Not that everything is peachy keen in Vermont, but relatively speaking, they aren’t that bad, either.

From the ever-useful Rural Blog comes word that reporter Bill Bishop of Daily Yonder has performed the valuable service of doing a county-by-county check of the recent growth of poverty in America.

It was disproportionately rural.

Using U.S. Census bureau statistics, Bishop found that while last year’s 13.2 percent nationwide poverty rate was the highest since 1997, it was higher yet – 16.3 percent – in the nation’s rural counties.

“The increase in the number of poor Americans was heavily weighted in rural communities,” Bishop wrote. “Rural counties were home to just over 16% of the nation’s population in 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But 33% of the increase in the number of poor Americans from ’03 to ‘08 — more than one million people — was found in rural counties.

As a result, the gap between the poverty rates in urban and rural America widened, doubling between 2003 and 2008.”

During the 1990s, Bishop found, the rural-urban poverty gap actually declined, thanks largely to a growing nationwide economy. The weaker economy of this decade, though, apparently hits rural areas the hardest. There are 50 rural counties where more than 32 percent of the people live under the poverty line.

How many of those counties are in Vermont?

None. In fact, no Vermont county has a poverty rate as high as that 16.3 percent of all rural counties. Essex County in the Northeast Kingdom comes closest with a 14.8 percent poverty rate, closely followed by neighboring Orleans County, at 14.3 percent.

(In case anyone is wondering, Chittenden is Vermont’s only urban country. Franklin and Grand Isle are considered exurban. All the others are designated rural).

On the other hand, no Vermont County was among the least impoverished rural counties, either. And in all of them, the poverty rate was higher than it was in 2003, when the rate in Essex County was 12.3 percent, and 13.1 percent in Orleans.

Here are the poverty rates for the other counties: Addison—9.5 percent up from 8.7 percent in 2003; Bennington–12.2, up from 10; Caledonia–11.8 , up minimally from 11.3; Chittenden—9.6 from 7.6; Franklin—9.9 up from 9.5; Grand Isle—8.4, up from 7.3; Lamoille—10.1 from 8.8; Orange—10.9 from 9.2; Rutland—11.6, up from 10.3; Washington—9.7 up from 8.4; Windham—9.8, just up from 9.7; Windsor—9.3 up from 8.7.

It’s possible that Vermont’s rural counties are lucky in being, in a sense, less rural than the rural counties of many other states. Down South and especially out West, some rural counties take up as much space as four or five of Vermont’s, and are much farther from the nearest town of any size, where most of the good jobs are these days.

What with poverty going up, it’s no surprise that so is reliance on food stamps. Last Sunday’s New York Times reported that one in eight Americans – and one in four children – use food stamps to keep themselves nourished. So widespread is the use of food stamps, the Times reported, that much of the stigma is gone from a program “once scorned as a failed welfare scheme.”

Using both U.S. Agriculture Department and Census Bureau statistics, the Times also provided, on line, a county-by-county breakdown which showed that in Vermont, as in almost every other state, use of food stamps has grown everywhere, especially in some of the more affluent areas.

Chittenden County, for instance, had Vermont’s lowest percentage of food stamp users in June of this year – nine percent. But the growth since June of 2007 was 43 percent, higher than the 33 percent growth in less affluent Essex County, where 17 percent of the residents use food stamps.

The same pattern holds in many other states, at least suggesting that the current recession is plunging into poverty many households and individuals who until recently could be classified as middle-income. Not only are some of those people unemployed, but even more are working fewer hours.

Here are the results for the other Vermont counties, with the percentage on food stamps first, followed by the two-year percentage increase: Addison—9. 61; Bennington—16. 51; Caledonia—16. 41; Franklin—15. 46; Grand Isle—11.52; Lamoille—13. 47; Orange—12. 13; Orleans—20. 42; Rutland—15. 45; Washington—11. 45; Windham—15. 54; Windsor—11. 47

And speaking of statistics, and reluctant though the News Guy is to beat up on the Burlington Free Press yet again, there was a certain amount of innumeracy in its account last week of Fletcher Allen Health Care’s dissent from the recent federal task force recommendation that all women under 50 did not need to get annual mammograms.

“During the last fiscal year,” the paper reported, “the hospital screened about 7,000 women ages 40 to 49…79 women in that age group were diagnosed with cancer.”

But “those diagnoses were not necessarily made through the annual screening process.”

Meaning those figures provide no evidence of the efficacy of the annual mammograms for those women. Neither does the fact that women in their forties “had the second largest tally of breast cancer diagnoses,” after women in their fifties.

They would, wouldn’t they? The disease is less prevalent among both younger and older women.

