Without mentioning the great man’s name, Vermont’s dwindling collection of Vermont Yankee supporters have been invoking the wisdom of one of this more admirable Yankee’s most famous utterances (and one he apparently uttered, which is not true of all of them): “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

Indeed it ain’t. It might not be over for 24,000 years, roughly how long the spent nuclear fuel stored on site will remain dangerous, unless by then it is moved elsewhere.

But last week’s overwhelming vote by the State Senate against allowing the Public Service Board to relicense the nuclear power plant for another 20 years, was a powerful – if not quite fatal – blow to the plant.

To employ a metaphor the aforementioned Mr. Berra would appreciate, a baseball team that has fallen behind 26-4 (the Senate vote) at the end of eight innings can still win. It rarely does.

Today’s post is particularly designed to fulfill one of the purposes of this web site, as expounded at its outset – to compensate for the flaws in mainstream news coverage stemming not from lack of ability but from the rise of “opinions on the shape of the earth differ” journalism, in which quoting each side accurately is considered doing the job even if the words quoted are absurd.

The premise seems to be that if a reporter points out the absurdity he or she will be considered biased. It’s a foolish premise. There is no bias here on the issue; the News Guy is neither an opponent nor a booster of nuclear power. The only “bias” is for evidence and against nonsense.

Start with the oft-quoted dismissal of the Senate vote by Yankee’s most important backer, Gov. Jim Douglas.

“There was a lot of theater here yesterday, but from a legal standpoint, nothing’s changed,” Douglas told WPTZ-TV (Channel 5) News. “The law says absent an affirmative vote from the Legislature, the Public Service Board can’t move forward with relicensure. So I expect there’ll be more chapters in this drama to play out.”

Could be. As the Governor and other Yankee advocates pointed out, by next year, Yankee’s image, battered by news of tritium leaks and official misstatements,  might have recovered. Besides, there are elections this November, and the lawmakers who take office next year could be less hostile to Yankee and its owner, Entergy Company.

But that would require a far greater turnover of Senate seats than seems likely. And on the basis of recent development, it’s just as likely that another misstep or another revelation would drive Yankee’s reputation even lower. Right now, the Senate’s decision appears likely to stand.

As to the consequences of shutting down the power plant in two years, actual evidence (as opposed to rhetoric) supports not taking either side one hundred percent seriously.

The gloom and doom projections are certainly overblown. There is a power surplus throughout the Northeastern United States. Your lights will go on with or without Vermont Yankee.

Might your electric bill be higher? Yes, but it was going to be higher either way. Yankee may now provide some 35 percent of Vermont’s electricity at a low price. But under its most recent contract offer, it would provide less power at a higher price. Interestingly, the utilities that buy Yankee’s power have been relatively quiet during the recent tumult. That’s because they’ve figured out how to replace the power they get from Yankee at an acceptable price.

Besides, if people are serious about controlling global warming (as to be sure many are not, though all evidence indicates that most Vermonters are) everybody is going to have to pay more for all kinds of energy so that everybody uses less. Markets work; the easiest way to reduce consumption of any commodity is to raise its price.

None of this proves that electricity might not be slightly more expensive without Yankee than with it. But “might” and “slightly” are the key words here. Either way, the increase is hardly likely to eliminate Vermont’s status as the cheapest-power state in the region. So those warning about how shutting down Yankee will chase away businesses because of high utility rates need not be taken seriously.

So what should be taken seriously? In ascending order, the following:

1—Without a nuclear power plant, more greenhouse-gas-creating fossil fuel will be burned so Vermonters can turn on their lights, run their computers, and the like. Most of that fuel will probably be natural gas, which burns cleaner than coal and oil, but not as clean as nuclear, (at least once the nuclear fuel is refined from its ore, a process that burns a great deal of fossil fuel). Eventually, wind, solar, and other “sustainable” sources will provide more power, probably at a higher cost. But (see above) higher costs are both inevitable and desirable.

2—Closing the plant will have some economic impact in and around its home base of Vernon. Even Arnold Gundersen, the consultant who has been critical of Vermont Yankee, acknowledged that if the plant stops producing power when its license expires in 2012, it will lay off some 200 nuclear engineers.

Yankee critics point out that most of those engineers live in Massachusetts or New Hampshire. True, but they come to Vernon five days a week (or more) and spend money there. Losing them will be noticeable.

But not catastrophic. Businesses and policy makers have at least two years to prepare. Furthermore, shutting down a nuclear power plant is a major undertaking, requiring hundreds of highly skilled workers for a decade or more. Vernon can prosper for the foreseeable future if it keeps its head.

3—And here’s the only real reason the Vermont Yankee matter is not really closed (all that other stuff is just why people will still jabber about it). Entergy could challenge the state’s power to block its relicensing in federal court.
The company might win. Federal law trumps state law if they conflict (See Article VI, US Constitution). But it’s complicated. Elsewhere, state regulatory agencies play a role in licensing nuclear plants, which seems not to have been challenged.

