OK,  This is it. The 345^th Vermont News Guy post.

And the last.

It’s been just a few weeks short of two years. It’s been fun. It’s time to stop while it’s still fun. A good rule is to quit doing what you like while you still like it.

My thanks to all readers. My special thanks to regular readers. My specialer (yes, I know that’s not a word) thanks to subscribers and comment writers, and my specialest (ditto) thanks to the two or three of you who appointed yourselves occasional editors, correcting typographical and other errors.

Everybody needs an editor.

Speaking of which, one last short correction. The last post said details on the connection between wind power entrepreneurs and environmental organizations could be found in last Wednesday’s entry. It was actually in the post of Monday, November 15.

A harsher editor would have insisted that this site not shut down until its proprietor dealt with some of the things he said he’d deal with – the persistence of poverty, for instance, or the truth no one will discuss about the importance of campaign money. (It fools the American people, who are more foolable than one is supposed to admit).

Sorry, time just ran out. But you know what? The News Guy is no more. I (dropping the droll, remote, third person act here) survive. In one platform or another, I may still be heard from in Vermont journalism. Stay tuned.

A note to my Facebook “friends,” the quotation marks needed here for those of you who are not my actual friends, in the pre-Facebook definition, for the simple reason that we have never met:

I’m going to unfriend you. Don’t take it personally.

Come to think of it, I may drop Facebook entirely. I hate Facebook. On it, my “friends,” some of whom I’ve never met, keep telling me they’ve just had a cup of tea. Or wasn’t the sunset beautiful?

As Rhett Butler once said, “frankly my dear…”

I hate Twitter, too. I have nothing worthwhile to say that can be said in 140 clicks.

Neither do you.

So enough. Assez. Basta. Gornish.

As it happens, though, events have conspired to render it useful, if not irresistible, to provide one more analysis of a current Vermont squabble – the recent suggestion by Attorney General Bill Sorrell to levy a tax on sugared soft drinks, a suggestion widely reviled as an assertion of “The Nanny State.”

It certainly is.

But what isn’t?

Almost nothing, despite the general inclination to ignore that fact.

Or, more accurately, to deny that fact. Americans like to call governmental intrusion they don’t like “The Nanny State.” Governmental intrusion they do like (highways, state universities, airports) they call…something else.

In this case, the connection is direct. Too many people, especially too many kids and most especially too many poor kids drink too much sugared soda for several reasons. One is their own foolishness; nobody holds their mouths open and pours Coca-Cola down their gullets.

But another reason is The Nanny State. Markets work. Products that cost less will be consumed more, especially by low-income people. Sugared sodas are cheap. In fact, they are cheaper (in “real,” meaning inflation-adjusted, terms) than they were in the early 1970s.

That’s when President Richard M. Nixon and his Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, turned farm policy on its head, transforming it from a system that subsidized farmers to one that subsidized production of crops, mostly corn.

Plant it “fence row to fence row,” Butz told the farmers. Effectively (the details are a little more complicated) the Government (The Nanny State) said to farmers: “what you can’t sell, we’ll buy”.

The result? Lots of corn.

The result of that (remember, markets work)? Cheap corn. Meaning, also, cheap high fructose corn syrup, the sweetener now used in most sodas, which explains why they cost so little.

Whether public policy, or The Nanny State as it is sometimes known, ought to be used here to offset the negative consequences of earlier public policy, or The Nanny State as it is sometimes known, is one of those many questions on which reasonable people can disagree.

But don’t take seriously the guys who kvetch than Sorrell’s proposal is an example of The Nanny State. Not, at least, if they drive their cars on the public roads, eat food inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or fly in planes which do not bump into one another in the air. It’s all Nanny State all the time.

Stay loose. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Write if you get work. Never try to fill an inside straight. Throw strikes.

First, the announcement:  A final decision will not be made for another week or so, but this web site is probably in its final days.

The election is over, the year is coming to an end, and so, most likely, is the News Guy.

It has been fun. It may have done some good. But with the election over, the year coming to an end, perhaps it is time to go.

A few weeks ago, the proprietor of this site woke up and found himself 70. No problem. There is but one alternative to getting older, and as long as most systems are functioning adequately, getting older is the preferred option.

But it is a reminder that if one is going to do something different, one had best get to it. Being the News Guy isn’t all that different from previous activities.

