Things are getting a little strange over in Burlington.

To which many a Vermonter would say: “So what else is new?” These are the folks who like to point out that Chittenden County is a nice place because it’s right next to Vermont.

But let’s not be divisive; it’s one state, and we’re all in it together. And considering that the latest Burlington strangeness was inspired by politics, known to bring out the strange in men and women all over the world, we non-Burlingtonites (Burlingtonians?) should refrain from acting in a mean-spirited manner.

But that doesn’t mean we have to ignore the obvious.

Start with Mayor Bob Kiss’s assertion on election night that the outcome “doesn’t play out as a referendum on this administration.”

Uh, actually, Mr. Mayor, it did. Your party lost  (pending a recount) a Council seat in its Ward 2 stronghold. Your party’s pet political ploy – instant run-off voting – got rejected. Your administration’s handling of the Burlington Telecom mess was certainly one reason Republican Kurt Wright breezed to an easy victory over incumbent Democrat Russ Ellis in Ward 4.

Sounds like the functional equivalent of a referendum on the administration.

In the interests of charity, it should be acknowledged that Kiss was acting like a very conventional politician (which, come to think of it, is what he is). Even extraordinary politicians  seem incapable of calling a setback by its rightful name. Recall that both Ronald Reagan (in 1982) and Bill Clinton (in 1994) were asked the day after the Mid-term elections whether their party’s defeats indicated public displeasure with their policies. No, both said. Yes, was the correct answer.

True, you can’t expect any politician (or non-politician) to be that candid. But wouldn’t it have been refreshing if one of them had said something like, “well, it wasn’t a ringing endorsement, was it?”

But the Mayor was not the only self-deluded politician in town last week. No sooner had the votes been counted than Councilor Ed Adrian, a Ward 1 Democrat, said Kiss should resign.

Resign? He’s the duly elected mayor. In a democracy, elected officials who are not seriously ill or been convicted of a crime should not resign. We should not let them off so easily. Furthermore, we should not let the voters off so easily. They should pay more attention to whom they elect, on the assumption that the winner will serve out his/her term. Voters should understand that they are going to be stuck with their choice until that term ends.

(OK, right across the lake there is a possible exception because Gov., David Paterson (a) has been charged with offenses that are not frivolous; and (b) was never elected governor. But those are peculiar circumstances. Even Burlington is not as strange as New York State).

In addition to political delusion, some Burlngtonians seem to suffer from hypersensitivity. When Kiss blamed the loss of instant runoff voting on the “naysayers” of the New North End, Ward 7 Councilor Paul Decelles, the Republican who represents part of that neighborhood, pronounced himself “appalled.” The Mayor’s statement, he said, was “beyond contempt”  The New North End, he reminded Kiss, was part of Burlington, and “not in Colchester.”

Touchy, touchy. If in fact the denizens of Ward 7 got their noses out of joint over Kiss’s comment, they need to grow up. Maybe they didn’t but Decelles decided to get in on the whining craze anyway.

Again, he was not alone. The people (or, probably, just the mayor and some self-appointed spokespersons) of Las Vegas executed a hissy fit last month after President Barack Obama told a New Hampshire audience, “you don’t blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.” Outraged, a Las Vegas newspaper wondered “why the president of the United States continues to use Las Vegas as an applause line in speeches about wasted money.”

But where do the folks out there think you go to blow a bunch of cash? Akron? Topeka? Perth Amboy?

Or maybe Colchester.

If you live in the nation’s sybaritic capital (or in the North End, for that matter) at least a minimal thickness of skin is recommended.

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Last week, the News Guy was on the radio, on the WDEV-FM morning call-in show hosted by Mark Johnson, who mentioned that a new poll about public opinion on the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant was about to be released.

“Who took it?” Was the first reaction from this corner. “You have to be careful about polls commissioned by interest groups.”