Reached in Chicago, where she is attending a medical conference, Dr. Sally Herschorn, Fletcher Allen’s attending radiologist, acknowledged that the figures were “not germane” to the factual debate over the recommendations. But Dr. Herschorn said she thought the task force’s study was “flawed,” and that annual screenings by women in their forties could save lives.

She may be right. But the numbers cited by the Freep as evidence for her position, while interesting, were not evidence for anything.

Actually, no.

Commissioner Dale

Or at least no to the first assertion. Yes, narrowly speaking, to the second. Forbes Magazine did make that ranking. It was, however, garbage, and not the least bit supported by the article, which was shoddy enough that an honest editor would fire the reporter who put the piece together (unless, of course, the editor him/her-self was responsible).

Douglas himself seemed to recognize that he’d gone too far. Later in his letter he wrote that the Times assessment put Vermont near the top of all six categories, and wrote that  ”Vermont has one of the highest — if not the highest — tax burden of any state in the country.”

Aha! Actual fact, albeit tarnished by the gratuitous hyperbole within the hyphens. By almost any assessment, Vermont is one of the more highly taxed states. But Forbes Magazine to the contrary notwithstanding, not the highest.

(Briefly, what Forbes did was add up all state taxes and fees, then divide by population, forgetting that (a) Vermont spends more on the state level, less on the local, than many other states; (b) a disproportionate share of Vermont taxes are paid by tourists who don’t live in the state).

The mystery here is why Douglas decided to overstate his case when his case, honestly stated, is legit. With all that tax revenue, Vermont is in fact one of the more generous states when it comes to helping the sick, the disabled, and the poor. That New York Times assessment he referred to said as much. It just didn’t say what first he said it said.

According to the New York Times May 9 assessment of several federal social programs, Vermont is first in its “share of poor children and parents that receive cash welfare,” with 49 percent of the target population getting benefits.

If you don’t know what that means, don’t feel ignorant. Neither did Steve Dale, and he’s the Commissioner of  the Department for Children and Families. But we’ll come back to that anon. First let’s dispense with where Vermont stood in those other rankings.

Not Number One. Other states were more generous when it came to unemployment compensation, food stamps, housing assistance, and health insurance. In unemployment compensation and housing assistance, Vermont wasn’t even in the top ten.

But in health insurance and food stamps, it was. Like the other states in New England and the Northeast, Vermont provides its poorest citizens with more benefits than most of the Southern and Western states.

In fact, Douglas may have understated his case. Vermont might pay the highest welfare benefits in the country. At least according to the assessment by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research and advocacy group in Washington. Its figures show that last year a Chittenden County single-parent family of three received a monthly grant of $709 (the benefits are slightly lower in the rest of the state). Only a similar family in New York City gets more, $738.

So when the Governor assailed the Legislature for “raising already high taxes to support aid programs that are already the very best in the country,” he wasn’t blowing smoke, even if he was overstating his case.

At this point, a few qualifications are in order. All those welfare benefit figures above are inexact. There are so many variations due to geography, family size, and family make-up, that different organizations estimate average or median benefits differently. Commissioner  Dale, for instance, said the typical Vermont beneficiary household gets about $680 a month from the state’s “Reach Up” funds.

“Reach Up” is what Vermont calls its version of  Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, pronounced “Tanif”), the federal program that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) the old and much reviled welfare program.

Then there’s the confusion over that category where Vermont did place Number One, the percentage of poor parents and children getting cash benefits. Dale said it isn’t 49 percent. It seems higher.

Roughly ten percent of the 144,000 Vermonters under 18 are poor, Dale said, meaning they live in households that earn no more than the federal poverty line (roughly $22,000 for a family of four). The total number of people receiving Reach Up funds is 13,700, he said. At least 10,000 of these would be children.

As to that New York Times table, Dale said, “I see a lot of numbers every month and I’ve never seen a number like that.”

Nor was the Commissioner aware that the state’s benefit levels might be the highest in the nation, and he certainly didn’t think they were too high.

“Nobody lives on $680 a month,” he said. Reach Up Recipients also qualify for Medicaid and Food Stamps, but even then, he said, “that’s not a place anyone wants to be. If it’s generous (compared to other states) it’s still very little, and it has not been increased in years. Years.”

Actually, in real terms, it’s gone down. In inflation-adjusted dollars, that $709 payment in Vermont (according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities) is 17.6 percent lower than the $633 a Vermont household received in 1996 under the old AFDC program. There were many more recipients then, too. Even with Food Stamps added, a Vermont family on Reach Up has an income 25 percent lower than the federal poverty level.

And Douglas wants to pay them less?

Well, sort of.

What the Governor has proposed would save money, but not by spending less money in Fiscal Year 2010 (starting July 1). Instead, as Dale described it, the Douglas Administration would put into place a few policy changes hoping both to save money and to help Reach Up recipients .