It isn’t much less time-and-effort consuming, either, and at least in the old days, the time and effort was compensated for with…compensation. At best, this web site breaks even. Happily, under the present circumstances, profit is not necessary. But neither is expending all that time and effort, enhancing the appeal of either (a) spending the time and effort at something potentially remunerative; or (b) not spending the time and effort at all.

Because a few interesting subjects have been put on hold during the election campaign, the News Guy will continue for another couple of weeks. But that’s probably it.

Now to the analysis. Last Friday’s post (The Big Day Dawneth) pointed out that the “downside” of Brian Dubie being governor would have been the constant (and worse! Incorrect) repetition of the mantra about Vermont’s economy being in such bad shape.

But there would have been an upside to a Dubie governorship, too, and one that might have transcended Vermont. That’s because Dubie – his anti-abortion stance and some attacks from the hard-line left to the contrary notwithstanding – is a politician of the center-right.

For instance, he was one of the few candidates in either party, anywhere this year to praise the new health care law. No Tea Partier, he campaigned for tax cuts and budget restraint, but not for decimating or dismantling government. According to office-holders in both parties, he has sometimes shown more flexibility than Gov. Jim Douglas in negotiating with lawmakers and officials.

Some critics argue that political expediency forced Dubie to try to come across as more moderate than he really is, that if he were not running in (sort of) left-leaning Vermont, he would have shown his true, farther-right, colors.

Maybe, but it makes no difference. He was running in Vermont. Had he won, he would have been governor of Vermont, and whatever private agenda he might have had, his would have been a center-right governorship, which is by no means the worst kind of governorship to have.

Especially now, where the center-right is endangered in Vermont and all but extinct elsewhere. The most prominent center-right office-holder in the country, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, is leaving office in a few weeks. With a few exceptions, the Republicans of the impending 112^th Congress can not be described as center-right politicians.

In Vermont, it is not clear whether leading Republicans have quite grasped what the Dubie defeat means for their party. Political fortunes are (in the words of a great poet) “constantly fickle,” so the GOP could rebound quickly. But it’s hard to see how. The party holds fewer than a third of the seats in the Houses, barely over a third in the Senate, and could not find credible candidates to run for either the U.S. Senate or Congress.

‘Credible,’ in this context, means ‘center-right’, the only kind of Republican who can win statewide elections in Vermont. The fact that no center-right Republican made any effort to take on Sen. Patrick Leahy or Rep. Peter Welch – even knowingly playing the sacrificial lamb role to build up some party cred for a winnable race in the future – speaks volumes about the poor prospects for the GOP in the state.

Yes, there are Lt. Gov-elect Phil Scott and re-elected Auditor Tom Salmon. But Salmon has, so far, painted himself farther right as he apparently prepares to challenge Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2012, an uphill battle to say the least. Scott is center-right, and right now seems to be the Vermont Republican Party’s best hope.

But it isn’t easy being lieutenant governor when the top guy is from the other party. It will not be in Gov. Peter Shumlin’s interest to give Scott much opportunity to look good, and the lite gov really has no official duties.

Well, presiding over the Senate, but with the Senate 20-8 Democratic, the presiding of a Republican will be largely ceremonial.

Had Dubie won, he might have helped revive the moderate wing of the Vermont GOP. He might also have been one of only a handful of Republican center-right governors in America (there are a few Democrats who fit that description), along with Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Terry Branstad of Iowa.

And the country needs center-right office-holders. For at least two reasons, even liberals ought to be glad that center-right politicians survive, and sometimes win. First, even when they are wrong, center-right officials keep the center-left from getting carried away with itself, as it is wont to do. Second, center-right politicians are not always wrong.  Because there are so many genuine needs, governments do have an incentive to keep spending money, sometimes more than is wise. Here moderate conservatives, wary of spending but not hostile to government, help restrain excesses.

Alas, other excesses on the right have all but obliterated moderate conservatism. Explaining how and why is beyond the scope of this post, but two examples should encapsulate the problem. Nationally, the conservative mainstream refuses to accept two facts: (1) cutting taxes means governments will have less (not more; less) money to spend; (2) the world is getting warmer, in part because of human activity. A political movement that willfully blinds itself to reason can accomplish nothing more than winning some elections. Winning elections is indeed one purpose of a political movement, and an important one. But so is rational governing.

Those are two Kool-Aid cocktails Brian Dubie did not drink.

