UPDATED:  Edited to remove the conspiratorial tone of the original. Thanks to JO for the catch.

Jack McCullough 

What started out as an uncontroversial, good-government civic project in the Capital City has turned to controversy, due largely to last-minute changes adopted by Montpelier's City Council before the proposal goes to the voters.

The project, launched in October, 2012, was intended to be a modernization, reorganization, and update of Montpelier's city charter, with no changes to the substance of the charter. As described by the Charter Revision Committee in its report to the voters,:

 The Charter Revision Committee was careful to not propose any substantive changes to the charter.  Our proposed revisions are clarifications and updates to the charter text.  The committee recommends deleting obsolete and unnecessary charter text, adding new language, moving and reorganizing some sections, and inserting new sections that accurately describe the current practices and authority of Montpelier city government.

. . .

The document Montpelier Charter Revisions submitted to the council in August 2013 has extensive clarifying edits but no substantial changes.  When the committee met with the council in August and November, a few additional clarifying edits were requested by the council and incorporated into the charter revision document.  

 (g) Permit the non-highway use, occupancy or reservation of portions of public streets and thoroughfares, provided that such use, occupancy or reservation is in the public interest and will not impair or interfere with the free and safe flow of vehicular and pedestrian traffic thereon.

(h) Establish fees and benefit charges for city services, permits, licenses, hearings, and uses of city property.  Establish fees for dog licenses.

The first provision, allowing the Council to premit non-highway use of public streets, arises out of a kerfuffle last year about Montpelier Alive's proposal to let local restaurants and bars use the parking spaces in front of their establishments for “parklets”, or outside seating. In a city where parking as tight as it is in downtown Montpelier you can imagine that this would not be universally popular, but in addition to the lost parking people were complaining about safety and public alcohol consumption issues. Questions were raised by the chair of the local Liquor Board and the state Liquor Control Commission (how I wish Vermont's commission were called the ABC Commission, as in some other states!) and transportation issues were also raised.

Beyond that, some residents were unhappy with the idea of public space, even parking spaces, that could be used as a public resource would essentially be turned over to local businesses. The Times Argus reported:

 Ann Gilbert, a member of the New Directions Coalition, a central Vermont organization promoting healthy lifestyles, said she too was concerned about allowing alcohol to be served at the parklets. 

 The proposal never went anywhere last summer, but now it pops up as part of the charter revision.

The second item is similar. The fight was over dogs, dog owners, and dog waste in Montpelier. Should Montpelier have a dog park, should dogs be allowed to run off leash at Hubbard Park,  should dog owners be more responsible to take care of dog waste, and who should pay the cost for dog waste receptacles the city wound up buying, dog owners or the general public?

Because people feel strongly about their dogs, and other people feel equally strongly about not have to encounter threatening dogs or dog feces contaminating their daily walks, this led to some very strongly worded arguments on Facebook and elsewhere. (For instance, see Bryan Pfeiffer's blog post “The Crap Around Montpelier“.) 

 I think there are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides of this one. On the one hand, I don't want to deal with feces other people and their dogs distribute around the city, and I think it is reasonable to argue that dog owners should bear the cost of disposal. On the other hand, we don't make tennis players pay a fee for the upkeep of the public tennis courts, we don't make joggers contribute (beyond their taxes) to the city's hiking and running paths, we don't charge people who frequent Hubbard Park a special “park impact fee”, so why should dog owners be any different?

Again, while not explicit, the dog fee has surfaced as part of the Council's changes to the charter revision proposal.

In both of these cases there is a perfectly innocent explanation: in the course of considering ordinances the City was told that the Council didn't currently have authority to do what they wanted to do. The parklet proposal impinged on the authority of the Department of Transportation and the dog fee proposal would have violated state law on the permissible uses of dog licensing fees.

Contacted about this proposal, Mayor John Hollar emphasized that if either of these proposals is going to be implemented it would still have to do through the Council's usual process for enacting new ordinances, including public hearings. 

Former Council member Nancy Sherman, who chaired the charter review commission thinks the charter change proposal goes too far. In a letter in Times Argus she doesn't go so far as to call for the defeat of her own commission's proposal, but raises questions about whether this was a back door deal to sidestep public input. As a consequence, this uncontroversial update may suddenly be getting more attention than anyone expected.