Besides, companies are often wary about using raw power to impose themselves where they are not wanted. Nobody is going to boycott electricity. Still, fighting the state in federal court could turn out to be what Yogi Berra (maybe) once called “a wrong mistake.”

Correction: Last Monday’s post said the recent Vermont poll taken by Research 2000 had a margin of error of plus-or-minus four percent. That was a typographical error of the mind. It’s five percent (as the computations in the next paragraph correctly indicated).

Correction 2: A reader noted that the picture used to illustrate Friday’s post did not seem to come directly from the US. Agriculture Department’s Food Environmental Atlas, but via a “secondary sourc.” Said reader is right. The map should be credited to the always-helpful Rural Blog from the University of Kentucky.

Fruit and vegetable consumption by state

Real Vermonters eat their fruits and vegetables, do their exercises and don’t care much for Big Macs.

At least in comparison with most other Americans.

It isn’t that plenty of people in Vermont don’t swill sugared sodas, eat in fast food restaurants, or chow down on platefuls of fried foods while sitting in front of the TV. But either they do it less, or fewer of them do it, or both, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and collected in the Food Environmental Atlas.

Available for free on line, the Atlas contains detailed county-by-county information about where and what people eat, how much they spend on food, how extensively poverty affects their diet, whether they get much exercise, and the extent to which they have diet-related health problems.

On almost all counts, Vermont emerges as one of the healthier states, in part because Vermonters seem to try harder than most other Americans to eat a healthier diet and get some exercise.

The Atlas does not provide exact national or statewide statistics, at least not as could be discovered by your less-than-brilliant on-line operative, who also failed to reach an Agriculture Department spokesperson.

But the maps, with color-coordinated rankings by county, added to the county-by-county statistics, leave little doubt that Vermonters have relatively healthy eating habits.

Take fast-food restaurants.(Please!). In Lamoille County there are (or were in 2008) 21 of them, or 0.855 per thousand residents. That’s on the high side for Vermont. There were 0.738 per thousand in Chittenden County, 0.793 in Windsor, and only 0.393 per thousand residents of Caledonia County.

Most of the rest of the country seems to need a lot more. Far and away the champ fast-food county is San Juan County, Colorado (Silverton is the County seat), where there are 7.117 fast food restaurants for every thousand people. That’s twice the ratio of the runner-up, Norton County, Virginia (yup, the county seat is Norton, too; nope, I don’t know where it is, either) where there are a “mere” (compared with San Juan County) 3.235 fast food joints per thousand folks.

Perhaps because there weren’t that many fast food places, Vermonters spent relatively little in them, less than $400 per person per year, a level of restraint matched only by their fellow-Americans in Idaho, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. The big fast-food spenders. Shelling out more than $500 a head, were in California, the Southwest, the Midwest, the deep South, and – go figure – Massachusetts.

Along with Maine, Wisconsin, and several states in the northern Rockies, Vermont has the highest percentage of adults (more than 70 percent)  deemed to be “exercising enough,” though it was not clear what constituted “enough” or who determined what constituted it.

At any rate, exercise is one of those areas in which Vermont might look good only in relation to the rest of the country. Statewide (because the number was the same for every county) 48 percent of Vermont high school students are physically active. That put Vermont in the top rank, along with North Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, and Iowa.

But less than half of high school students are physically active?

That’s scary. Throw away their computers, or at least their computer games.

There is too much information in too many categories in every county to deal with it all here. Anyone who is interested can find the Atlas, either at the Agriculture Department site through usa.gov, or just by Googling Food Environment Atlas, and find out all sorts of stuff about his or her county and its eating/spending/exercise habits.

Suffice to say that Vermont comes across as the state whose residents drink less soda, eat less meat and more vegetables, buy food directly from a local farm, and take care of themselves than most other Americans.

Raising some troubling questions: Do Vermonters enjoy themselves? Of are they a bunch of eat-your-spinach, life-is-serious, let’s-find-only-the-nutrition-and-not-the-flavor-in-our-food wimps? Do they spend so much time at the gym (remember, the adults seem to exercise more than the teenagers) that they’ve forgotten the joy of sitting around a fine dinner table covered with a touch of wretched excess (in moderation, to be sure)?

The Food Environment Atlas does not directly answer that question. But the Atlas does contain one hint, and it’s a hopeful one. Vermonters may spend less money than most Americans at fast food joints, but it ranks high in full service restaurants per thousand people, and is one of only 21 states where folks pay more than $500 a year per capita in restaurants.

Where they might actually be enjoying themselves over good food and drink.

Before state boosters get what the late, great boxing trainer Whitey Bimstein used to call “a swelled head,” the Atlas shows that while Vermonters may be less likely to be obese or diabetic than most other Americans, neither are they all that unlikely to be obese and diabetic.