Actually, Vermont may have a center-right governor next year – Peter Shumlin. Either winner would have faced the same immediate dilemma: expected revenues next year will be some $110 million lower than anticipated revenue. Though not as ideologically – even viscerally – hostile to higher taxes as Dubie, Shumlin doesn’t want to raise taxes either. It would be bad politics, and bad economic policy (though not as bad as laying off more state workers).

Like a center-right politician, Shumlin is going to propose budget cuts, possibly deep cuts, possibly deeper than many Democratic legislators can accept. The next session could be a tough one for Democrats. Maybe Vermont Republicans will enjoy themselves after all.

This will be a somewhat abbreviated post because the News Guy moderated a debate among Northeast Kingdom legislative candidates last evening and there is only so much one fellow can do in one day.

Oh, all right. Full disclosure. In addition to this public duty, the News Guy herewith admits another factor. As revealed in an earlier post (the one about Centennial Field and the Lake Monsters Take Us Out To the Ball Game? July 3, 2009)  among the News Guy’s private passions is that exotic past-time known as baseball, to which he devoted the latter part of the evening.

So for today, just a correction or two, a little mopping up, and then a tale, a true story that may or not be cautionary.

Wednesday’s post reported news of an “inter-active map showing poverty rates by state and county in 2009 when the poverty reached its highest levels in 51 No big surprises.”

Obviously that should have been the poverty rate which reached its highest levels in 51 years, period, end of sentence.

A few paragraphs later, the post listed the poverty rates for Vermont’s counties, but left out two of them. Thanks to the reader who pointed out the omission, and for those who read the post early, scroll down. All 14 counties are in there now.

And to the reader who asked what the under-five-year-old poverty rate is by county, stay tuned. The search is on.

Another reader had a good point on that post, and this time it was not just any reader but Doug Hoffer, the Democratic candidate for Auditor. Read Hoffer’s full comment (just go down to the bottom of Wednesday’s post and click on “3 comments,”) but his main point was that it isn’t good enough for Vermont’s poverty rate to be lower than in most other states; ten percent in poverty still too high and we’re all too willing to accept that state of affairs.

An interesting comment which deserves a full treatment soon.

Later in that same post was the report of a poll showing that “45 supported the idea, 36 percent opposed it, and 19 percent were undecided.”

No doubt you all figured this out for yourselves, but just for the record, that’s 45 percent.

The October 11 post, Ethical Quandary, reported that Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie was once a member and chairman of the school board in Essex. It was Essex Junction. Apologies to both municipalities and to Dubie.

OK, now to the tale, in which the names shall be changed to protect the innocent. So let’s call them Mr. and Mrs. Jones. They live in Charlotte, in the same house they had built more than 40 years ago. It isn’t a big house. Fifteen hundred square feet, Mr. Jones said.

The Joneses are not young. He’s 81. She’s 75. They’re not rich either. Last year, they said – and emailed tax records to back it up – their taxable income was $44,000. Because they own their home free and clear, they no longer have to make mortgage payments. They just have to pay their utility bills, buy food and fuel, whatever clothing they might need, and some incidentals.

Oh, and of course property taxes on their house. This year, their property tax bill is $11,252.

No, that’s not a typographical error. The Jones pay more than $11,000 – one quarter of their taxable income – for property tax.

Wait a minute. Doesn’t Vermont’s property tax system include an “income sensitivity” provision that protects middle-income homeowners from sky-high property taxes?

Yes, but earlier this year the Legislature passed a bill (H 783) effectively abolishing income sensitivity  when “the equalized value of a housesite (is) in excess of $500,000.”

That covers the Jones’s 1,500-square-foot house that they had built in 1967 for $22,000. It is now assessed at $1.4 million

No, neither of those was a typo, either.

The Joneses have made some improvements to their house over the years. But that’s not why its assessment shot up. It was, said Mrs. Jones, the much larger houses built all around them over the last several years that raised the assessed value of all the homes in the neighborhood.

The Legislature acted after some news stories in the Burlington Free Press and the Valley News (for some reason unavailable on its web site) that some residents of opulent homes were paying modest property tax bills based on their incomes.

The Legislature acted out of a combination of opportunism and controlled panic. The lawmakers were scrounging for all the revenue they could find. And they worried about being attacked for coddling the “wealthy,” even if these supposedly wealthy people earned average incomes.

It was not an unreasonable decision. Like the others so targeted, the Joneses will not suffer economically. They can sell their home, probably not for $1.4 million in the Recession, but for several hundred thousand dollars, which will allow them to live out their lives in comfort.

