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.

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.