In Windsor County, 7.1 percent of adults are diabetic, according to the Atlas, and 22.8 percent obese. Almost ten percent of low-income pre-schoolers are obese. Those numbers are higher in Caledonia County.

And however low Vermont’s obesity and diabetes rates may be compared to other states, they are higher than they used to be, according to figures released last week by the Attorney General’s office and the Department of Health.

There’s nothing peculiar to Vermont about these increases, and according to Kelly Brownell of Yale University’s Rudd Center, who was in Montpelier last week, one reason is that more people are eating more fatty, sugary, processed foods, and for good reason. They’re cheaper.

Between 1985 and 2000, Brownell said, the price of fruits and vegetables rose 117 percent, compared to 46 percent for sugars and sweets and only 20 percent for soft drinks. Markets work. When a commodity’s price goes up, consumption of it goes down. When the price goes down (relative to inflation and alternative prices) consumption goes up.

Markets, but not free markets. Soda is cheap because of government subsidies to agriculture. Having, so to speak, sown, Americans now reap, even Vermonters, if a little less so.

There is a political campaign going on right now in Vermont, and we can’t say we haven’t been told about it.

No, this has nothing to do with who’s going to be governor come next year. This is a campaign which ends Tuesday, and while it has regional – perhaps even statewide – ramifications, the electorate is confined to the residents of one town: Lowell, where 550 voters are on the checklist.

Any doubts about this being a political campaign were erased in the Burlington Free Press the Sunday before last, in an excellent front page story by the estimable Candace Page., who explained how Green Mountain Power Co. was employing standard political devices to convince Lowellites to approve a wind power development on three miles of their town’s ridge lines.

Among the classic campaign maneuvers being used: voter registration, direct mail, living room meetings, and a get-out-the-vote campaign including driving voters to the polls.

And what, one may ask, is wrong with any of that?

Not a thing. And there wouldn’t be a thing wrong with it even if the wind project opponents weren’t employing the same tactic (albeit on a smaller scale because they have less money). Among the words that could be applied to this process is ‘democracy.’

But there’s another, to which the Free Press story alludes, but without using the word.

The word is ‘bribery.’

Perfectly legal bribery, to be sure, meeting the dictionary’s (American Heritage Second College Edition) second definition of the word “bribe”: “something offered or serving to influence or persuade,” not the first definition, in which the “something” is given to induce him or her to “act dishonestly.”

In this case nothing is being sought from the recipients of largesse but their ‘yes’ vote, which violates no law. Furthermore, there is nothing covert about the gift. Green Mountain Power is openly offering to give the town between $400,000 and $535,000 every year, which would enable the town to cut its town tax rate to zero or pretty close to it.

Lowell residents and businesses would still pay the statewide school property tax of course. But according to the Free Press’s calculations, the owner of a $200,000 home could save close to $1,000 a year.

Enough, it would seem “to influence or persuade” a homeowner.

All of the above should be taken as observation, not condemnation. In fact, the point of today’s post is neither to censure nor to reveal information kept hidden from the general public. Instead, it is to ponder why information that is known to the general public is so widely accepted by that public under it euphemistic – rather than its real – label: an ‘incentive, not a ‘bribe.’

There’s a difference?

Consider the new wood pellet plant to be created not far east of Lowell, in Island Pond, but only thanks to $10 million of federal loans, $9 million of it guaranteed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Or the extra $15 million that a special legislative panel – at the request of Gov. Jim Douglas – added to an economic development program to entice four businesses to move into the state (see January 13 post, VEGI Burgher). Again, there might be nothing wrong with this. There certainly isn’t anything unusual about it. Almost every state, county, and city in America offers loans, loan guarantees, or outright grants to firms who pledge to expand or relocate, even though the evidence that any of this spending creates a single job that would not otherwise be created is skimpy at best.

It may be good policy. But another thing it is is bribery, however legal and respectable. And one thing it is not is free enterprise, at least not as taught in the Economics 101 textbooks. There, firms open or expand because their leaders think they can sell enough goods or services to earn a profit after meeting their costs, which include interest on loans from the private banking system.

Outside the textbooks, some firms, at least,  hold out for an inducement from the government, often playing one state or city off against another. The result is a form of socialism which is never called by that name, especially by the recipient entrepreneur, who often spends much of his spare time railing against government profligacy.

Except, of course, when he’s the beneficiary.

As mentioned, this is a national phenomenon, but perhaps especially pertinent to Vermont these days. The national-state connection was evident the other day when President Barack Obama proposed $9.8 billion in loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants just as Vermonters debate the future of the only one they have.

Again, let’s stipulate for the purposes of today’s discussion that Obama’s policy is wise, or at least defensible, and that the defenders of Vermont Yankee have a point. There is a case to be made for nuclear power (and against it, as is true with wind power).

But one of the arguments made by the plant’s supporters is that it is unsubsidized, contrasting its independence with the de facto subsidy the Legislature gave “sustainable” (wind, solar, hydro, methane) power last year when it passed a bill granting those producers higher rates.