But they don’t want to move.

“This is our home,” Mrs. Jones said. “It’s where we raised our three boys. At my husbands age, moving will be hard on him.”

Surely this is not what the Legislature intended. But nobody has repealed the law of unintended consequences. And legislating on the basis of a few “horror stories” is a good way to activate that law.

Yesterday, the News Guy escaped the undisclosed location where he had been ensconced for 18 days (see note at the beginning of In and Out of Class II, September 22) and returned to his normal haunts.

Unfortunately, the act of returning used up so much time and energy that there was not nearly enough of either, much less both, left over to write a post for today.

For the next one (Monday) the News Guy will be rested, ready, and rarin’ to go.

As someone once noted, there’s no place like home.

To paraphrase Cole Porter, Mr. News Guy regrets he’s been unable to post for today. Madam.

And you, too, Sir.

For reasons less interesting than those which compelled Miss Otis to cancel lunch. But with the same results.

Come back Monday.

Tomorrow is Primary Day. Wanna know who’s gonna win? .

Lotsa luck. So would everybody else. But they don’t know. Quite possibly, nobody knows. What fun.

No doubt some Vermonters (perhaps including the five Democratic candidates for governor) are distressed by this uncertainty. Better to savor it. Like much of life in Vermont, it’s a chance to live life they way it used to be lived, a throwback to the days before polling.

Or at least before polling was reasonably accurate, which is roughly 60 years now, meaning longer than most folks remember. Polling’s biggest mistake came in 1948, when all the surveys predicted that Thomas Dewey would beat President Harry Truman, inspiring the Chicago Tribune to hit the streets with journalism’s most celebrated headline. “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

(A blunder firmly stuck in the newspaper’s memory as late as 1976, when the managing editor telephoned the reporter covering the New Hampshire Primary warning him not to call the winners prematurely because “we remember 1948 here”).

Since then, polling has gotten a lot more sophisticated, and if it’s hardly perfect, rare is the election in which almost nobody has the foggiest notion about who’s going to win. In recent years, two Vermont news organizations, the Burlington Free Press and WCAX-TV (Channel 3), contracted with polling firms. This year, they didn’t, perhaps to save money, perhaps because the polling firm Channel 3 had been using, Research 2000, has been sued by another client, and seems to be at least temporarily out of business.

Besides, this race might be effectively impossible to predict, even with a passel of polls. In any election, but especially in a primary, pollsters don’t just make their calls, ask the folks who answer for their favorite candidate, and tote up the answers. That would be pointless because not everybody who answers the phone will vote. So the pollsters first have to “screen for likely voters,” to use the industry jargon.

Hard to do when: (a) the primary is earlier than it has been; (b) no candidate has excited most voters; but (c) no candidate has repulsed them, either, and most Democrats could happily support any one of the five. The usual screening technique – asking respondents if they intend to vote, then maybe asking if they really intend to vote – might not be all that effective.

This could explain why no poll results have been leaked. There are polls. Two candidates, Deb Markowitz and Peter Shumlin, have retained pollsters. Presumably senior staff at both campaigns have some results. Yet none of those senior staffers seems to have sidled up to a reporter and whispered sweet statistics in his or her ears.

Meaning either that neither of those candidates is ahead (or at least safely ahead) or that the results remain inconclusive thanks to the likely-voter screening problem.

(Wait. Isn’t it possible that the senior campaign staffer, even armed with a poll showing his/her candidate in the lead, is too scrupulous to leak confidential campaign information?

Uhh, now that you ask: no).

So Vermonters are happily in the dark. We can all expect some real suspense tomorrow evening. Just think: a reality show with no vulgar housewives. What fun!

Does this mean the race can’t be scoped out at all?

Of course not. So let’s scope, starting with the conventional wisdom, a good place to start because, despite its bad image, the conventional wisdom is usually right, or it wouldn’t have become conventional.

The first conventional wisdom about political campaigns is that the candidate with the most money usually wins. So it’s a two-person race, between Markowitz and Shumlin, the ones who’ve raked in the bucks.

But here’s some conflicting conventional wisdom. In a low-turnout primary, which this is likely to be, the candidate with the best grass-roots support usually wins.