These are substantive changes, and it's hard not to think it would have been better to have them on the ballot as standalone measures, so each could have been debated on its own merits.

Today, I received am email from my friend Marie Limoges that contained this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v… The link contains video of the assembly line of the Tesla Motor Co. The emphasis is on how automated with robots is the assembly of these automobiles.

What struck me was the thought of how many workers these machines replaced. This replacement of human beings by automatons has been occurring for the past forty years. Initially, these workers were replaced by less expensive foreign workers. Then, even those jobs were transferred overseas to nations to take advantage of the less rigorous safety, health, retirement and other statutory rules.

To be sure, the robots are designed by higher wage workers. But, those workers replaced within this nation by robots have less beneficial employment, at best. At worst, they have long term unemployment before they must turn to low paying service industry jobs or welfare.

Another friend of mine, Ralph Rosenberg, refers to these manufacturing leftovers as the “new nobility.” The “new nobility” are those who the society must support to do nothing. From where does the money to support these people come?

There are many solutions. One answer might be to revise or eliminate the laws providing for depreciation of production machinery or to require taxation of employers for the depreciation of the employees. Call it what you like. The current system must be changed to provide for those persons who are excess to those needed for production in this country. Either tax breaks for business must be eliminated or those who have income from the businesses must fill the gap.

As Robert Reich blogged on Saturday, January 25, 2014:

At some point, working people, students, and the broad public will have had enough. They will reclaim our economy and our democracy. This has been the central lesson of American history.

Reform is less risky than revolution, but the longer we wait the more likely it will be the latter.

I really ought to stop commenting on the ever-flowing cascade of fatuity produced by the Campaign for Vermont’s opinion essay machine. But it’s like eating potato chips: betcha can’t eat just one.

Today’s entry comes from the Master of Fatuity himself, Tom Pelham, CFV co-founder, state functionary in a variety of Administrations, and self-regarded freakin’ genius. The latest Words From On High are entitled “It’s Complicated.” By which he means, “Only I can understand this stuff, now let me explain it to you in a really condescending way.”

Now look, Tom Pelham knows far more about government financing and taxation than I do. But it’s also obvious that his insights are heavily colored by his fiscal conservatism, which makes his policy prescriptions difficult to trust. Or, in my case, easy to dismiss.

But we soldier on. Pelham begins his essay — distributed for free in the Vermont media — by slamming the Vermont media.

Over the years, it has become clear that some in the media do not fully grasp how Vermont’s education property tax system works.

Damn reporters. How dare they not be as brilliant as Tom Pelham?

His point, and he does have one, is that the media are misrepresenting the implications of the school property tax system’s income sensitivity provisions. (If that sentence made your eyes glaze over, then you’ll be in a coma by the time you finish Pelham’s mighty slog.)

Pelham may well have a point: the tax system is a tough nut to crack, and the media’s nutcracking proclivities are intermittent at best. But his underlying message is an ideological one: that income sensitivity unfairly shifts the tax burden upward. This leads to the conservative canard that lower-income voters happily approve school budget increases because they don’t proportionately feel the pain of higher taxes.

That’s just plain old bullshit from the ideological charnel house that brought us “Welfare Mothers in Cadillacs” and “Obamacare Will Make Americans Lazy.”

Actually, if you take a look at the following chart from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (which I posted last week in this space, but it’s equally relevant here), you’ll see that in spite of the effects of income sensitivity, the property tax hits working folks the hardest.

Hmm. Gee. To judge by that chart, Vermont could use a little bit more income sensitivity. Because it seems as though the working poor and middle class are still paying a bigger proportional share than are the top 20%.

Tom Pelham is well versed on the gears and pulleys of tax policy. He knows how it functions. But there’s the machine, and there’s the stuff produced by the machine. That’s what matters about public policy and its outcomes. And in that sphere, Tom Pelham is no smarter than your average reporter (or blogger).  

ICYMI, the Gannett media chain issued a disappointing fourth-quarter earnings report last week. Industry observers saw signs of trouble for the corporate owner of the Burlington Free Press. Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review called the results “basically miserable.”