That bill (H 446) is effectively a subsidy. But nuclear power plants aren’t subsidized? Give us a break. For more than half a century the Price-Anderson Act has limited the nuclear power industry’s liabilities from lawsuits. And all – all – of the initial research and development costs for nuclear power were borne by the taxpayers in a program that was secret at the time but has since become widely known: The Manhattan Project.

This is not an argument against nuclear power. It’s an argument against self-delusion.

As regular readers may recall, every once in a while this site pauses to revisit some earlier items, make necessary clarifications and corrections, offer some random thoughts, and deal with items that may not warrant the full News Guy treatment.

This is one of those once in a whiles.

Monday’s post about public employee retirement funds identified Terry Macaig only as “the most liberal” member of the commission State Treasurer Jeb Spaulding created to study the matter. Macaig is also: (a) a Democratic House member from Burlington; (b) on the staff of the Vermont State Employees Association (VSEA); (c) a long-time employee of the State Health Department.

In other words, he has a personal financial interest in the public employees retirement system, a fact that does not render his views invalid, but that should have been included in Monday’s post. (And thanks to VT Digger for the heads-up on this).

Not that the background of everyone else on the commission proved them to be entirely objective. For instance, Gov. Jim Douglas’s appointee was Douglas J. Wacek, the retired President and Chief Executive Officer of Union Mutual of Vermont Companies, and general poobah of the Vermont corporate/financial establishment.

A vested interest of class and ideology rather than a personal financial concern, perhaps. But no less likely to guide one’s conclusion in a direction that might not be entirely in the public’s benefit.

_________________________________________________________________

Friday’s post noted that the American Automobile Association “does not favor” legislation that would ban hand-held cell phone use while driving.

That was correct, but Tom Williams, AAA’s Northern New England Regional Manager, wants it understood that his organization does not oppose the bill, either. It’s neutral.

AAA does favor “a total ban on portable electronic communication devises including cell phones for junior operators,” Williams emailed, along with “strong support” for “primary enforcement” of the seat belt law and the proposed ban on texting while driving.

_______________________________________________________________

In that same post (A Man’s Car is (Not) His Castle), the news guy declined “out of kindness” to name a businessman who had spoken at a public hearing held by the Senate Transportation Committee. Clearly implied, if not overtly stated, was that the anonymity was a kindness because the fellow had said something (“I don’t believe the statistics”) quite ignorant.

In the” no good deed goes unpunished category,” a commenter (scroll down to that post to read the whole comment) raises a valid point and asks a legitimate question: “It may be kind not to name the businessman, but is kindness part of your remit?”

Good as the question is, first we have to deal with this “remit” business.  In context it seems to mean “mission,” “mandate,” “task,” or something like that. Sounds impressive, a word that might be used by a professor of English literature back when C.S. Lewis or E.R. Dodds was at Oxford. Or were they at Cambridge?

Alas, it also seems to be wrong, though the News Guy remains open to further testimony before rendering a final verdict. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (the “compact” version, for which even younger readers need a magnifying glass), the noun “remit,” found on page 429 of Volume 2 (P-Z) is defined as a pardon (as in, remitting a punishment) or as a reference of (anything) from one part of a book to another, or from one authority to another (remitting a case from a lower to a higher court).

Nothing about it being a synonym for “duty” or “obligation” or anything like that.

Enough semantics. The basic question remains: Should kindness be part of the job here?

On one level, kindness should be part of everybody’s job every day.

Except maybe a reporter’s.

As the commenter said, this guy, private citizen though he may be, voluntarily stepped into the public domain. When you, whoever you are, step into that domain, we, the news chroniclers, are supposed to show you no mercy.

That’s actually the usual theory, practice, ethic, policy, and (who knows, maybe) remit here. It was not followed in this case because, so far as could be determined, it would be a one-shot appearance for the businessman. It wasn’t as though he had joined some organization and was going to be a regular advocate for or against anything, a la, the Tea Party folks.

So he got a pass. It probably won’t happen again, and the commenter was both alert and correct to object.

_____________________________________________________________

In a housekeeping note on February 1, the News Guy took note of “the demons who, it seems, occasionally usurp control at Word Press,” forcing it to disobey orders to publish a new post at a specific time.

“Plans for subjugating these demons are afoot,” that post proclaimed. “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.”

The demons have in fact (we think) been subjugated, which is an unscientific way of saying that the system has been updated.

So what happened?

Ten days later, on a Wednesday, early morning readers clicked in to find neither a new post nor a notice that there would not be one.

It would be tempting here to report that the demons staged a comeback, or that system failed again. In candor, it must be revealed that the guy operating the system failed again, having gotten confused. He is, in the cyber world, easily confused.

The News Guy is happy to report a substantial flow of new subscribers. It is gratifying.