The poll came out later that day, justifying the caution. It was taken by a market research company called Infogroup ORC (which just this week was bought by CCMP Capital Advisor, a New York based private equity firm for some $635 million) on behalf of the Civil Society Institute.

The Institute seems to be a lively group of folks who do some valuable work. But they are unquestionably anti-nuclear, and it shows. Among the poll’s questions were whether respondents would support closure of Vermont Yankee in 2012 “assuming that a combination of increased energy efficiency, clean energy, such as hydroelectric, wind and solar, and natural gas could be used to offset the electricity from the reactor.”  Another was whether they would support closing the plant in 2012 “assuming that many new jobs could be created through investments in new clean technologies, such as hydroelectric, wind and solar.”

Would you believe that very large majorities replied that under those circumstances they would shut down Yankee? And would you agree to give away your car “assuming” it would be replaced by a chauffeur-driven limousine with a fully-stocked bar and a drop-down table constantly refilled with caviar canapés, with an all-expenses-paid, two-week trip to the Riviera thrown in as an added inducement?

The irony is, of course, that it isn’t necessary to hype anti-VY sentiment in the state these days. As demonstrated by the neutrally worded poll taken by Research 2000 last month, and by reaction to the recent State Senate vote not to relicense the plant, most Vermonters would be happier without it

But the hyperbole in this poll was so bizarre that it would felt right at home in…well, in Burlington.

At about 5PM, the phone rang.

Nobody on the other end.

“Hello, hello,” and finally came that delightful metallic tone of a recorded voice explaining that this was a political poll, and asking the respondent whether he had a favorable (press 1) or unfavorable (press 2) opinion about Sen. Patrick Leahy.

At which point, the respondent, being a politically sophisticated type, assumed the poll had been commissioned by a Leahy opponent.

A conclusion confirmed by the next question: Would you vote for Pat Leahy no matter who ran against him? (Or words to that effect. Notes were not being taken. It could have been something like, “regardless of who runs against him”).

Now, aside from Pat Leahy, his wife, his children, and a few devoted, down-the-line Democrats, who on earth is going to answer that question in the affirmative? Suppose Jonathan Papelbon were to quit the Red Sox, or Tom Brady were to retire from the Patriots, move to Vermont, and run for the Senate? What if Oprah moved here and wanted the job? They’d get lots of votes. Rare is the voter who would commit to a candidate without taking even a quick look at the opposition.

“That’s a pretty typical hard re-elect question used in polling,” said Dan Riley, the spokesman for Len Britton, the Republican running against Leahy, who was indeed the power behind the poll.

Well, not really. More typical would be something like, “do you think Pat Leahy has done a good enough job as senator to deserve re-election, or is it time to give somebody else a chance?”

But just because the question was unusual did not make it pointless. Britton can try to trumpet the likely result (look for a press release headlined, “80 percent might vote against Leahy”) to convince contributors that his is not a lost cause.

Which of course it is not. Eight months before the election, nobody’s cause is lost. Improbable, perhaps, but not lost.

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Outside some polling places Tuesday health care activists were handing out little slips of paper with their motto, a phrase commonly heard but rarely examined in Vermont these days: “Health care is a human right.”

It is? Who says? And more broadly, who decides what is and is not a human right?

The questions bring up the recently quoted remarks of John Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods Market, that “it’s not intrinsic in the nature of human beings to have a right to health care.”

Mackey is right, of course. But then it’s not intrinsic in the nature of human beings to have the right of free speech, freedom of religion, security against unreasonable search and seizure, or the power to choose the folks who will govern them.

These are all artificial inventions, or what the folks in parts of academia would call social constructs. They come neither from nature nor heaven, but from people in particular cultures, notably ours.

Intrinsic or not, it’s up to human beings to decide what rights they and their society should have. In America we have in effect (because we’ve never spelled it out) decided that health care is a human right for those old enough, poor enough, or, needless to say, rich enough.

For everybody else it isn’t. Yet.