One big problem: Circulation revenues showed a slight increase for the year, but declined in the fourth quarter. The annual results were buoyed by the imposition of paywalls and price hikes for the paper editions; the 4Q falloff may be a sign of reader fatigue with both. Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute:

This raises the concern that capturing revenue from new digital subscribers and pairing “all access” print/digital bundles with a big price increase could be a one-time revenue event. Gannett not only failed to continue gaining circulation revenue at the end of the last year, it lost a little, as these subscriptions came up for renewal.

Edmonds notes that Gannett is hoping for another revenue boost this year, as its local papers begin to carry a slimmed-down version of its national flagship USA TODAY; Gannett’s CEO Gracia Martone says “the expanded content could provide the rationale for another round of price increases.” As I predicted several weeks ago in this space. This time, I’m not especially happy to be right.  

They’re really pushing the limits of reader fatigue. And, as Chittum reports, Gannett properties are poorly positioned to thrive in the digital age.

The medium- to long-term point of a paywall strategy is to create a new, growing digital revenue stream while protecting your existing digital-ad business and slowing the decline of print revenue as much as possible. The end game is, hopefully, an all-digital business that can support a strong newsgathering operation without print subsidies.

But a paywall imposes the quality imperative more than ever. You have to have a strong newsgathering operation to justify charging online in the first place.

Gannett, though, has a well-earned and long-established reputation for high margins and poor quality. Last year it generated 22 percent operating cashflow margins, paid out $183 million in dividends, and laid off hundreds of journalists.

And there’s the rub: Gannett’s cost-cutting inflated its profit margins in the short run and allowed it to maintain high dividend payouts at the expense of its newspapers’ quality. And mediocre media outlets aren’t likely to bring eager customers through the digital door. Chittum:

It’s worth pointing out that Gannett doesn’t break out its digital-only subscriber numbers in its securities filing. A year ago it had snared a pitiful 46,000 subscribers across its 81 papers but projected it would a quarter-million digital-only subs by now. You can bet it didn’t come close to that. If Gannett had something remotely positive to say, it would tell us.

Seen through these expert analysts’ eyes, Gannett is taking on water as it sails into stormy seas. And its captain may not particularly care all that much. During the 4Q announcement, CEO Martone was asked if Gannett might follow the lead of News Corp. and Tribune and spin off its newspaper operations while keeping its cash-cow broadcasting properties. Her reply wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy.

In essence, Martore’s answer was not now, but maybe later.

Sounds like the captain is ushering Gannett newspapers into the lifeboats. I think we can expect the Burlington Free Press to continue cutting its news operation while asking readers to pay more. It might work in the short term, but it’s a recipe for eventual disaster.  

News consumers in Vermont are relatively blessed by the presence of VTDigger and the new and improved news efforts at VPR and Seven Days. (And WDEV and the Mitchell Family Papers, which do good work with very limited resources.) It’s a good thing, since the Freeploid is already a shell of its former self, and continues to be drained by its corporate masters.  

Submitted for your approval: a recent opinion piece posted on VTDigger by Jeff Provost, “a business owner and a member of Campaign for Vermont.” The title: “The State Is In Serious Trouble.”

Ah yes, Campaign for Vermont doomsaying. It’s such a boost to Vermont’s image to have serious people going out of their way to slag the state at every opportunity, in hopes of gaining some short-term political edge. It’s almost like they hope Vermont will fail.

But anyway, back to Mr. Provost, “business owner.” What business, pray tell? According to The Google, he is owner of Dock Doctors, which waged an expensive lobbying and advertising effort last year, aimed at killing the shoreland protection bill. Sounds like a typical CFV “nonpartisan” type.

Normally I don’t take the time to dismantle every piece of piffle generated by the CFV Laugh Factory, but Provost’s is a truly spectacular example of rhetorical parkour — the art of leaping from one point to another with no regard for the terrain in between.

He begins by discovering our parlous condition by driving down a single road.

Traveling a distance of less than a mile on a street in one of Vermont’s larger cities, I counted eight single-family residences for sale, not to mention a couple of other multi-family structures and one commercial building – all on the market, and presumably with few to no buyers at all knocking on the door for a tour.

