The fight is on, and it promises to be a humdinger.

Attack and counter-attack. Quick response. Thrust and parry. Jab and hook. Give no ground or quarter. The best defense is…well, you get the picture.

All of which is lots of fun, but threatens to obscure the meaningful substantive differences between Republican Brian Dubie and either Peter Shumlin or Doug Racine.

In fact, “obscure,” may understate the case. “Pervert” could be more appropriate. The barbs each side is throwing at the other seem designed to convince voters that the opposition is extremist: that the Democrat would raise everybody’s taxes; that Dubie would permit the poor to starve on the sidewalks.

Not hardly.

As mentioned here the other day, the winner will be governor, not emperor. Even if Shumlin/Racine wanted to raise everybody’s taxes, the Legislature would not. Nor would it allow the poor to starve on the sidewalks.

Besides, the Democrats, who are prudent, do not want to raise everybody’s (or anybody’s) taxes, and Dubie, who is decent, does not want the poor to suffer at all, much less starve on the sidewalks.

“People who depend on vital state services are not going to be abandoned by state government,” said Dubie campaign spokesperson Kate Duffy.

Even the semi-defensible attacks are a bit over the top. There is some justification for Shumlin to argue that Dubie’s economic policies would lead to “deficits, unending deficits, tax cuts for the wealthiest Vermonters and budgets that don’t balance.”  Dubie’s determination to cut taxes and his vagueness about what programs he would cut do complicate the budget-balancing task.

But in addition to redundancy (deficits are “budgets that don’t balance”), the attack ignores Dubie’s pledge that tax cuts “won’t happen in one big step or one year,” but would be “incremental.”

Similarly, Dubie may not be dead wrong when he claims the Democrats have “only two solutions for the challenges we face: more government spending and higher taxes.” Both Shumlin and Racine are on record in the past favoring new programs and higher spending. But while they still favor  some new state initiatives, they are not for higher taxes.

Besides, there’s another candidate who proposes new government spending: Brian Dubie. The jobs plan in his “Pure Vermont” document calls for the state to “increase support for (Vermont Economic Development Authority’s) highly successful interest rate subsidy program,” “ increase public investment in the new Technology Lending Program,” “add support for (Small Business Development Center) counseling,” and create an investment tax credit.

All that costs money. Yet the heart of Dubie’s campaign is to hold the state budget to spending increases of  two percent a year. Because revenue is projected to rise at a higher rate, a Dubie Administration could then cut income taxes by a total of $240 million over four years.

This means, said  Duffy, that Dubie’s plan “is not making any cuts.” State spending, she said, would continue to rise, just more slowly than it has been rising, and more slowly than revenue would rise.

Dubie’s arithmetic is correct, except that he first pledges to close the projected $112 million deficit for the coming Fiscal Year (2012). That would require a spending cut of more than 9 percent, creating a new base. Increasing spending by two percent a year for the next four years on top of that new base would mean that spending would fall by an annual rate of about three-quarters of a percent over a five-year period. Extend the same policy out another five years, and spending does go up, but only at an average annual rate of slightly more than one percent.

That might be the smallest growth rate of state spending in decades, if not a century, raising questions about how realistic the plan is. Dubie claimed that in the early 1990s, Gov. Howard Dean actually level-funded (no increase) spending over a three-year period, a harsher reduction than Dubie’s proposed two percent growth.

Not really. Check the esoteric document available from the Joint Fiscal Office web site’s “Appropriations” page,called “Budget History FY 83-present.” It shows that while the General Fund budget actually went down for one year under Dean, it then started up again, and over a five-year period it rose by an annual rate of 3.4 percent a year.

That document provides other interesting information, both casting doubt on the assertion that Dean really “level-funded” spending and confirming that budgeting is a creative art. In those same recession years that Dean was spending less out of the General Fund, some new expenditures are recorded in the Transportation Fund.

Could it be that the state was using Transportation Fund money (financed from gasoline taxes, auto registration, etc) for non-transportation purposes? The document suggests, but does not prove, that the answer to that question is in the affirmative.

If so, it would not be unusual, in Vermont or elsewhere. One reason for that $112 million projected shortfall for the next Fiscal Year, for instance, is that the Legislature and Gov. Jim Douglas have been effectively filching from the Education Fund by not transferring into it as much General Fund money as the law required. (Legislatures and governors, who make laws, can change them as an alternative to obeying them). Reached at home where he did not have access to his records, Joel Cook, the executive director of the Vermont National Education Association, estimated that the shortfall was at least $50 million.

If the Legislature doesn’t repay that (as it said it would) or come up with enough money again this year, the Education Fund could be short tens of millions of dollars. That would require either deep cuts in school spending or substantial increases in local property taxes.

This poses a potential political problem for Dubie. He wants to cut everybody’s income tax rate by about a third, reducing the top rate from nine to six percent and the lower rates comparably. That’s good politics; everybody likes lower taxes.

But the Democrats will try to convince voters that the result would be higher property taxes, which are the taxes Vermonters really dislike. Democrats are already making that argument as well as claiming that, in Racine’s words, Dubie’s “numbers just don’t add up.”

“He wants to add money for various business promotion efforts…but he wants to cut taxes,” Racine said in a telephone interview. “This sounds like the federal budget discussion. Make promises of higher spending for business and lower taxes for everybody. That’s Washington. We don’t do that here in Vermont.”

That’s harsh, but standard political rhetoric. What came out of the Dubie campaign late yesterday may have crossed the line from standard to…well, to  false. In a statement released yesterday afternoon, Dubie said Racine had wanted to use money from the state’s “Rainy Day Fund” to “expand government-run services,” and that he opposed the “Challenges for Change” plan to make government more efficient.

The first of those accusations is simply incorrect. Racine has suggested dipping into the reserve funds, but only to support existing social service programs, not to “expand” government service. The second charge is minimally defensible, but a stretch. Racine supported “Challenges for Change” during this year’s legislative session, voting for it at least twice,  though he voted against the final Fiscal Year 2011 budget which incorporated “Challenges.”

“Fundamentally, Brian is a decent man,” Racine said. “If he wants to disagree with me, that’s fine. But don’t be deceitful.”

It could be a long two months.

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.

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.”