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Some clarifications of recent items are in order here, including a clarification of a clarification. Monday, the News Guy corrected the previous Monday’s post that said the recent statewide poll taken by Research 2000 for WCAX-TV had a four percent margin of error.

Actually five percent, said the correction.

Actually five percentage points, which the numerate among you will understand is not the same thing. This is one of those stupid errors which is stupider than most stupid errors, being an error the News Guy has often corrected when committed by others, making it especially foolish of him to commit it himself.

Almost as embarrassing was the typo in Monday’s other correction. Why the spell check did not catch “secondary sourc” remains a mystery (but not an excuse; we can’t rely on spell check). Perhaps there is such a word is “sourc”? Whichever, this was supposed to be a” secondary source.”

More substantively, Monday’s post reported that the spent nuclear fuel stored at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant site in Vernon could remain dangerous for 24,000 years.

Worse than that, emailed Margaret Gundersen of Fairewinds consulting, which deals with nuclear power issues. That 24,000 years “is the half-life of the nastiest radioactive isotopes,” she said, “but it takes roughly 10-half lives for the radioactivity to decay completely and for the radioactivity to be equal to what is natural background.  So, mathematically, 10-half lives of 24,000 years means 240,000…years.

This becomes a question of personal responsibility. The News Guy wants to make sure that his error has lulled no one into thinking he or she can wander around the grounds of the abandoned Vermont Yankee plant as early as the year 26,010. That could still be dangerous. Unless the waste has first been removed to Yucca Mountain, Nevada (but don’t hold your breath for that one) or elsewhere, do NOT, under any circumstances, walk around that area until the year 242,010.

Assuming, of course, that human beings then are still counting years under the same system. Assuming that is, that human beings have not either (a) evolved into a possibly more rational species; or (b) completely destroyed themselves and their surroundings.

The Greek slave Pedagogue

Grammar Note: On Vermont Public Radio Friday, Sen. Phil Scott, a Republican from Montpelier and an aspirant to the lieutenant governorship, described something as “a phenomena.”

Scott was thereby guilty of what might be called the criterion phenomenon, the inexplicable compulsion to call a single phenomenon or criterion two of them.

But let us not confine our pedagogic purity to the politicians. To the contrary, we will also meticulously monitor members of the media (as we assiduously arrange the alliteration). A few hours earlier, VPR’s Mitch Wertlieb, helping the quarterly and loathsome fundraising drive had imagined “$5,000 laying on the ground.”

Possible, had the $5,000 undergone metamorphosis into human form and commenced placing objects upon the earth. Or alternatively, transformed itself into two human beings, and….oh, no. This is a family web site.

More likely the five grand was (at least in the Wertliebian imagination) lying on the ground.

If it’s any comfort to either man, on the radio the next day, Steven Chu, the secretary of Energy and, more pertinently in this case, a Nobel prize winner, talked of a competition “between (his younger brother) and I.”

This is the “between I” problem, the origin of which could be similar to that of the criterion phenomenon For decades, teachers scolded kids who said “Johnny and me are going to town,” or some variant thereof, convincing millions that it is always correct to say “(whoever) and I” even when “me” is right and “I” is wrong.

(Anyone who at this point actually said to him/her self, “no, ‘I am wrong,’” should be thoroughly ashamed, if not summarily executed.)

Political Note: Back in October, the News Guy, putting on his political prognosticator hat, suggested that State Sen. Doug Racine of Richmond had emerged, however tentatively, as the front-runner among the five Democrats running for their party’s nomination for governor.

Very tentatively indeed, as it turns out. Looking at the field today, it looks as though Senate President Peter Shumlin of Putney has become the first among equals.

Considering that the primary is at least 28 weeks away (the date may yet be changed), that no one seems to have taken an actual poll, and that most people who will vote in the primary are so far paying scant attention to the campaign, Shumlin’s hold on this position is just as tentative as Racine’s was.