… Either the prior owners have moved away or, because of the poor economy in Vermont, have been forced out of their mortgages and into rental situations. Sadly, it’s probably a mix of both.

Okay, hmm. A single stretch of road is presumed to be emblematic of the entire state. When, in fact, it’s the exception, not the rule: the unspoken truth in Provost’s exposition is that he hasn’t seen any similar lumps of for-sale properties. If he had, this one stretch wouldn’t have struck him as exceptional. I’d be curious to know where this road was located; there are certainly some troubled communities in Vermont with lots of real estate on the market, but there are many more that are doing just fine property-wise.

As if that isn’t enough of a death-defying logical leap, he embeds a couple of huge assumptions: that there are “few to no buyers” and that the prior owners “have been forced out” “because of the poor economy in Vermont.” How does he know how many buyers might be out there, or how long the properties have been on the market? How does he know the prior owners were “forced out”? Maybe they upgraded.

But no, he has a preconceived narrative, and he’s looking for evidence to fit.

Having discerned the health of the entire herd by reading one set of entrails, Provost goes on to quote some handy statistics: he points out our “meager” net job growth of 7,000 since 1999. I wonder how he happened to pick that year. What I do know is that it included the jobless growth of the Bush years (and the Douglas Administration, mind you) and the devastating effects of the great recession of 2008 (triggered by Bruce Lisman’s old buddies on Wall Street, mind you).

And he chooses to compare Vermont’s job growth, unfavorably, with North Dakota’s. Which is just goddamn absurd: North Dakota has enjoyed a huge resource boom since 2000, mostly thanks to hydrofracked oil. It’s like comparing Austria with Abu Dhabi. The difference between Vermont and North Dakota has nothing to do with public policy or taxation; it has to do with exploitable resources.

He then bemoans our falling population and student enrollment, which are legitimate issues to be sure. But he uses them as a prelude to an all-out attack on you-know-who in Montpelier.

All of this is happening while our most influential elected officials continue to add taxes, operate inefficient and ineffective government programs, stymie development, mandate high-cost energy and impose a variety of roadblocks on businesses that are barely getting by as is.

“Roadblocks” like the shoreland protection bill that might cost Dock Doctors some business, hmm?

All of Provost’s rapid-fire assertions are highly arguable, but he’s hoping that sheer quantity will compensate for uneven quality. And then — well, you had to know that this was coming:

Meanwhile, to our east in New Hampshire, you will find a vibrant economy that benefits from no sales tax, no tax on wages, no estate tax and no land gains tax. …New Hampshire has become a hub for the technology industry, primarily in the southern part of the state. It has also grown its population by well over 6 percent since 2000, one that is more than double Vermont’s.

Ah, New Hampshire, the lodestar of the pro-business, pro-development crowd. Live free or die! No taxes! That’s the ticket.

Well, Jeff, I hate to break the news to you, but the “New Hampshire Advantage” has much less to do with taxes than with geography. As you yourself note, New Hampshire’s growth has come “primarily in the southern part of the state.” More specifically, the southeastern corner, blessed by its proximity to the prosperous Boston metro area and its centers of learning and research that generate a whole lot of entrepreneurialism. Plus the ongoing boom in seacoast-area properties. Growth in the rest of New Hampshire — anywhere outside of the area bounded by Nashua, Manchester, Concord and Portsmouth — is no better than in Vermont. New Hampshire’s North Country is just as poor as our Northeast Kingdom.

And as long as we’re on the subject of proximity to New Hampshire, why don’t any of the Provosts of the world ever discuss our other three borders — shared with high-tax Massachusetts, New York, and Quebec? Whatever we lose to New Hampshire, we must gain back from the three rapacious governments to our north, west, and south. Especially Quebec, what with disastrous single-payer health care; disaffected Canadians must be streaming across our borders!

But for now, let’s stick to the New Hampshire Fable. Here’s an inconvenient truth: Vermont’s unemployment rate is roughly a half-percent lower than New Hampshire’s. And according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the two states’ jobless rates have tracked very closely since at least 2005. Vermont’s been consistently lower for the last couple of years; before that, New Hampshire did a bit better. Now, I know the unemployment rate isn’t perfect, but I sure don’t see any edge for the Tax-Free State.