It would be even more gratifying – and make possible more trips to Montpelier and elsewhere – if more of you who have recently joined the ranks of subscribers would also join the ranks of donators.

It’s easy to do. Just look up near the top right quarter of the screen, under “Pages,” and click on “donate.”

It will tell you all you need to know to…remit.

A funny thing happened to the Vermont teachers retirement system on its way to getting diminished and perhaps demolished. It got stronger.

At a price, to be sure. Teachers will have to pay a little more into their pension fund and wait a little longer to retire. But when they do, their benefits will be higher.

Spaulding

Perhaps more important, their plan will survive as a defined benefit plan (the jargon for a traditional pension system) instead of being turned into a defined contribution (the 401k alternative) plan as some officials had apparently hoped.

In the process, the state saves $15 million. Pretty much a win-win-win situation, the winners being: the teachers and their union (Vermont-National Education Association); State Treasurer Jeb Spaulding, who seems to have orchestrated the arrangement; the Democrats, because the deal removes a Republican talking point; the taxpayers, both for the $15 million and because the agreement might inspire some veteran (meaning well-paid) teachers to retire.

What, no losers?

Maybe not. Gov. Jim Douglas wanted a plan that would save the $29 million proposed by a special commission last year from both the teachers and state workers. There are more teachers than state workers, so even if a deal is worked out with the Vermont State Employees Association, the $29 million figure is not likely to be reached. But Douglas does not really come off as a loser here, and is not threatening to veto the agreement.

A few teachers are miffed because, for a while at least, they thought they’d have to make the higher contribution to the pension fund without getting the higher benefit. The agreement has apparently been modified to assuage their concerns at least somewhat, but perhaps not entirely.

And the retirement controversy is not over. The VSEA and state officials are farther apart than the Vermont-NEA ever was. The state workers union and state officials are not even negotiating yet.

“Negotiating,” in this context, comes with an asterisk. In the words of Jes Kraus of the VSEA, “this isn’t a matter of negotiating a contract. This is a matter of statute.”

Meaning that the deal reached by the teachers union, Spaulding, and the leaders of the Legislature isn’t final unless and until it becomes law. Or maybe not even then. The public employee pensions are not simply laws. They are constitutionally protected contracts with each worker, and “any aggrieved individual can always challenge” any contract change in court, as Spaulding acknowledged. Especially because the Vermont-NEA has agreed to these changes, a challenge might fail. But fighting it would cost the state some of that $15 million it expects to save.

This constitutional complication is not merely theoretical; it is, for instance, one reason Kraus and the VSEA are so far standing firm in opposing any change in their pension system. But it does not seem likely to scuttle the deal with the teachers, which came as something of a surprise when it was announced two weeks ago.

Until then, state officials and what might be termed the establishment public opinion machine had prepared press and public for a confrontation. Both unions objected to making concessions. To Douglas and some Republican observers, a “crisis” loomed because of the projected growth in state payments into the retirement funds — $73.5 million this fiscal year, $103.5 million next year, and continuing to rise in the future.

Out of context, those raw figures are meaningless, except perhaps to provide politicians with ammunition for declaring a “crisis.” But putting the figures in context does not demonstrate that there is no problem. The obligation is projected to rise as a percentage of state spending, higher than the 3.5 percent of the General Fund deemed acceptable by the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office.

There is nothing unique to Vermont about any of this. All over the country, governors and mayors for decades have been negotiating generous retirement plans (most far more generous than Vermont’s) in exchange for union acceptance of smaller wage hikes. The wage increases have to be paid now, during the mayor or governor’s term. The retirement benefits will be somebody else’s responsibility. By one estimate, states and localities face a $2 trillion retirement obligation shortfall.

Seen from that perspective, Vermont’s problem seems manageable, but chances of reaching any kind of agreement dimmed last year when Spaulding established a seven-person “Commission on the Design and Funding of Retirement and Retiree Health Benefits Plans” without naming a single worker representative to it. Adding insult to that injury, (from the unions’ perspectives) the commission retained as a consultant the Indianapolis law firm Ice Miller, which claims on its web page that it can “solve difficult employee issues and resolve disputes before they ever rise to the level of a lawsuit or a union organizing drive.”

That’s jargon for, “We bust unions.”

But when the Commission issued its report last month, its recommendations, while ambitious, were not draconian. It did call for raising the age of full retirement eligibility and the employees contribution to the system. But it also proposed raising the basic retirement benefit to a maximum of 60 percent – rather than the current 50 percent – of how much an employee had earned while working.

That’s still “the lowest in New England,” Spaulding said, but perhaps enough of an improvement, in the view of NEA spokesman Darren Allen, to attract more top-flight young teachers into the state’s system.

Though Douglas took the Commission report as a done deal, incorporating its $29 million reduction in his budget proposal as though it had been adopted, instead of just recommended, Spaulding, the legislative leaders, and the Vermont-NEA obviously saw it as the next step in the negotiating process.