Besides, in a way it was no fair. Shumlin had outside help. From the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

It’s not likely that Vermont Yankee or its owner, the Entergy company of Louisiana, planned things that that way. Shumlin has been one of the plant’s persistent critics, meaning the best thing it could do for him was to do just about everything wrong, calling attention to the plant’s possible safety problems and its management’s competence and dependability, or lack thereof.

Precisely what it has done in the last several weeks, almost as if the Shumlin campaign had been secretly orchestrating Entergy’s actions, or (for those who believe in such) put a hex on the company.

But Shumlin didn’t just sit there as this gift was proffered to him. He knew what to do with it. No smug I-told-you-so wise cracks. No (apparent) gloating. He’s been calm, forceful, consistent in the way he’s handled himself behind the various podiums from which he’s addressed the issue.

Of course all the candidates have been standing behind podiums. But thanks to the Vermont Yankee tritium leaks and misstatements, there have been lots of television cameras and reporters in front of those podiums while Shumlin spoke. It’s been hard for the other Democrats to get much ink or air time of late.

Speaking of which, has anybody noticed that Lt.Gov. Brian Dubie, who faces no primary for the Republican nomination, has gotten a bit of air time because Gov. Jim Douglas keeps inviting him to every podium to face the cameras even though there is no point at all to Dubie’s presence?

Well, not counting to have him face the cameras.

Since Dubie has said nothing newsworthy, he hasn’t gotten much attention. Still, he’s been pictured up there next to the other officials who actually have power to make policy decisions.

Not Dubie’s fault. The lieutenant governor just doesn’t have much in the way of power to make policy decisions.

Tax Note: Well, on the very morning of the News Guy’s last post (scroll down), the one pointing out that there was no actual evidence that Vermont’s relatively progressive income tax structure has produced a measurable exodus of wealthy folks, the Burlington Free Press’s lead story in the local section bore the headline “Tax Migration Feared.”

What? Had somebody come up with actual evidence that your humble agent had somehow missed?

In a word, no. A tax accountant said some of his clients had asked him about the tax benefits of moving elsewhere. This is actual evidence of nothing. The closest thing to evidence that the Senate Economic Development Committee heard at a Burlington session was the claim of real estate developer Ernie Pomerleau that he has no plans to move out, but knows three dozen people who have.

A nice, round figure, three dozen. Nobody seems to have asked Pomerleau for their names. But let’s stipulate that Pomerleau is an honorable fellow and has actually talked to 36 wealthy Vermonters thinking about blowing the pop stand because of last year’s repeal of the state tax preference on capital gains.

But just where will they go? Only eighteen other states (according to the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office) offer tax breaks on capital gains, and most of them apply only to some gains. The only states that had the kind of broad preference Vermont just repealed are Arkansas, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.

Somehow, a mass exodus of wealthy Vermonters to North Dakota does not seem likely.

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

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

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

Bad poetry, but good political analysis.

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

Poetry no better. Perspicacity identical.

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

But it’s also expensive.

According to whom?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just not their favorites.

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

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

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

Sen. Leahy (from his web site)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does Vermont coddle the Middle Class?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

exercise it.”

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

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

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

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

In his last State of the State address, Gov,. Jim Douglas demonstrated once again that he is tenacious, determined, single-minded, and bold.

And maybe a little clueless?

It was a fairly long (5,917-word, 50-minute) speech to the Legislature, clear if not eloquent in composition, crisply delivered, politely received.

And familiar.

In fact, if some in the audience thought they had heard similar sentiments similarly expressed not all that long ago, they were right. Similar statements had been similarly expressed a year and a day ago in the same place by the same speaker, in his fourth inaugural address.

Leading some to wonder why, early in the speech, Douglas warned his listeners not to “choose to recycle old ideas and hope for a different outcome.”