See, taxes are not the only factor in entrepreneurialism and business decision-making. It’s actually pretty far down the list. And while Vermont does have a higher tax burden than New Hampshire, we also have better public services and better schools. Those are helpful to business. We have a climate that, in many ways, is entrepreneur-friendly; it’s easier for a growing business to gain a foothold in a smaller market, and it’s easier for a business to obtain financing when there are a lot of locally-owned and community-focused banks and credit unions, as we have in Vermont.

And now we have come to the big conclusion of Jeff Provost’s parkour adventure. And it’s a big fat kiss on the ass of you-know-who:

So far, Bruce Lisman and his group, Campaign for Vermont, are the only ones who have really attacked the problem that is our struggling economy. Maybe our current administration ought to reach out to those folks for help, or at least take a page from their playbook.

Oh, how they have “attacked the problem.” That is, if by “attacked” you mean “written fatuous opinion pieces and bought a lot of advertising time.” Reminds me of George S. Patton, it does.

Well, actually, it reminds me of the old Peter Cook and Dudley Moore routine.

PC: Do you remember that, the Second World War?

DM: Certainly, yes.

PC: Ghastly business.

DM: Oh yes.

PC: Absolutely ghastly business.

DM: Yes, indeed…

PC: I was completely against it.

DM: Well, I think we all were.

PC: Ah yes, but I wrote a letter.

You know, if Jeff Provost is right, and Bruce Lisman’s Brigade of Letter-Writers is really the only thing between us and economic doom, then we really are in big trouble.

Fortunately for all of us, Jeff Provost is wrong.

 

Ya know, I’ve been ‘sharing’ a lot of Facebook posts on missing dogs and cats.  But every day when I go to the Montpelier Post Office, I look at the posters of Missing Children (under 18).  I’ve made a habit of this for the last year or so.  Kids from all over the country.  Hardly ever any from here in Vermont, but they change the posters quite a bit in a week’s time, I’ve noticed.  More kids are added-on almost every three or four days.  The posters taken down to accommodate these new ones?  Well, I figure, since I’ve been looking at them, the Montpelier Post Office would have to add-on a very large wing to keep all those missing children’s posters up.  A VERY LARGE Wing.

This is a tragedy in our nation that seems to get little attention.  As I have read about it, missing children account for about 750,000 of the more than 800,000 missing Americans each year.  Many of these missing kids are repeat runaways, or kids who have been sort of kidnapped by a divorced parent, and are quickly found.  But all those only bring the figure down to about, if not more than, 400,000 missing kids in the U.S. every year.  Where are they?

Some, many I hope, are leading some kind of new life under a new identity in a new town or city.  Some of these with the help of people who care.  Others may be into prostitution as a way of surviving in their new environment.  No doubt many of these are controlled by pimps who get them into drugs.  And some are already dead.

But what about the booming Big Business of Sex & Human Trafficking?  How many of these missing American kids are now in some foreign country (Saudi Arabia?  Japan?  Britain?  China?  Wherever?) being used as products in the sex slavery trade?  As I said, it has become a very Big Business.  And what happens to them after X amount of years?

I think we Americans need to wake up to this Human Holocaust of disappearing children and Human/Sex/Child Trafficking.  If 400,000 Black people or Gay people or whatever people disappeared in this country every year, I expect we’d have long ago demanded and got some action.

Why the SILENCE about this?  Yes, there are government agencies and private sector and non-profit agencies working on finding these kids, and compiling data about kidnapping and trafficking.  But how come we never hear about their work or results?  I’m sure there have been many successes and many tales to tell.  Also many blind alleys.  What is wrong here?  Is it that our Establishment Media simply just doesn’t care about this issue/story?  As an old-fashioned ex-print journalist, I would put on my old cynical reporter hat again and say:  “Helleva story here.  Bigger than drugs!”  