As it happened, the negotiations didn’t take long. The Vermont-NEA understood it was going to have to give way on the retirement age and employee contribution, but it insisted on getting something in return. What it got was that 60 percent ceiling plus health care coverage of a retired worker’s spouse.

As health care costs continue to rise, that could be a big plus.

Ironically, the Commission had rejected recommending spousal coverage, even as a topic for discussion. But it appears to be significant that Spaulding was in the minority on that vote, joined only by Rep. Terry Macaig of Williston, the Commission’s most liberal member.

The final “score” is that the teachers will pay 5 percent rather than 4 percent of their salaries into the retirement plan (an average of an extra $550 a year), and more (though not all) will have to wait until they are 65, instead of 62, to retire.

That leaves some of the 1,800 or so (out of about 9,500) teachers in their late 50s or early 60s wondering what’s in it for them. If they can’t take advantage of the new spousal benefit, either because they are spouseless or because their spouse has access to his/her own retirement health care plan, some could decide they’re better off retiring now.

“We could be sitting on an unprecedented wave of retirements this year,” Allen said, perhaps welcome news to school boards who can replace a highly paid veteran with a lower-salary rookie, or not replace the veteran at all.

As is usual in these matters, all parties had political interests. The advantages to Spaulding are the most obvious. He appears as an official who has done his job effectively and saved the state some money. He’s also preserved the defined benefit pension plan of a union whose members vote in Democratic primaries. Spaulding decided last year he didn’t want to run for governor this year. But he’s only 47. There’s an election every two years.

As for the Vermont-NEA, this is not a bad time for it to appear to be accommodating. With school budgets rising even as school populations fall, the union has faced increasing criticism for winning wage and benefit increases for its members.

Winning such benefits is precisely what unions are supposed to do, but in this case the employers are taxpayers who are more likely to feel stingy in a troubled economy.

VSEA has the opposite problem, especially among its own members. It has been quite accommodating, if mostly because it had little choice. The union has accepted hundreds of layoffs, a two-year pay freeze, and now a 3 percent pay cut. It would seem to be in Kraus’s interest to be seen by his own members as being as tough as possible.

Besides, he said VSEA’s situation is not the same as the teachers. His union’s pension plan is “pay as you go,” he said, and is closer to being fully funded than the Vermont-NEA plan.  Spaulding said “informal talks” were going on with the VSEA, but in the meanwhile Kraus is adroitly playing the legal challenge card. He got prominent attorney Beth Robinson, she of the Vermont Freedom to Marry organization, to prepare a legal brief which concluded that, “if the Legislature chose to adopt the Commission’s proposals, it would subject the State of Vermont to very substantial risk of litigation leading to injunctive relief, possibly an award of damages, and possibly a substantial attorney’s fee award to aggrieved state employees.”

Right now, then, a deal with the VSEA doesn’t appear likely. But then, a few weeks ago, a deal with the Vermont-NEA didn’t look likely, either.

The State Senate’s Transportation Committee held a public hearing this week about “cell phone use while driving,” during which the committee members tried as hard as possible to avoid the subject.

Well, the first two speakers, Sharon Racusin of Norwich and Carol Rose, the executive director of the Vermont Safety Education Center, actually addressed the (supposed) topic of the day. Not only that, they (and, as it turned only they) buttressed their arguments in favor of banning cell-hone use by drivers with actual data.

The senators, by and large, were not interested in data. They seemed more receptive to the final speaker, a businessman who, out of kindness,  will not be identified here, who started off by saying, “I don’t believe the statistics.”

It would be unfair to conclude that the senators didn’t believe the statistics, only that they weren’t about to be dominated by them.

The statistics leave little doubt that a driver using a cell phone is far more likely to cause an accident, possibly injuring or killing himself and others, than a driver not using a cell phone. Allowing those statistics to dominate, then, might persuade a senator to support at least a partial ban on cell phone use, as is the law in 29 other states.

But the senators don’t want to pass such a law. Otherwise they would not have spent so much of their time asking questions about the dangers of text-messaging while behind the wheel. That’s what they want to ban by law.

In fact, the Senate has already done its part, passing S 280 last week by a 25-0 margin. Now, say the senators, it’s up to the House.

Not so fast, says the House, where most members want to go farther, also banning hand-held cell phone use and changing the seat belt law to “primary enforcement,” so that police officers could enforce it even if they had not stopped a driver for another offense.

“Highway safety really needs a comprehensive approach,” said Rep. Maxine Grad, a Fairfax Democrat who is the sponsor of the more far-reaching House bill. “We’re talking about public health and safety.”

So while the hearing itself produced almost no useful information, its very lack of substance illustrated what it was trying to hide:

–A House-Senate game of chicken;

–The bi-partisan, bi-ideological inclination of Vermonters (and not just elected officials) to prefer personal observation, anecdotes, and even gossip, where it is convenient,  to empirically testable data, as if, “I don’t believe the statistics” were the state’s motto;

–The apparently widespread if unspoken Vermont assumption that the right to be left alone in your car is comparable to the right to be left alone at home.