In this case, the governor recycled some of his old ideas, including several that he’d proposed last year. He didn’t get them then. If he’s hoping for a different outcome this time, he would seem to be ignoring his own advice.

After all, little has changed. It’s the same Legislature that ignored most of his proposals last year and over-rode his veto twice. If anything, the lawmakers are more confident than they were a year ago, especially because one thing that has changed is that Douglas decided not to run for re-election.

In other words, he’s a lame duck. He keeps insisting that he isn’t, though he is, or at least that it has not weakened him politically, which would be a first in the history of the country, if not the world.

So why did he make the same controversial (and probably doomed) proposals again?

Because he really believes in them. Because he’s tenacious and bold. Because he thinks this time he might prevail.

Or because he’s clueless.

As he did last year, Douglas urged the Legislature to set a cap on local school spending. It didn’t. As he did last year (though in slightly less blunt language) he called the school finance system “broken,” implying that the lawmakers should replace it. As was true last year, he didn’t specify what the replacement would look like, leaving that to the lawmakers. Perhaps because most legislators don’t agree that the system (Acts 60 and 68) is “broken,” they came up with no replacement last year. They won’t this year, either.

But Douglas did not stop at recycling his old ideas that were not adopted. No, bulling right ahead with little hope of success, he came up with some new ideas that are almost certainly not to be adopted, as follows:

–Repeal – or at least pledge to repeal in the near future — the capital gains and estate tax increases adopted last year;

–Require teachers to pay 20 percent of their health insurance premiums;

–Trim the “income sensitivity” provision of the statewide education property tax so that middle-income homeowners pay more and the wealthy pay less. (of course, he didn’t word it quite that bluntly, but that’s the gist of his proposal);

–And while this was more a suggestion than a specific proposition, Douglas made clear he thought it would be a good idea if all the teachers emulated state workers and took an immediate three percent pay cut.

(Not an outlandish idea, but unrealistic. The state employees agreed to the cut in their new, statewide, contract. Teachers contracts are district-by-district, and they do not all expire at once).

It was hardly necessary to wait until the speech was over to figure out that Douglas was not convincing the legislators. Six times the audience in the House Chamber interrupted the speech with applause. But except for the early support for his tribute to Vermonters fighting (or soon to be) overseas, almost all the clapping came from the balcony, full of old friends and administration officials.

Down on the floor, where the lawmakers sat, few applauded except for the stalwart but decidedly outnumbered Republican contingent—50 of 150 House members, seven of 30 senators, and not all of them firm Douglas allies.

Perhaps because they know they have the votes and Douglas doesn’t, the Democratic Legislative leaders were relatively restrained in their post-speech comments. Snate President (and Democratic governor hopeful) Peter Shumlin and House Speaker Shap Smith both said they were willing to discuss the governor’s ideas. Sen. Susan Bartlett of Morrisville, another candidate for governor, called the speech a “pragmatic first step” in this year’s legislative process. Sen. Doug Racine of Richmond, yet another gubernatorial hopeful, said he agreed with Douglas that the state is in a “tough” fiscal bind.

Then, bit by bit, they began to say what they really thought. Douglas’s proposed tax cuts would “reduce Vermont revenue by roughly $28 million,” Shumlin said. Bartlett said that Douglas “wants to have his cake and eat it, too,” because he didn’t call for repealing the income tax cuts adopted last year, only the capital gains and estate tax increases.

Racine said the speech sounded like “a list of the things he promised to do seven years ago and failed to do,” such as extending broadband Internet service statewide and cleaning up Lake Champlain. And Sen. Mark MacDonald, a Williamstown Democrat, said Douglas’s proposed changes in the income sensitivity mechanism would “raise the property taxes of working Vermonters and cut them for out-of-staters,” some of whom own large tracts of land. Income sensitivity used to hold down the tax bills of 80 percent of Vermonters, MacDonald said. It is now down to 70 percent, and Douglas wants to reduce it further.