Is so much money changing hands between so many Americans and foreigners that the network of corruption is so vast and complicated that law enforcement and government agencies can do little to control it?  Or identify the players?  And are there many players involved who don’t even realize what they’re playing at?  What their place in this network is?  That, to me, would mean that many government folks are in on it too.  For the $$$.  It is reasonable of me to raise these questions.  Moreover, as an ex-establishment journalist, it is my duty to raise these questions.  It should be the duty of all American media to raise these questions.  When Big Money drugs are involved, there is always the payoff to the corrupt cop or city official.  We’ve all read our share of crime mysteries over the years to know this is a given.  Right here in Vermont, read Archer Mayor.  And so it must be with Big Money Human Trafficking.

So, I propose we here in Vermont take a serious look at what might be.  We have been reading and hearing about the growing Heroin pipeline through Vermont.  From Florida, up the East Coast, through Jersey and NYC, Providence, R.I., Mass, up through Vermont to Montreal.  And back again.  Now, it seems to me that if the Heroin Traffickers have this Underground Railway, certainly the Human/Sex/Child Traffickers do.  And maybe some of them are doing both at the same time.  And maybe some of them are getting a lot of help along the way, from some fine upstanding citizens and pillars of their communities.  Vermont is along the way.  Isn’t it?  Why is it so quiet out there?  Hmmm…

I have as much as accused our Attorney General, Bill Sorrell, of falling down on the job of fighting the growing Heroin epidemic.  Now I will add to that by saying outright that I believe Vermont is part of the Human/Sex/Child Trafficking Pipeline, and Sorrell is falling down dead on his ass on that too.  Yes, in our little La-La Land of Vermont.  Something ugly.  Something that smells.  Another dirty little Vermont secret.  As an ex-print reporter, I’d bet money that there’s a big story here.  Is Sorrell just incompetent?  Or is the story bigger?  A more involved story than what appears to be the case?

It is worth looking into?  But I have little hope our AG will come forward and fill us all in.  Or that the Vermont Democratic Party will want to go near this one.  I would expect the silence to become deafening.  But silence speaks volumes sometimes.  

Therefore, as Zola once put it: J’Accuse…!   I accuse Bill Sorrell, the entire Vermont Attorney General’s office and those in State government who could be able to act on this big money crime that THEY ARE NOT </b>ACTING ON IT AND THAT THEIR INACTION IS DELIBERATE!  Something needs to be done.  This is an election year.  Good time for it.

It’s work, these children.  But it is the very best job in the world.



Peter Buknatski

Montpelier, Vt.

Not that it should come as any surprise, but Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO)  has just admitted that they have massively underestimated  the amount of radiation released by the crippled reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, due to “improper measurement.”

“We are very sorry, but we found cases in which beta radiation readings turned out to be wrong when the radioactivity concentration of a sample was high,” TEPCO spokesman Masayuki Ono told a press conference. Beta ray-emitting radioactive materials include strontium-90.

Guilty of epic fail in the realm of public safety, TEPCO is still inexplicably controlling operations at the site of the worst nuclear disaster in peacetime history.

It doesn’t take much to imagine that this latest revelation is just the tip of the radioactive iceberg.

Since the first day of the disaster, there has been an ongoing conspiracy afoot to keep much of the unfolding story shrouded in secrecy for as long as possible.  

This has been done almost exclusively to protect the corporation, and the industry associated with it, from total collapse.  By limiting the effectiveness of the evacuation zone, falsely minimizing the risk posed by radiation exposure in general, and fudging the data from Fukushima exposures in particular, those who collaborated to protect the industry callously sacrificed the public good.

Thyroid cancers are spiking among children in Fukushima prefecture; but the official position is that escaped radiation from the accident is “unlikely” to be the cause.

How many times did the public receive assurances that meltdown would not occur; that contamination could be contained; that groundwater wouldn’t be contaminated; that the ocean fisheries would be unaffected?  If these were not the most bald-faced lies, the only alternative is that TEPCO is singularly incompetent.

In either case, there is absolutely no legitimate excuse for the Japanese government to have left them in control for so long.

In the past, I have variously labeled UVM economist Art Woolf as “Vermont’s Loudest Economist” for his inescapable media presence, and as “Vermont’s Laziest Economist” for his tossed-off weekly emissions in the Burlington Free Press. We at GMD have also criticized him for his obvious free-market bias.

