Hold onto your hats, folks: We have some rrrrrealllly big announcements to make about the future of News Guy.

To begin with, there will be no postings next week.

Yup, the News Guy is taking another week off. Yeah, yeah, it’s not that long after his previous week off. But William Ernest Henley to the contrary notwithstanding (in the very famous if rather bad poem, “Invictus”), no one can really claim to be “the master of my fate..the captain of my soul” (or is it the other way around?)

Just a fancy way of saying that sometimes you have to accommodate yourself to the schedules of others. Hence, next week is the week off. The next post will appear June 22, one day after the Summer Solstice.

But that’s not all. Here’s another rrrreallly big change:

Upon return, there will (usually) be but three postings a week. Expect new posts only every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

It isn’t that five a week is too much, though it is. But mostly, it’s too much to maintain quality. As said at the very outset of this site, some stories take more than one day to report. Committing to the daily offering threatens the onset of superficiality, precisely the scourge of Vermont journalism News Guy was created to combat.

(Do we hear some wise guy, someone with the instincts of a reporter, asking whether another factor is that it was OK to sit in front a computer all day back in December when News Guy was born , whereas now a guy might want to spend some time in his garden, in the woods, in a kayak communing with the neighborhood loon (see above), in a trout stream? OK, guilty).

The new schedule does not mean only two substantive posts and one Friday mop-up/inside info piece each week. Substance will continue to outnumber inside baseball by at least a four-to-one ratio.

Furthermore, now and then, there will be a Tuesday or Thursday offering. If an important event or development occurs on a Monday or Wednesday, the News Guy will cover it. And having been brought up in the world of daily newspapers, he is constitutionally incapable of keeping a good story to himself for 24 hours.

Readers who are registered on the site, or following via Face Book and/or Twitter (finally, a use for these thingies) will be alerted when an extra post is planned.

But, in the immortal words of The Cat in the Hat, “that is not all, no that is not all.”

There’s another rrrrreally big change in store.

And it is…….

We can’t tell you.

Not quite yet.

It involves other folks, other enterprises. The details have not yet been completely arranged. As soon as they are, you will know.

All right, enough for the future. Let’s delve into the past. There have been an unusually large number of comments and emails lately, and some of them deserve answers and/or comments.

First of all, the winner of the gold star for identifying the source of the politics/poker connection (in the June 10 post, Political Palaver) is reader Tom Stevens, who said, “I’m going with musicala obscura: Fiorello.”

The song Politics and Poker is indeed from the 1959 Broadway musical, Fiorello, which, as Stevens seems to be suggesting, has pretty much faded from memory. But it was a good show, one of only seven Broadway musicals to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Reader GFB3 correctly scolds the News Guy for not mentioning the title of the school spending study by Susan Pace Hamill mentioned in the June 8 post, (He’s Leaving Home Continued). That title is  ”The Vast Injustice Perpetuated by State and Local Tax Policy.”

From that same post (and indeed from that same report,), reader Peter Joes asks, “can you explain how the highest income taxpayers in Florida pay more in taxes than in VT when there is no (Florida) income tax?

Good question. Possible, partial answers: Florida’s statewide sales tax, like Vermont’s, is six percent. But it goes as high as eight percent in some areas, probably the wealthier ones. Also, until 2007 (and the figures cited were from 2006) Florida had an intangible personal property tax on stocks, bonds, etc. Rich folks have a lot of them

Thanks to reader Doug Hoffer who turned out to be not only a better statistician but a better editor than the News Guy.

Who was trying to make the point that the average bloke (or blokette) could earn more money in Vermont than in most Southeastern states. That’s true, but comparing per capita income was not the best evidence to support the contention, because, as Hoffer said, “it ignores the (income) distribution” As he said, comparing median household income, family income, or hourly wage would have been better.

Then he asks, ” You said, “A case can be made, both economically and morally, for greater inequality. I can’t imagine how.”

So we’ll try to explain.

First of all, a case can be made for anything – tyranny, racism, and (as we have recently seen) torture. The question is, can a good case be made for any of it?

For those last three, no. Greater income inequality is a bit more complicated. Obviously we all accept some inequality. The company president earns more than the janitor, the foreman more than the laborer, the maitre d’ more than the busboy. A market economy has to provide incentives.

Over the last few decades, the “more’ that these bosses earn vis a vis their underlings has grown substantially. Too much, in the  view of some. But not everyone agrees. They claim the economy grows faster if entrepreneurs can earn more and keep more of what they earn.

As it happens, the economy has grown faster when incomes got more, rather than less, equitable – from the 40s through the 60s, and again in the 90s, when income inequality grew, but more slowly than it did in the 1980s.

But there’s also a moral argument for greater inequality, the argument that there is a connection between power, wealth, and virtue, that those who have more deserve more, and those who have less…don’t.

It’s a tough political argument because many more voters have less than more. Hence the diversionary tactic, claiming that the real purpose of inequality is economic growth. The point of that earlier post was to urge the anti-equality forces to stop pretending that, for instance,  Vermont’s tax rate was hurting the economy (it is not), and to come out of the closet, as it were, and make an honest case for more economic inequality.

Hmmm. Come out of the closet. Could supporting greater inequality be the policy position that dare not speak its name?