Despite these dismissals, a few of Douglas’s proposals might actually get adopted, though probably with some alterations. Regardless of party, almost everybody in state government agrees that public education in Vermont is expensive, in large part because there are, as Shap Smith put it, “legitimate questions about the pupil-teacher ratios.”

They are very low, 11-to-1 statewide, Douglas said, and he proposed “a mechanism to fill only one vacancy for every two retirements.”

A politically sophisticated plan, because it doesn’t require firing anyone, and because raising the ratio to 13 to 1, as he suggested, hardly degrades the quality of education. Perhaps not a realistic plan, though. It’s based on statewide numbers, but teachers neither teach their classes nor retire statewide. They do it school by school, where the numbers may not always add up (or subtract down) precisely the right way to allow reducing faculty without letting some classes get too big.

Still, here’s one area – quite possibly one of the few– where the legislators might build on (or off) one of Douglas’s proposals.

Gov. Douglas. Speaker Smith half hidden behind his right shoulder

And the lawmakers returnedeth to Montpelier, where layeth down the lion with the lamb. Nor did the Democrats unsheathe their rhetoric against the Republican governor, who in turn utterethed not the words, “irresponsible spending.” But stoodeth they side by side, as brethren that dwelt together in unity.

All right, all right! Enough of that! Let’s heed the advice of veteran Democratic Rep. Michael Obuchowski: “Don’t be too cynical.” What began in Montpelier yesterday was both sincere and bipartisan. Democrats and Republicans from both houses, legislative leaders and Gov. Jim Douglas’s top aides (not to mention Douglas himself), who….

Oh, you mean the same guys who just several months ago stopped barely short of questioning each other’s parental legitimacy? The same guys who still hold diametrically opposing views on how the state should be governed? We’re supposed to believe this era of good feeling will last?

…are really trying something new, an innovative approach . This time, state officials are not acting on their own. The Legislature is spending $200,000 for the services of Public Strategies Group, a Minnesota-based consulting firm which is….

Waitaminit, Waitaminit! We’re supposed to take seriously a firm that could write the sentence, “To achieve this client centric approach, the State will seek to redesign the delivery system through the more effective and efficient alignment of financial and staff resources across public sector programming, such as economic benefits, social services, health and human service programs”? It’ll cost us more to translate that into English than we’ll save by following their recommendations.

…providing advice on how to “do more with less,” as several legislators said, for instance…

More with less? Don’t be ridiculous. When the inputs are smaller, so are the outputs. Any time a politician brags about a “win-win” solution, somebody loses.

…having a “unified and systematized…human service intake” system, so that Vermonters who needed social services could enter the system through “one doorway,” rather than having to visit several different agency offices. Similarly, according to the Public Strategies Group report, “streamlining” the process of granting permits to developers could “increase compliance with state regulations while spending 3% less in (Fiscal Years 2011 and 2012).”

Not those old saws again. This “one-stop shopping” plan for both social services and development permitting has been around forever. Furthermore, almost nobody is against it. Douglas and the Legislature could have put all that into effect years ago without the advice of some clowns from Minneapolis.

The consultants came up with some other ideas. For instance, they suggested the state could save money if it would “empower families to support aging Vermonters and individuals with disabilities. Vermont is spending almost $69 million from its General Fund for these services, and “aging demographics and reduced public resources may be requiring Vermont to reconsider its expectations about whom it can afford to serve.”

In English, that means don’t do as much for some doddering old geezers and disabled folks of all ages. That’s doing less with less. They admit it.

If there is a central guiding principle behind the Public Strategies Group’s recommendations it is that the state should not pay for services as much as it should pay for the results of those services. In effect, the PSG’s report says, Vermont and other states use something comparable to the health care system’s widely criticized “fee for service” method, “paying providers ‘hit by hit’ rather than…paying for outcomes.”

