talking about it.

That this precept is not universally followed renders it no less worthy.

Just how dangerous are those dry casks of nuclear waste stored at the plant site? How hard would it be to replace the power Yankee produces annually? Will that one-degree increase in the Connecticut River’s temperature degrade the river’s ecological integrity? Does the spinoff of Yankee to a new, highly leveraged, company mean Vermont taxpayers are likely to be stuck with the cost of shutting the plant down?

Because the policy here holds that knowing what you’re talking about involves more than just quoting the (often shrilly expressed) opinions on both sides of the debate, answering those questions and more would take more time than has been available. Hence the absence of Vermont Yankee coverage.

By now, though, enough of that information has been gathered to probe into some of the politics and economics (if not the nuclear physics) of the Vermont Yankee dispute. Besides, in recent days, the political aspect has moved center-stage, allowing the political observer to comment with more authority.

Actually, the tumult of the last few days has inspired some exceptions to one of the most obvious political facts of the Yankee debate – its tribalism. An outspoken Vermont Yankee supporter is likely to be…well, let’s just say a proper person (and, yes, we’re engaging in a little simplistic stereotyping here, just to make the point quickly). Possibly a Republican, but at any rate a pro-establishment sort, someone who admires – or at least is not bothered by – large corporations, the consumer culture, suburbia.

But find a populist Vermonter (left or right) who rails against corporate dominance, gas-guzzling vehicles, and consumerism, and who has some counter-cultural sympathies, it’s a probable twelve-to-seven that he or she wants Vermont Yankee shut down yesterday.

On neither side of the divide is anyone likely to change his or her mind because of anything as trivial as evidence.

Which, when you think about it, is a pretty foolish foundation on which to conduct an important discussion.

Herewith, then, the first of three conclusions about the Vermont Yankee debate: It is entirely possible to be a reasonable, thoughtful, intelligent, well-meaning, public-spirited person and be in favor of relicensing VY for anther 20 years.

Or to be against it.

And that’s because of the second of three conclusions about the Vermont Yankee debate: Everyone living in Vermont now or who gets born or moves into it over the next 20 years can live healthy, prosperous (and electrically-powered) lives if the plant shuts down in 2012 or earlier.

Or if it continues to operate for another 20 years.

Which is not to say that the choice is not consequential, merely that it is not cataclysmic. Without Vermont Yankee, electricity might cost more, and Vermonters in effect might have to burn more coal, producing more greenhouse gas. (“In effect,” because Vermonters wouldn’t themselves burn the coal; it would be burned for them to provide some of the power now produced by Yankee).

If the plant continues to operate, it will continue to produce some radiation pollution. Then there is the danger, minimal but potentially catastrophic, of leakage from those storage casks. (But that danger already exists, from the gunk already there. Whether another 20 years worth substantively enhances the danger is one of those scientific questions this site is not yet competent to answer).

These are the kinds of choices societies have to make these days, and, as stated above, are matters on which decent and reasonable people can disagree. In an ideal world – or even a reasonable one – they would disagree civilly and rationally.

A challenge rendered more difficult by passions on both sides, but especially these days by the conduct of the plant’s owners, whereupon we come to the Third conclusion about the Vermont Yank debate: Entergy officials may be competent managers of an efficient and safe power plant. But when it comes to dealing with the public, they…well, to clean up the line Lyndon Johnson (unfairly) used about Gerald Ford, they can’t find their collective behind with both hands.

A reality evident even before this latest debacle about the underground pipes and lying to the authorities. There was the collapsing water tower in 2007, the inadequate studies about the safety of the waste storage, the failure to follow the Public Service Board’s order requiring it to monitor radiation levels in the spent fuel containers, its procrastination in making a price offer to the utility distributing companies.

Then consider the company’s new advertising campaign, the one highlighting the fact that 650 people work at the plant.

As they do. But half of them live in Massachusetts. And if they were all Vermonters? They would comprise some three tenths of one percent of all the jobs in the state. The people of Vermont don’t rely on Yankee to provide jobs. They rely on it to provide clean, reliable, inexpensive electricity. Sometimes, marketing “experts” can be too cute for their own good.

Then of course we come to the latest fiasco. ‘Oh, we do have radioactive material in underground pipes after all, even though we said we didn’t; even though we said it under oath.’ (But using words perhaps designed to avoid to perjury. “I don’t believe there is active piping service today carrying radionuclides under ground,” said Entergy Vice President Jay Thayer. It’s all but impossible to prove that a person did not “believe” what he said he did at any moment).

It’s as though nobody ever told these guys that the best – actually, the only – way to appear to be transparent is to…(hold your breath here for the shock)…be transparent. It’s a public process. You can never be sure of not getting caught if you say something false. Ergo, say nothing false.

In all likelihood, then, most Vermonters now view Vermont Yankee as a company from which they would not buy a used car, were it in the car business, because: (a) they wouldn’t trust it not to have rolled back the odometer; and (b) they wouldn’t be sure it knew how to roll back the odometer without rolling it forward by mistake.

That explains why even a whole lot of pro-corporate establishment types are turning against Yankee relicensing. See Sunday’s Free Press editorial. See also the angry statements from top officials of Gov. Jim Douglas’s Administration, clearly expressing the governor’s views. If anyone has the right to be angry at Yankee, it is Douglas. He’s supported it all the way. Now it has sandbagged him.

To render this judgment, one needs no scientific expertise, and the company has only itself to blame.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1973

Patricia Blair is pro-choice.

She didn’t put it exactly that way. Until recently, when she thought about abortion at all, it was not as a political issue, but as it related to her, and she couldn’t imagine ever wanting one.

“I wanted babies,” she said.