Without getting into all the technicalities, here’s how it would work: The typical Reach Up household is headed by a young single mother with one or more small children. To remain eligible for benefits, the young women are expected to get a job, go to school, enter a training program, or engage in some other activity that might help them become self-sufficient.

Federal law allows states to reduce the monthly payments to women who refuse to cooperate, even to drop her entire family from the program after five years. For the most part, Vermont has ignored these penalties. Douglas wants the Legislature to give Dale’s department the power to invoke them.

The goal, Dale said, is not punishment but “reciprocity. Many folks have significant barriers and need a lot of help. The deal is you need to be moving toward some kind of improvement.”

In addition, the Administration wants to reduce payments to some Reach Up households in which one resident is also getting federal disability SSI benefits. Dale acknowledged he was not happy about this proposal, but said it was justified under the circumstances, both to save money and because receiving “SSI plus TANF can result in less incentive to participate in work programs.”

The Legislature rejected these proposals, some members calling them “draconian.” But the differences here are at the margins. Douglas is not proposing to decimate Reach Up, just to restrain its growth. Dale said the Administration’s plans would save $3 million of the state’s $15 million contribution to Reach Up. But this does not signify a 20 percent reduction; the program is largely funded by some $43 million in federal money.

This argument is at least 40 years old and will probably be around for another 40 years. Liberals point to the actual reduction in benefits over the years and to the difficulties many Reach Up recipients have in meeting their work or school requirements because of ill health, babies who need tending, psychological and emotional problems. Conservatives argue that simply giving people money without also providing incentives for them to become self-supporting is a disservice to the young mothers and their children.

In one sense, Douglas is proposing a redistribution of income upwards. He wants to save this money in Reach Up so the state doesn’t have to increase taxes on the wealthy. The Democrats want to redistribute the other way. Again, it’s an old argument, and one with some merit on both sides.

Why all the emotion, then? Well, that’s what happens in politics. It often gets personal. Perhaps unhappy about being the target of so much criticism from the Democrats, the Governor lashed out. He wasn’t just personal; he was tribal.

“You seem intent on a budget that satisfies more fiscally liberal members of your caucus, even if that comes at the expense of fiscal prudence,” he said to the lawmakers, effectively accusing the leaders of being captive to their party’s most liberal wing and their occasional allies, the Progressives.

That could have been anger, or it could have been political calculation, based on the assumption that most voters distrust “tax and spend liberals.” For most of the last 30 years, that has been a reasonable assumption. It may not be playing as well any more.

Either way, Douglas’s staff released his new budget counter-proposals yesterday afternoon. The Legislative leaders to whom he addressed his confrontational letter were not invited, but they will no doubt be reading it carefully today. The intention here is to do the same, and to provide a report tomorrow.

It was also the first cut the Legislature rejected, though the rejection, like almost everything else about the budget, is subject to revision or reversal in the end-of-days (fiscally speaking) negotiations now under way in Montpelier.

It’s easy to see why Douglas said V-Pharm should be eliminated. Getting rid of it saves a lot of money, roughly $8.6 million.

It’s also easy to see why the lawmakers wanted to save it. The program serves a lot of people, 12, 548 of them according to the official document of the Office of Vermont Health Access. More precisely, 12, 548 people who are at least 65 years old. Legislators are quite sensitive to the wishes of people who are over 65 years old, at least in part because they vote

Douglas called his proposal to eliminate V-Pharm, during his January 22 budget address to the Legislature, “particularly difficult.” He’d been in favor of the program when it was created in 2005. But, he noted, getting rid of it is not going to leave elderly patients dying in the streets.

“Seniors eligible for assistance will still receive a prescriptiondrug benefit through Medicare.,” he said. Meanwhile, the money that has been going to Medicare-covered seniors under V-Pharm should be used “to ensure continued health care coverage for Vermonters with no other options.”

Wherever one stands on the issue of this or the other proposed budget cuts, the Governor’s case deserves to be taken seriously. When money is tight, priorities have to be set. Channeling the money to the very poorest makes some sense.

V-Pharm beneficiaries are not poor. Some of them make as much as two-and-a-half times the poverty rate, meaning an elderly couple with a $35,000 a year income can still get the benefits. That’s not a lot of money, but it should be enough to pay for life’s necessities, including most of the “wrap-around” costs (co-payments) of prescription drugs.

The same holds true for Douglas’s other proposed cuts in social service programs. If the Legislature agrees to all of them (and that’s not likely) Vermont’s social safety net will be weaker, but it will not be in tatters. In fact, the level of services would still be more generous in this state than in than most of the others.