Instead of paying for the work being done, the consultants said, the state should pay for the results obtained/

As an example, PSG’s Babak Armajani told members of the Joint Legislative Government Accountability Committee, instead of paying for “a night of bed-space” for a caretaker to tend a sick child all night, the state could “actually purchase the (desired) outcome,” of a healthy child.

Excuse me! In this case the desired outcome is what the state is paying for. The service itself – a sick child not alone in the night but watched over by a health care professional – is the desired outcome. That’s often true with sick children or physically and/or mentally disabled people of any age. They have to be taken care of. The taking care of them is the outcome. It’s expensive.

(Armajani later acknowledged that he might have chosen the wrong example. Instead, he said, think of a social service agency hired by the state to deal with troubled children. Instead of paying it according to how many nights a child stays in its facility, pay it for quickly placing an abandoned child in a good home).

The Joint Committee adopted the 42-page report from the consultants and the committee’s own five-person “steering team” of three legislators and two Douglas Administration officials. The report envisions possibly saving $38 million in Fiscal Year 2011, which begins July 1, without major cuts in state services.

Yeah. That’s a lousy 38 million bucks of a projected $150 million budget shortfall. Let’s see. If this pocket calculator is correct, that still leaves $112 million of money to be raised or programs to be reduced or eliminated.

Meaning that the big-wigs are still facing the choice of raising somebody’s taxes or cutting services to people who really need them. Not that it would actually come down to ‘crippled children left out in the cold.’ But it might be close.

And how about considering the possibility that this report and this display of harmony is a way of: (a)diverting attention from the real choices (and possibly the real disputes) confronting them; and (b) laying the groundwork for making the case that they tried as hard as they could to avoid having to consider raising taxes or slashing services. The possibility, in other words, that all this was less bipartisan harmony than bipartisan political theater.

Afterwards, Douglas and House Speaker Shap Smith and Senate President (and candidate for governor) Peter Shumlin, the Democratic leaders who orchestrated last year’s first-ever legislative over-ride of a governor’s budget bill veto, stood together and pledged to work together to solve the state’s budget problem without last year’s rancor.

When Shumlin said, “Do not doubt our resolve. We will get this done,” he said it forcefully enough to raise doubts in even the harshest cynic.

Okay, Okay. Maybe they mean it. And this consultant stuff doesn’t hurt. It’s like having a good editor go over your copy. There’s nothing wrong with hiring someone to take a fresh look at the old ways you’ve been going about your business. If not taken to extremes, efficiency can be useful.

It’s just that whenever you hear politicians talk this way, you should remember the immortal words of Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne.

Who?

The guys who wrote the music and lyrics to, “It seems I’ve heard that song before”

But first, two items of news, the first one related to Monday’s post (scroll down) about how Vermont’s budget woes are similar to almost every other state’s.

So, it turns out, are its Unemployment Insurance Fund woes, according to a story in yesterday’s Washington Post. The insurance programs in 39 other states are roughly as broke as the one here, largely because “state programs were on average funded at only one-third the level they should have been, according to generally accepted funding guidelines,” in the view of one expert.

As with the budget crunch, this news does not render Vermont’s problem inconsequential or let our policy-makers off the hook. It does seem to mean that they were no more irresponsible than their counterparts in most other states.

The second item is a study concluding that at least 3,000 Vermonters – and probably 6,000 – escaped poverty, and the poverty of some 37,000 others was diminished, thanks to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

Take that conclusion with a smidgen of salt. It comes from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal organization that wants to find good things to say about ARRA. But the Center has a reputation of playing it straight with numbers, and its methodology is there for all to see on its web site.

Now to the serious business of the day, which is only sort of a Vermont matter, but enough of one to justify examining it here, what with the prominent role played in recent days by former Gov. Howard Dean.

We’re talking health care, specifically the quarrel on the left side of the political spectrum over whether to support the much-compromised bill now (apparently) about to pass the U.S.Senate. It’s a worthy subject to discuss here because most Vermonters are at least mildly on that side of the spectrum. But they are not the only ones who might benefit from the conversation; there are lessons here for conservatives, too.