“It goes back to the fight (in the 1980s) over the child restraint law,” said Carol Rose of the Safety Education Center. “A kneejerk reaction of ‘don’t tell me what to do in my car.’ Or ‘I don’t want big brother telling me what to do with my kids.’”

Among those who seems to share that outlook is Gov. Jim Douglas, who in the past, according to Tom Williams of the American Automobile Association, has mentioned “personal freedom” concerns in relation to regulating what drivers may do in their cars. Just last week, Douglas worried that banning cell phones could put the state on a “slippery slope,” presumably toward outlawing coffee drinking, eating, and other common driver activities.

From a strictly legal perspective, the personal freedom concern does not exist. There is no right to drive a car on public roads. Were there a right to drive, no one would need a license. The state does not issue permits granting freedom of speech or protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Those are rights.

Permission to drive is a privilege granted by the state, which created the highway system, maintains it, repairs it, and patrols it. So the state has the authority – and arguably the responsibility — to impose any reasonable rules and regulations for using that system.

But legal/constitutional reality does not always trump culture, and apparently some Vermonters connect their automobile with their personal freedom.

Not a completely irrational connection. Especially in rural areas – which is where the car/freedom link seems strongest (seat-belt use is far lower, for instance) – a car expands one’s mobility and options, which are not unrelated to freedom. Besides, people impose their personalities onto their cars (or select the car that fits their personality). So the ‘don’t tell me what to do in my car’ attitude is understandable,  if unsupportable in law or logic.

At any rate, it seems to be carrying the day in the Senate. So does not paying attention to data, asking for little of it, and instead bringing up personal impressions.

“I find that the most (diverting activities) when I’m driving are changing the CD and dealing with hot coffee or tea,” said Senate President (and Democratic gubernatorial hopeful) Peter Shumlin of Putney.

When the senators did resort to actual evidence, they did so selectively. Sen. Phil Scott, the Montpelier Republican (seeking his party’s nomination for lieutenant governor) pointed to a study by Virginia Tech indicating that eating, changing CDs, or putting on make-up are more distracting than using a hand-held cell phone.

It was, implicitly, Douglas’s slippery slope argument, and Scott was reciting the statistics accurately. What he ignored was evidence that it is the use of electronic devices, including cell phones, which have “increased exponentially in recent years” in the words of Despina Stavrinos, a researcher at the UAB University Transportation Center, describing research prepared for the U.S. Transportation Department.

Using a cell phone, according to government data, impairs a driver as much as being drunk under Vermont law.

To be sure, the folks on the other side of this debate aren’t always guided by data, either. Rep. Grad’s bill (H 493) would ban only hand-held phones. But the government data indicate that the hands-free cell phones are no safer than the hand-held. That’s why, according to Tom Williams the Northern New England Regional Manager for the American Automobile Association, his organization does not favor the cell phone ban.

But as Grad said, a ban on hands-free calling would be harder to enforce. A cop who sees a driver with a phone to her ear has evidence. If he just sees her moving her lips, she can always claim (having of course turned off the phone as soon as she saw the bubble-gum machine behind her) that she was singing along with the radio or her I-pod.

Even if there is no right to drive there might be legitimate civil liberties concerns about changing from secondary to primary seat belt enforcement. That gives the individual cop a lot of leeway to, for instance, stop a car to check for seat-belt use just because he didn’t like the political point of view expressed by the car’s bumper stickers.

Ironically, one possible alternative came from the businessman who didn’t believe in statistics. Instead of banning cell phone use, he suggested, why not increase the penalties for drivers who cause accidents because they were on the phone? That might serve as an effective deterrent.

As it happens, though, no such bill has been introduced.

Oh, and speaking of data, here’s some about Vermont from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. If the state went to primary coverage of its seat belt law, compliance would rise – and the number of accidents would decline — enough to save insurance companies $1,316, 000, and the state treasury $498,152.

That may not be a conclusive argument on behalf of primary enforcement. But it is powerful evidence that when drivers assert their individuality by not wearing seat belts, or by talking on the phone, they cost the rest of us money. Driving is a collective, not an individual, activity.

As with the first thing that “everybody knows” about Vermont’s economy – that the state has a bad business climate (scroll down to the previous post) — “everybody knows” this other thing because it is incessantly repeated.

Unlike the gripe about the business climate, though, the statement about the taxes is almost accurate. Some Vermonters pay either a little or a lot more in state and local taxes than they would if they lived in most other states.

Most do not. Or if they do, the difference is so small that it is both imperceptible and not really measureable.

(In general, of course. No doubt there is somebody whose special circumstances would enable him or her to pay far less elsewhere. But then some whose special circumstances would involve them paying more).