That would be Doug Racine, endorsed by the teachers union, the state employees union, the AFL-CIO, and the Vermont League of Conservation Voters (not, as stated in earlier versions of this post, the Vermont Natural Resources Council, which may not and does not endorse candidates). If all these organizations do a get-out-the-vote operation tomorrow – phone banks, email reminders, ferrying voters to the polls – Racine has a shot, too.

Especially because he’s the only candidate from vote-heavy Chittenden County, and was endorsed last week by a passel of influential Progressive Party members. Only around 10 percent of Vermonters are committed Progs (party chair Martha Abbott got 12 percent running for auditor in 2008), but they tend to be politically aware. They vote.

So it’s a three-person race.

Except for that little voice saying you can’t rule out Matt Dunne. In the last few weeks, he’s been endorsed by the Herald of Randolph, the Addison Independent and the Stowe Reporter. In the last few months, he’s raised more money than Racine and has run some pretty good television ads. His campaign seems to have some energy. At 40, he’s the youngest of the candidates, and the one most at home in the high-tech wired (or, actually, wireless) realm that may or may not be the future.

So it’s a four-person race.

Having come this far, can we take it a step farther and find some way for the fifth candidate, Susan Bartlett, to win?

Not really.

“This is anybody’s race to win,” Bartlett’s campaign claimed in an email yesterday.

Anybody’s but hers. Too bad in a way, because one can make the case that she’d be a good governor. But she never raised enough money to be competitive, nor did she give voters a compelling reason to select her over one of her better-known, better-financed opponents.

But wouldn’t it be funny if she did win?

Whoever wins will debate Republican Brian Dubie Thursday evening in South Burlington. The News Guy will be there, liveblogging from the debate hall (as will Anne Galloway of VT Digger) for Vermont Public Television. The next evening, the News Guy will be on VPT’s ‘Vermont This Week,’ broadcast at 7:30 PM Friday and 11:30 AM Sunday

The next new post will appear Friday, August 20.

No big deal. Happens to everybody from time to time.

He will return Wednesday with renewed vigor.

A writer of clear prose (not running for governor of Vermont)

The News Guy has been summoned away (though not physically) on other business matters.

(No, they’re not very profitable, either, but can not be ignored).

He will return Friday with substantive (meaning, not just political) information.

But there is just enough time and energy left for one apology and one observation.

The apology goes to Julie Waters, who was called Julie Walters in a recent post. Ms. Waters, in her amusing corrective comment, suggested the News Guy might have gotten her confused with an actual Julie Walters, an actress.

Nope, this was strictly an eyesight malfunction, the existence of actress Julie Walters having been previously unknown in this precinct.

The observation comes after perusing Tuesday’s Burlington Free Press “Comment and Debate” page in which all six candidates for governor answered the question, “What changes, if any, would you make to how we pay for public education, how much we pay and how the public school system is structured?”

Actually, this is one observation in five parts:

–Part One: Is the Free Press aware that no more than 14 people could possible be reading these answers?

–Part Two: As has been mentioned here before, the writing of these answers, simply as writing, is execrable. Any candidate writing these answers him/her self should cease, desist, and hire a professional writer. Any candidate whose answers are already being written by a professional writer should  fire said writer and hire another.

(And Susan Bartlett, or perhaps the Free Press, should hire a proofreader. She said  school costs were rising because of “personal.” Surely she meant “personnel.”)

–Part Three: But to those of the 14 (perhaps eight) who can wade through the stilted prose, all six candidates have some sensible ideas, having to do with consolidation, distance learning technology, bulk purchasing, and other possible efficiencies.

–Part Four: Sen. Peter Shumlin, in his answer as well as on his television advertisements, calls for universal pre-kindergarten education. That can be expensive. Have his four Democratic opponents challenged him as to how he plans to pay for this? If not, why not?

–Part Five: Republican Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie said that “our problem is simple: we spend more than we have.”

No, we do not. The schools are financed from the General and Education Funds, neither of which is in arrears. Obviously, Vermont spends less on schools than it has. Otherwise, it would have nothing to spend on anything else.

Sounds as though Dubie was using evocative language to suggest that the state spends more than it should, more than its taxpayers want to spend, perhaps even more than it can afford to spend on schools. These are all plausible, if debatable, assertions.

But politics ain’t poetry. Its language should be literally accurate, not an experiment in hyperbole.

But give Dubie some credit. That was one of the few simple, declarative English sentences by any of the six.

All are invited.

The host will be Sterling President Will Wootten.