Well, he’s outdone himself with his newest Freeploid “effort” entitled “State taps richest Vermont taxpayers for revenue.” (Gannett paywall warning.) It’s the kind of rhetorical disingenuousness I’d expect from a junior hack at the Heritage Foundation, not a tenured professor at a pretty good university.  

Woolf’s message is that Vermont’s top earners are already shouldering a substantial burden under Vermont’s “highly progressive income tax.” The unstated corollary is that we shouldn’t impose on them any further. But his evidence is so obviously, blatantly selective that it invalidates his entire argument.

The whole thing rests on the narrow foundation of this chart:

That one chart gives birth, in Woolf’s fertile imagination, to a columnful of conclusions about state tax policy past, present, and future. And I’m sure the chart was carefully chosen to “prove” his point, since I’m about to produce other charts that show the hollowness of Woolf’s reasoning.

The chart concerns state income tax only — not total tax burden. And I think you know why: the property tax burden (local and state combined) is relatively friendly to top earners and hits the middle hardest:

(Chart from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy) What’s more, the sales tax is even worse: the lower your income, the more it stings. According to ITEP, the lowest 20% pay 5.1% of their income in sales and excise taxes. The top 1% pay 0.6%. Now, that’s a regressive tax.

The chosen cutoff point in Woolf’s chart — $100,000 — is rather curious. That’s quite a bit lower than the usual wealthy/middle class/working class/poor dividing lines, and lumps quite a bit of the middle class in with the very rich.

Also, please notice that virtually all of the dastardly increase occurred while Jim Douglas was governor. Damn socialist.

After the jump: Lots more charts!

Now, I don’t think Douglas was really soaking the rich. I imagine the increase was due to the pre-Great Recession boost in upper incomes and stock valuations.

But still, the chart does show the income-tax share borne by those earning $100,000 or more increased from 46% to 65% in a decade. That’s quite a leap. Funny thing, though: Woolf does not cite a single change in policy or law that shifted the tax burden upward.

Well, there’s a reason for that: the tax burden has shifted upward because THE INCOME HAS SHIFTED UPWARD. The top earners are taking home more and more of the taxable income. And if you earn proportionately more, of course you’re going to pay proportionately more in taxes. (That’s how it ought to work, at any rate.) Remember this chart?

First, to be clear, this is a “wealth” chart, not an “income” chart. They’re different. But this chart is still relevant to Woolf’s sophistry. Those bars at the far right, showing the top 5%, shoot way, way up off the chart. The bigger point is that the upward curve doesn’t kick into high gear until about the 89th percentile. The bottom 80% just don’t own very much of our total wealth.

Now, let’s look at a couple of readily available charts on Vermont income that Art Woolf chose to omit. Both come from our friends at the Public Assets Institute. The first shows how the top 1% of Vermont earners have seen their incomes skyrocket since — how about that — Ronald Reagan took office. (The chart ends in 2005, but the trend has continued since then.)

The second PAI chart shows how the income share has skewed to the top in the last two decades.

As PAI notes, the state economy “saw respectable growth” in the period, as did real personal income. But the median income level — the dividing line between the upper half and the lower half — barely moved at all. Which means virtually all the growth in real personal income was concentrated in the top half. And, by other measures, we’ve seen that it’s mostly concentrated at the very top. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the bottom 20% of Vermont earners take home $25,500; the middle 20% earn $65,700; and the top 5% earn a whopping $243,900. The average top earner’s share is nearly ten times higher than the average bottom earner.

What’s worse, those figures include the Earned Income Tax Credit, which helps buoy the working poor.

So of course the top earners are paying a bigger share of the total income tax burden than they used to. THEY’RE TAKING ALL THE DAMN MONEY.

Whether they’re actually paying as much as they should is another question. Vermont’s top income tax rate — for those earning more than $398,350 — is 8.95%, which is pretty hefty. But thanks to the way Vermont calculates taxable income, and thanks to the many tax breaks and deductions available to top earners, the real income tax rate paid by the top 1% is 5.2% — more than three and a half percentage points lower than the official rate.