No one has lately starved to death in Vermont, and no one is likely to in the coming year, even if there is a cut in state aid to food banks and homeless shelters. (One Vermonter did die of starvation in another state in 2007, the Health Department said). State and local governments, churches, synagogues, and other private agencies will provide enough food to keep everyone alive.

Of course it’s always possible for someone to slip through the cracks, for a drunk to fall asleep where no one will find him or an old person to be left alone in her home and succumb to hunger and neglect. Such mishaps, though, can happen at any funding level.

But accounts of low-income people eating pet food, notably short of detail, are probably more urban legend than fact. They sound rather like the abortions actually performed with a coat hanger, which almost surely never happened, or, from the other side of the political spectrum, the grown children of the recently deceased small businessman who had to sell the family firm because they couldn’t pay the estate tax. Find them.

It would be absurd to claim that the cuts called for by the Governor would not degrade the quality of some people’s lives. They would. In a few cases, those cuts would probably even cause people to suffer. But not all degradation is suffering, and there is nothing inherently evil about taking into account the limits of the community’s (meaning the taxpayers’) obligation to care for people. If (as noted here yesterday) some business leaders and conservative commentators exaggerate the horrors of even the tiniest tax hike, perhaps some liberal activists equally overstate the consequences of modest budget cuts

Then there is the question of personal responsibility. Considering that 87 percent of all Vermont households have cable or satellite television service (so estimates the National Association of Broadcasters) It is almost certain that a substantial majority of the V-Pharm beneficiaries are hooked up, and a pretty good bet that so are many, if not most, of the people going to food bank (though of course the homeless are not).

Maybe before they get the free food or the drug benefits they should cancel the cable and spend the $40 or so a month on necessities. Nobody needs a hundred television channels (or a television set at all?) to live a decent life.

People do need health care to live a decent life, and because of the proposed cuts, some might go without it. This even includes some of the not-so-poor V-Pharm recipients. Patients whose drugs are so expensive that they hit the “donut hole” of the Medicare program, where they have to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket before their benefits kick in again might simply decide to do without their medications. Patients suffering chronic diseases – diabetes, some heart ailments and cancers – often do not have pain or other immediate symptoms for quite a while even if they stop taking their prescriptions.

Again, personal responsibility comes into play here. Many, perhaps most, or these people could dip into savings or get help from their grown (and often affluent) children and pay the bills. Perhaps some of them (as well as other recipients of public aid) should consider moving to a cheaper home or buying a less expensive car. These suggestions might be unkind. But so is ignoring the burden placed on middle-income taxpayers who might not have very much more money than the folks getting helped.

Others who might actually suffer from the Douglas budget cuts are the mentally ill, both children and adults. These patients don’t need money as much as they need caretakers, who have to be paid. If the public agencies and publically funded private non-profits who serve the mentally ill have to lay off workers, the decline in the quality of life of their patients could decline to a level many would find intolerable.

One unusual (and largely un-noted) aspect of the current debate is that, in their determination to protect spending programs for the poor and low-income,  the liberal activists oppose all spending cuts, even those that benefit the rich. There has been, for instance, no suggestion to cut the $3.6 million budget for Department of Tourism and Marketing, some of which subsidizes the promotion efforts of profit-making ski and golf resorts.

Or what about Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Susan Bartlett’s recent threat to close all the Interstate Highway rest areas and temporarily shut down the fish hatcheries? That’s money that could  be saved to help the poor and the sick, though in the case of the hatcheries several laws would first have to be changed; they are financed by hunting and fishing license fees and excise taxes on hunting and fishing equipment.

It’s good political tactics for the liberals not to endorse those cuts. Both the rest areas and the hatcheries are popular with middle-class constituencies. Setting them against the poor would be a risky move.

Barbara Postman, the policy coordinator for the “One Vermont” coalition fighting the budget cuts said her group didn’t want to play the “Don’t cut you, don’t cut me, cut the fellow behind the tree,” game, playing one interest against another

“We don’t have a spending problem,” she said, “we have a revenue problem. Before this economic downturn, the Governor signed off on this spending level. Now have a big drop in revenue. We (the “One Vermont” coalition) don’t have the capacity to analyze the budget at that intricate level” to say what else should be cut.

Perhaps nobody does. Try to find the Vermont State Budget, or the budget of any state agency on the Internet. It doesn’t seem to be available. It isn’t that the appropriations are secret. Through the Legislative web site anyone can find last year’s budget bills as passed, and see the appropriation for each agency.

But not a detailed, accounting of the item-by-item, function-by-function spending from year to year. On Thursday, the liberal Public Assets Institute and the conservative Ethan Allen Institute will unveil a new web site designed to make the Vermont budget process more transparent.

But their efforts will be limited by the information actually available from state government, which seems not to be much.

You don’t suppose some folks prefer it that way?