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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An interesting comment which deserves a full treatment soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, neither of those was a typo, either.

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

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

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

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

But they don’t want to move.

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

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

You mean after all that pulling and tugging, yelling and screaming, wailing and moaning, insults and accusations, this thing is tied?

So says the poll conducted for Vermont Public Radio, and so it seems.

In this case a tie looks better for…

–Brian Dubie because it comes after a couple of bad weeks in which even Republican office-holders were privately warning him his campaign ads were doing him more harm than good?

–Or Peter Shumlin, because eight percent of the respondents said they remained undecided. Undecideds usually break two-to-one against the incumbent, and Lieutenant Gov. Dubie is more of an incumbent than Shumlin.

One or the other, that’s for sure.

The poll was commissioned by VPR and conducted by Mason Dixon Polling and Research, headquartered in Washington. It shows Dubie ahead 44-to-43 percent. With a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points, (and remember, that margin is on each candidate’s total, not on the one-point spread) that’s a tie.

Mason-Dixon is a legit polling firm, and the sample (625 registered voters who indicated they were likely to vote) is big enough, so the survey’s basic numbers should not be doubted or disputed. Democrats who want to convince themselves that Shumlin is really ahead because this poll, like most, does not contact the land-line-less, who are more likely to vote Democratic, are welcome to their delusions. It’s true that a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press  indicated that with perhaps a quarter of U.S. households having only cell-phone service, “election polls that rely only on landline samples may be biased” toward Republicans.

But in Vermont, where cell phone service is spotty at best in many places, there are fewer ‘cell-phone-onliers,’ and while more of them are probably on the young side, and therefore more likely to vote Democratic, they are also less likely to vote at all. Small solace for Democrats here.

There is, however, one unusual feature of the VPR poll. More than 60 percent of the respondents were 50 years old or older. One hundred eighty four, or 29 percent, were between 60 and 64 years old, while 191, or 31 percent, were over 65. Only 73 respondents, 12 percent, were under 35, and 176, or 28 percent, were between 35 and 49 (and one refused to divulge his or her age).

That’s out of synch with Vermont’s adult population. According to the most recent estimates from the State Health Department, there were 484,996 Vermonters of voting age in 2004, of whom 204,411 were over 50. That’s just a touch more than 42 percent, a long way from 60 percent.

(Yes, the Health Department was estimating everybody, citizen and non-citizen alike., But Vermont is home to so few non-citizens that their presence would seem to be statistically insignificant in this context. And, yes, that percentage of geezers has probably inched up a bit since 2004, but not enough to erase the demographic disconnect between the poll sample and the entire population).

This  apparent discrepancy does not render the poll inaccurate. The pollsters tried to screen out respondents not likely to vote, and as just mentioned, older folks are more likely to go to the polls in non-presidential years than are the whipper-snappers. It’s quite likely that more people in their twenties, thirties, and forties told the pollsters they weren’t sure they’d bother to vote, while the older folks (some of whom don’t have that much else to do) were certain they’d cast a ballot.

At least as reported by VPR, the poll did not break out the candidate preferences by age category. They might not be meaningful, anyway; with such small sub-samples, the margins of error would be too big to allow responsible analysis. Still, even in Vermont, where the typical 60-year-old is likely to vote Democratic, the typical 30-year-old is more likely to vote Democratic. So the age gap between the sample and the whole electorate might mean that there could a simple path to victory for the Shumlin campaign: just get more young people to the polls.

“Simple,” in this case, does not mean “easy.” It’s a little late to start a major get-out-the-vote operation on, say, the University of Vermont and the State College campuses. But perhaps not too late to intensify them if they’re already underway. There are other ways to reach young voters, but it is not the mission of this web site to provide political tactical advice to either party (especially not for free; in the most unlikely event of a career path switch to political consulting, such advice will cost a pretty penny).

So if the score is tied midway through the fourth quarter, which side has the momentum, or at least the ball? And (honest, the football metaphor will stop soon) which side will not simply come up with the right plays, but will have the resources to execute those plays?

Nobody knows, and whoever claims to know is fooling either his/her listener(s) or him/her-self. As any good coach can tell you, intangibles can be decisive.

But so can one great big tangible: money.

The latest reports filed with the Secretary of State’s office show that Shumlin has actually raised more than Dubie in the last month ($490,000 to $172,000), and has almost as much ($207,000 to $231,000) cash on hand.

But the important thing here is not the official candidate money. It’s the other money, most of it originating with each national party’s Governors Association but filtered through other entities.

Raising a few questions: What are these entities and why were they created?

And why is money so important?

It’s that last question that rarely gets asked, much less answered. Perhaps that’s because the answer could be construed as an insult to the one faction which may not be insulted in polite company. Tune in later for answers.

Peter Shumlin wants to “put Vermont back to work,” because “thousands of Vermonters are struggling to find good paying jobs,” and “Vermont is facing the highest unemployment rate in 30 years.”

So they are and so it is. But Vermont is not alone. In the other 49 states, millions are struggling to find jobs and the unemployment rate is higher than it’s been in 30 years.

In fact, the unemployment rate is lower in Vermont than it is nationally or in most other states. In August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only four states had lower unemployment rate’s than Vermont’s 6.0 percent, which was more than a third less than the national rate.