Now, though, she’s aware that “some women might need an abortion,” and thinks they should have the right to make the decision, “as a matter of womens rights,” which sums up the pro-choice position rather succinctly.

It’s somewhat ironic, then, that the 38-year-old Pownal mother of three, may have propelled Vermont into a debate about abortion, even as she and the two legislators who responded to her plea insist that what they’re doing has nothing to do with abortion.

More ironic because the lawmakers – Bennington Democratic Sen. Richard Sears, and Newport Republican Sen. Vincent Illuzzi – also favor abortion rights, a stance that has not stopped them from sponsoring bills that trouble the state’s pro-choice campaigners while offering the minority but dedicated anti-abortion faction in the state a rare opportunity to score points.

Segueing, as they say in the TV world, to yet another irony: the political consequences of this impending dispute might be just what the anti-abortion forces do not want.

Assuming, that is, that there are any political or legislative consequences at all. There’s a good chance that neither bill will get out of committee, that the issue will be overwhelmed by the state’s budget battles and other more urgent matters such as the relicensing of Vermont Yankee.

For one thing, the proposed legislation is not likely to have much if any impact on the real world. Both bills are statements of philosophy as much as likely remedies to actual problems. That makes them no less interesting, and perhaps more contentious. Abstract arguments can be fierce, even when, as in this case, all sides agree that last August 10, something terrible happened to Pat Blair.

That was the day of her auto accident on Route 7, an accident caused, according to authorities, by the driver of another car, a young woman from Pownal who was allegedly driving while impaired by taking prescription drugs. Blair was injured. Her husband was more seriously hurt, remains confined, and is unable to work.

But that was not the worst consequence. Blair was pregnant with twins. They were killed in the accident. To Blair, she did not lose two fetuses, but two babies. She wants them remembered that way, and she wants other pregnant women protected from similar losses in the future.

Context matters here. Not long ago, the Blairs lost a daughter who was born with umbilical cord prolapse, a rare but often fatal childbirth emergency.

“But that was from natural causes,” she said. “This time, someone else’s choice caused their death. I don’t see why Vermont can’t hold her accountable.”

It’s close to impossible not to understand Blair’s anguish, and to want to help her overcome it. On the other hand, a state does not typically pass legislation to assuage the feelings of one of its citizens, which is pretty much all these two bills would accomplish.

The Sears bill (S-273) ”proposes to enhance the penalty for assault of a pregnant woman” if she is attacked or the victim of grossly “negligent operation of a motor vehicle, or operating a vehicle under the influence of alcohol or drugs.”

As deterrence goes, this isn’t much. How many impaired people are going to decide that they’d better not get behind the wheel of a car because they might cause an accident involving a pregnant woman? Besides, it doesn’t satisfy Blair; it doesn’t mention the fetus, only the pregnant woman.

Blair prefers Illuzzi’s bill (S-175) which specifically “proposes to establish that a fetus be treated as a victim under state homicide law.” This could have some practical effect. If, for instance, a pregnant woman survived a physical attack but her fetus did not, the assailant in this case could be imprisoned for life, as if he had killed a born person.

To say the least, this is a rare circumstance. Usually, such a vicious attack on a pregnant woman ends up with her death, also, and her killer is sentenced to life in prison, or even execution. That’s what happened, for instance, to Scott Peterson, the Californian convicted of the 2002 murder of his wife and unborn child. He’s appealing his death sentence, which almost surely would have been imposed had his wife not been pregnant.

California is one of 37 states whose laws do recognize a fetus as a separate entity, effectively as a person. Like Vermont, California is a state with a strong pro-choice majority, lending some support to Blair’s claim that “fetal homicide laws can coexist with abortion rights.”

But Jill Krowinski, the communications director of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, said there were potential dangers to women in legally recognizing the personhood of the fetus.

“It’s the wrong approach,” she said. “It would separate the pregnant woman from her fetus in eyes of law. That could be the first step in threatening a woman’s right to control her own pregnancy.”

The first part of that statement is exactly what Blair wants to accomplish. Both are what the anti-abortion movement wants to accomplish, which helps explain why the Vermont Right to Life organization is supporting her, even tough she does not advocate their cause and says she “hasn’t had a whole lot of connection with them.”

Here’s where the political irony comes in. If the Legislature debates either of these bills, it will raise the saliency of the abortion issue, a development which might hurt Brian Dubie, the likely Republican candidate for governor, and an opponent of legal abortions.

Were politics entirely rational, this would make no difference. A woman’s right to choose an abortion is protected by the U.S. Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court in the famous Roe v Wade decision of 1973. That decision is safe with the current Supreme Court, or any Court changes while Barack Obama is president, which will be at least to the end of the first term of whoever is elected governor this year.

But politics is not entirely rational, and just to complicate matters further, Alan Gilbert of the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Committee points out that Vermont’s old abortion ban remains on the books. It’s 13 V.S.A. § 101, and should Roe ever be reversed, it would have to be repealed or abortions would be illegal here.

A repeal that would be more difficult with an abortion foe in the Second Floor Corner Office in Montpelier.

An unlikely scenario, perhaps, but that doesn’t rob it of all political oomph.

Gilbert brought up another point. In 1991, he wrote in a letter to Sears, the Legislature amended the law (23 VSA 1091) to deal more harshly with grossly negligent drivers who cause death or injury to a fetus. The law he said, had the effect of “broadening the (negligent motor vehicle operation) offense to cover pregnancies terminated by injury, because the mother is almost always the victim of serious bodily injury in such a crash.”

Gilbert said he through the driver who allegedly caused Blair’s accident could receive up to 45 years in prison, a sentence he called “quite punitive.”

So Vermont law already (if perhaps implicitly) recognizes the fetus. Not as a person, exactly, but as something to be protected.