The moderator will be…well, ahem, uh, as long as you asked, the moderator will be the News Guy his very own self.

Please do not throw tomatoes as the moderator. He will be doing the best he can. But he could use some help. What would you ask the candidates for governor if you had the opportunity?

Some of the issues that should be brought up may seem obvious – taxes, schools, jobs, Vermont Yankee. Except that they all seem to agree on taxes, schools, and Vermont Yankee. And it isn’t clear that governor can do much about jobs.

Remember eight years ago when candidate Jim Douglas’s slogan was “Jim =Jobs.” Sounded good, but even before the Recession, private sector job growth under Douglas was pretty close to zero.

Not necessarily his fault. Campaign rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, state government policy may be irrelevant to job growth.

Or maybe not. Anyway, if anyone has probing, specific, substantive questions he or she thinks someone should ask one of these folks, here’s your chance to suggest them to someone who is going to do the asking. And who will appreciate the submission whether or not he uses it.

(star break)

MEDIA NOTE—Not censure, this time, but praise. In the continuing discussion about the role of hydro power in the state, Vermont Public Radio did what news organizations are supposed to do – spent some money, sent reporters to cover the news.

VPR reporter John Dillon went 600 miles north of the border who where Hydro-Quebec, from which Vermont utilities just agreed to buy a whole mess of power, has built a huge dam which will divert 70 percent of the waters of the Rupert River to help generate that power.

As Dillon pointed out, the Rupert is just one of three rivers which will be part of a system of four dams, 74 dikes and a new tunnel carved through a mountain, all powering four new generating stations still farther north.

At the same time, VPR’s noon Vermont Edition went to Montreal where host Jane Lindholm presided over a spirited and informed debate between Claude Demers, Hydro-Quebec’s science communicator, and  Daniel Breton, founder of  a Quebec environmental organization.

One angle VPR didn’t deal with, and neither has anybody else. Hydro-Quebec gets criticized from folks on the left side of the political spectrum for those immense dams which have flooded thousands of acres of land, with damaging consequences for both the natural world and the Cree Indians who live in northern Quebec.

Another big corporation abusing the land and indigenous folks in the thirst for profit for the stockholders, no?

No. Hydro-Quebec doesn’t have stockholders. It’s owned by the Province and the people thereof. It is, in short, a socialist institution.

(star break)

More (mostly) good news: Some additional ammunition for the argument made in the post titled Not So Bad (June 4) that life in Vermont is…not so bad.

Maybe even pretty good.

The latest issue of  Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine named Burlington one of the “ten best cities for the next decade.” Praised  for its “creativity and entrepreneurship” Burlington was tagged the eighth best city for both living and working over the next several years. Austin, Texas, was first.

In addition, recently released  (or, perhaps more accurately, hitherto ignored) Census figures confirm that Vermont is one of the most affluent states, with a relatively low poverty rate, and one of the lowest rates of child poverty in the country. The statistics are from 2008, the most recent available.

Only eight other states have child (under age 18) poverty rates in the same low category as Vermont: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Utah, and Wyoming.

For the total poverty rate, Vermont was in the second best category, ranked with 13 other states with rates between 10.2 and 13.1 percent (Vermont’s was 10.4). Seven states, including New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Maryland, had lower rates.

As is true almost everywhere, Vermont’s under-18 poverty rate (12.8 percent) is slightly higher than its overall rate.  But not everywhere. Chittenden County’s total poverty rate was 9.6 percent, but the child poverty rate was 9.2 percent.

But that was unusual. In the other 13 counties, the under-18 rate was either slightly or not so slightly higher. Even Addison County, which had the lowest total poverty rate (9.5 percent had a slightly higher rate (10.6 percent, for those under 18.

Both the highest rates and the biggest differences between total and child poverty were in the Northeast Kingdom. Caledonia County had an 11.8 percent total poverty rate, with 17.1 percent of its under-18s in poverty. In Orleans County, the overall rate was 14.3 percent, with a 19.3 percent poverty ate for those under 18.

And in Essex County, the poorest in the state, 14.8 percent of all persons lived below the poverty line, but the under-18 rate was 23.8 percent.

That puts Essex at a level comparable with some of the rural counties of the Southeast and Southwest, the poorest areas of the country.

None of this is a big surprise. But it deserves more attention than it has been getting from either officials or observers. That latter, that’s us. More attention will be paid, starting with maybe a few questions to these candidates at Thursday’s debate.