Brian Dubie agrees that job creation is vital, and he says jobs are scarce because “it’s harder to start a small business here, harder to earn a good living here, harder for a small business to hire and grow…than in almost any other state in America.”

Dubie has some evidence to support his assertion, a 2009 survey by Forbes Magazine finding that Vermont had one of the least “business-friendly environments” in the country. As evidence goes, though, this survey was decidedly unimpressive, and there are no actual data supporting the claim that small businesses are less likely to succeed in Vermont than elsewhere. Until the Recession began, business start-ups outnumbered business failures in the state, and the success rate was comparable to the rate in other states.

Different though their outlooks may be, Dubie and Shumlin are both acting in accordance with what seems to be Vermont’s real – if unofficial – motto: “Woe is Us.”

Speaking of no data, there are none to prove that Vermonters tend to complain any more than Tennesseans, Kansans, or Oregonians. In recent years, whining has emerged as the national pastime as various regions, generations, and subcultures claim to be more put-upon than everyone else.

To be fair, there is plenty to…well, whining never did any good, but there is plenty to complain about and rail against these days. In many ways, the country is in bad shape. The current Recession is the worst since the Great Depression (unemployment went slightly higher in 1982, but it was a far more manageable downturn). In real money terms, many people earn no more than they did a decade or so ago even as the cost of necessities such as health care and education keep rising. Life in America is not easy these days.

But all these are national (and some cases global) troubles. There is nothing particularly Vermont-ish about them. In fact, for the most part, Vermont is getting through these troubled times better than most states. Depending on who is doing the counting and when, the home foreclosure rate in Vermont is either the lowest or the second lowest in the country. As mentioned, the jobless rate, while higher than before the Recession, is relatively low, as is the poverty rate, and even the much-discussed pending state government budget deficit pales in comparison with many other states.

One reason to suspect that Vermont is whinier than most other states is that Vermonters were kvetching well before the Recession. To some extent, this is one consequence of being a generally liberal state. Complaining – sometimes with good cause, sometimes not – is built into a liberal’s DNA.

But if anything, it has been the state’s conservatives who have voiced the loudest gripes. Led by Gov. Jim Douglas, Republicans and their allies have kept up a steady chorus caterwauling that Vermont’s tax structure and environmental regulations are stifling economic growth.

It’s not impossible that there is some basis to this critique. But it faces one problem at the outset: there really isn’t much evidence that Vermont’s economic growth has been stifled at all.

For the last half century, this state has gotten steadily bigger and richer. In 1960, the Census counted 389,881 Vermonters. That rose to about 445,000 in 1970, some 511,000 ten years later, almost 563,000 in 1990, almost 609,000 ten years ago, and an estimated 638,000 this year. Experts project the population to reach 678,000 by 2025.

As it has grown larger, Vermont has grown richer. One of the poorest states in the middle of the last century, it now has the 21^st highest median household income. According to official federal figures from 2007 to 2008 (the latest figures available) Vermont’s Gross Domestic Product grew by 1.7, more than twice the nationwide rate of 0.7 percent.

Vermont does have economic problems, but the evidence suggests that these problems stem less from what Vermonters do (government policies) than with where they do it (on farms and in small towns) and who they are (white, Anglo, educated, relatively affluent).

Vermont is one of the most rural states in the country, with only one official metropolitan area (Burlington and environs). In today’s economy, the advantages go to concentration and consolidation. With rare exceptions, economic opportunity is found in the big cities and metro areas. That’s home to the big economic drivers – the big universities, the health care and research centers, high finance, the arts. That explains why Chittenden County is the most affluent part of the state. It has at least some of all of the above. Considering that the rest of the state has very little, its prosperity is impressive. Somebody is doing something right.

One thing Vermonters are not doing much is having children, so one real concern is that the average age of the state’s residents will progressively rise. But there’s not much that can be done about that. Educated, white, Anglos aren’t having children anywhere in America, all of which is getting older. Nationwide, the share of the population over age 65 is projected to rise from 12.9 percent this year to 17.8 percent in 2025.

Vermont does have challenges. Like the rest of the country – but more than most states in the Northeast – income inequality is growing. The immigrants tend to be affluent retirees or educated folks who come to work at Fletcher-Allen, IBM, or the University of Vermont. The emigrants tend to be the less educated who can not find the jobs in factories, farms, or forests that supported their parents and grandparents.

That’s a real problem. But – again – hardly unique to Vermont. It is a problem that stems from great progress. Oversimplifying just a bit, the prosperous half of the world has solved the production-of-goods problem. People can produce more machinery, food, and fiber with a fraction of the workers needed a few decades ago. Among the functions that need fewer workers are forestry and dairy farming. Milk, wood pulp, and saw logs will continue to be produced here, but by many fewer people. To live decent lives, the rest will either have to get the kind of education needed in the new economy, or go somewhere else (though pretty soon, going somewhere else won’t do much good, either).

For the most part, then, Vermont’s problems are the country’s (and even the world’s). Sure, there are a few things this state could do better, or different. It’s even possible – though hardly proven – that cutting taxes and easing the regulatory process might be among them. Meanwhile, it could be a good idea for both Democrats and Republicans to see if they can avoid grating Vermont the distinction of being the whiniest state in the union.