Take a typical $60,000-a-year-household. Assuming it consisted of a couple with one or more children who own their home and itemize deductions, its taxable income would be about $50,000, costing them roughly $1,360 in state income taxes, or about 2.2 percent of their income. They’d pay as much or more in several other states.

Same with the sales tax. It’s six percent in Vermont, but nothing on food from the store, non-prescription drugs, or most clothing. Eighteen other states charge six percent or more, 11 levy a sales tax on groceries, and in Illinois, shoppers pay a one percent sales tax on non-prescription medicines.

Even the hated property tax is higher in many other states, and an income sensitivity cap holds down that levy for most Vermont property owners, including that $60,000-a-year couple.

But there are Vermonters who pay substantially more than their counterparts in most other states. These are the richest Vermonters, those who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

It isn’t that Vermont’s top rates are the highest. Four states have higher marginal income tax rates than Vermont’s 9.4 percent. Besides, that top rate doesn’t go into effect in Vermont until a household  has $372, 950 in taxable income (which probably means total household income of close to $500,000). In several states with lower top rates, that top rates kicks in at a lower income, meaning higher taxes for some upper-middle-income folks.

But that doesn’t hold down taxes for the truly wealthy, for households earning $500,000 a year or more. In Vermont, those taxpayers pay more than they would if they lived in almost (though not quite all) other states.

Just look at the numbers.  In 2008, the last year for which figures are available, the 1,195 Vermont households whose taxable income was more than $500,000 (400 of them more than a million) paid $95,417,651 in “net Vermont taxes.” That’s an average of almost $80,000 each, and was almost 20 percent of all the income taxes the state collected (they earned about ten percent of the income).

That’s a heap o’ taxes

It is these wealthy people that business advocates, conservative politicians, and others, have in mind when they assert that Vermont has a poor business climate. If taxes on these folks weren’t so high, the argument goes, more of them would move to (or remain in) Vermont. They wouldn’t just spend their money here. They’d invest. They’d start businesses. So there would be more jobs, meaning more income for middle-income and working people.

Maybe even (though not all the tax-cut advocates take their argument this far) so much more earnings for middle-income people that the state treasury would take in more tax revenues from those incomes  than it would lose by cutting taxes for the wealthy.

And the evidence, the  statistical data to support these contentions are…are…well, it seems that they aren’t.

At least the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Regional  Burlington Industrial Corporation, the state’s two biggest lobbies often urging lower taxes, couldn’t come up with any. Neither could the American Legislative Exchange Council, the very conservative organization of state legislators from around the country. Neither could a few hours of trolling the Internet.

Oh, there are anecdotes and examples. This businessman or that is moving himself and/or his company to a lower-tax state. Sometimes a state or a country will see economic growth after cutting taxes. Sometimes low-tax states grow faster than their higher-tax neighbors.

But sometimes they don’t. Wealthy people seem to move into high-tax states as quickly as they move out of them. Vermont had almost 30 percent more over-$500,000 households in 2008 than it had in 2000, though it has had relatively high top rates for decades (fewer such households than in 2007; but the economic slowdown began in 2008).

As to taxes and economic growth just to take one example out of the blue, the United States of America raised income taxes in the early 1990s and embarked on perhaps its strongest period of sustained, non-inflationary, growth. Then it cut income taxes twice in the following decade and hit the economic skids.

In the 1980s, South Dakota Gov. William Janklow bragged about how his low-tax state was gaining population faster than neighboring, higher-taxed, Minnesota. It was. But in the ten years ending in 2007, Minnesota’s population grew faster, though its taxes were still higher. South Dakota’s economy grew faster, but it started from a lower base, from which faster percentage growth is often easier, and it remains a much less prosperous state than either Minnesota or Vermont.

And as illustrated in the report released last month by Burlington policy analyst Doug Hoffer (and discussed in Wednesday’s News Guy post), Vermont has been adding jobs at a faster rate than famously low-tax New Hampshire in recent years.

Proof that the state should raise taxes, especially on the wealthy, to spur economic growth?

Of course not. In fact, the data do not even conclusively disprove the “lower taxes means faster growth” argument. They just don’t come anywhere close to confirming it.

Do not expect this near-total lack of evidence to deter politicians from arguing that Vermont ought to cut taxes on the wealthy to invigorate its economy.  Gov. Jim Douglas has already used it urging the Legislature to roll back last year’s increases in the capital gains and estate taxes. Early indications are that it will be a theme in Lt.Gov. Brian Dubie’s campaign for governor.

It isn’t that there is no case to be made for cutting taxes on the wealthy. There is. There is a case to be made for almost anything. But when it comes to reducing taxes on the wealthy, only two outcomes should be expected: the wealthy will pay less in taxes, and the state government will have less money to do the things it does, and will therefore have to do less.

Either or both of these may be desirable ends. Tax cut advocates should make the case that they are desirable ends. Claiming that economic growth will also follow is intellectually irresponsible.

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.

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.