For those who have not been paying attention, Dean, the fiscally conservative governor of the nineties who has transformed himself into a lefter-than-thou agitator of the aughts, was for a while (he began to backtrack Sunday) a leader of the “bill-killer” faction on the left which judges the Senate bill worse than no change at all and urges its defeat, followed by the emergence of a better alternative next year.

As regular readers should know, it is the policy of this web site not to support or oppose legislation. From a liberal, a conservative, or any other perspective, good reasons to oppose any bill are easy to find.

But there are certain rules of political science and human behavior that should be taken into account. The first of these is that every public policy question should be answered through the prism of the Henny Youngman Hypothesis.

Derived from the Great Man’s second most famous line (after “Take my wife. Please!”), his response to the question, “How’s your wife?” The answer being, “compared to what?”

A good laugh in the nightclub, but perhaps a better lesson for the policy analyst. Because the way things actually work, at least in American government and politics, is that there are always two choices. In a free society, there can never be fewer than two. But in this free society, there are never more.

In every case, one choice is the status quo (the wife, in Youngmanian terms). The other choice is…the other choice. The “what” to which the status quo must be compared.

And what is that “what”?

Simple. It is whatever has emerged from the political/legislative/public relations process – the meat-grinder as some would put it – to challenge the status quo. That’s it. That’s the only other choice.

But wait a minute, comes the voice from Stage Left. What about a third choice? Where is the better “what,” the alternative to the status quo that would be even more different from the status quo than is this “what” that’s before us?

It does not exist. It never did. It never will.

The above is observation, not celebration. Now, and often in the past, advocates of greater change have complained that the “what,” the alternative that emerged from the meat-grinder, emerged thanks to chicanery, skullduggery, corruption, and decadence.

Could be. Doesn’t matter. What has emerged has emerged. What has not did not, and therefore does not exist. There are only two choices: the status quo, or the other thing.

That’s what James Madison and Thomas Jefferson knew in 1789 when many of their followers wanted to defeat the proposed new Constitution that had been sent to the states for ratification, and arrange for another convention, which would report out a better constitution.

No, said Madison (supported by Jefferson’s letters from Paris, which he wrote while pausing from his flirtations with a married woman), that’s not the way it works. The only choices are this proposed Constitution or the Articles of Confederation, which latter were not working very well. Let’s ratify this and then improve it, they said.

Which is what happened.

As to the opposite policy – waiting for a better “what” – that’s been tried, too, though not as successfully. In 1974, Sen. Edward Kennedy and top officials of President Richard Nixon’s Administration were close to agreement on a national health insurance system somewhat more sweeping than the one now before Congress.

Not good enough for liberals, led by officials of the AFL-CIO. They thought they’d get a better bill by waiting until after the 1974 elections gave them a “veto-proof” Congress. They’re still waiting.

(For details, check pages 217-219 of Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography, by Adam Clymer [William Morrow, 1999]. In a column in thedeailybeast.com Clymer convincingly argues that Kennedy would vote for this bill. The Senator’s widow, Reggie Kennedy, concurs in a column in Sunday’s Washington Post).

Yes, there can be a good reason to oppose the current health care bill: the conclusion that the system it would create is worse than the status quo. But that is a conclusion more easily reached by a conservative than by a liberal. According to most analyses (see, for example, this one) the major beneficiaries of the bill would be those in the low and lower-middle income brackets.

(And not the health insurance companies? Well, yeah, them, too.).

And remember, the sensible person will not casually dismiss the wisdom of Henny Youngman, not only in matters of political theory, but specifically on the subject of health care. Very few observations of the medical profession are more insightful than the account of the man who, when his psychiatrist told him he was crazy, insisted on a second opinion.

“Okay,” said the psychiatrist (according to Henny), “you’re ugly too.”