That 5.2% figure is from the Inetitute on Taxation and Economic Policy, as is the following chart, which puts the whole picture together:

To sum it all up, Vermont’s income tax takes a bigger bite from top earners, but not nearly as much as the official rate — and the total tax burden actually falls hardest on the lower and middle classes. The working poor get a break on income tax thanks to the EITC, but they still pay almost as much as anybody else — and they actually pay a higher percentage than the top 20%. Does anyone really think that’s fair?

The top earners pay proportionately more dollars in taxes, but that’s because their share of the total dollars is so absurdly high. They are not paying more than their fair share; indeed, a far better argument can be made that they aren’t paying enough.

Which means that Woolf’s implicit argument — the rich are paying too much — is nonsense. And his assertion that “Vermont has a highly progressive income tax” is accurate but fundamentally misleading.

He makes another statement near the end of his column:

The downside of that progressivity is that Vermont’s revenues become much more sensitive to the business cycle. When the economy does well, income tax revenues soar. But when the economy falters, state revenues fall by a lot more than they would if Vermont’s tax structure… was less progressive.

Hm, so we need to increase taxes on the bottom and middle in order to equilibrate revenues? Psssh. When I look at that, I see a powerful argument against income inequality: we’d have a more stable society, and more stable government revenues, if income were shared more equally.

Thanks, Art. That’s not what you meant to say, but it’s a nice takeaway from your otherwise abysmally dishonest column.  

The big news out of last Saturday’s Vermont Republican Party meeting was the resolution calling for all Republican candidates and officeholders to actively oppose single-payer health care. The measure was a clear slap at the state’s most visible (and successful) Republican, Lt. Gov. Phil Scott, who refuses to publicly denounce a plan that hasn’t been unveiled yet.

Yeah, he’s funny that way.

But the meeting also tooted out another resolution — this one on education. It supports independent schools, and opposes former Education Secretary Armando Vilaseca’s call for new limits on independent schools including a ban on public schools going independent.

So blah blah blah, Republicans bash public schools and promote the dilution of the system by encouraging towns to go indy. That’s not news.

What is news, is that the VTGOP’s resolution includes three grammatical errors.

In an official document on education.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Two of the three mistakes are in the very first sentence:

Whereas: Vermont has had a 150 year tradition of sending their students to independent schools

First, and pickiest, is that the verb tense “has had” implies that the tradition is in the past tense, that we no longer have such a tradition. Just drop the “had” and go with “has.”  

Second, the mismatch between “Vermont” and “their.” It should either be “Vermont” and “its” or “Vermonters” and “their.”

The third mistake comes in one of the resolutions:

That changes in the Vermont statutes and regulations proposed The Vilesca Report  will have a profoundly adverse effect on the education of our children and should not be implemented

Ahem. That should be “proposed in the Vilaseca Report.” Unless you meant to say that the changes actually proposed the report.

Just little goof-ups, slips of the pen. But c’mon now. A major party passes an official policy statement at a statewide meeting, and can’t be bothered to get the wording right?

And then posts the statement, mistakes and all, on its website for all to see?

On a resolution about education, of all things?

Ladies and gentlemen, your Vermont Republican Party.  

It was learned at tonight's Montpelier Board of Civil Authority meeting that next month's election will be a rarity for Montpelier in recent years: contested up and down the slate.

Not only is there a contest for mayor, every City Council seat is contested and there is evenn a race for Parks Commissioner.

Here's the list of candidates, as posted on the city's web page: Thanks to the efficiency of our Town Clerk, John Odum, for getting this information out so quickly!

 CANDIDATES: 

FOR MAYOR – For a Term of 2 Years (Vote for not more than ONE)

• JOHN H. HOLLAR
• GWENDOLYN HALLSMITH

FOR GREEN MOUNT CEMETERY COMMISSIONER – For a Term of 5 Years (Vote for not more than ONE)

• CHARLES E. WILEY

FOR PARK COMMISSIONER – For a Term of 5 Years (Vote for not more than ONE)

• BRYAN M. PFEIFFER
• BILL JOHNSON

FOR SCHOOL COMMISSIONER – For a Term of 3 Years (Vote for not more than TWO)

• CAROL PAQUETTE
• KENNETH JONES

FOR COUNCIL PERSON, DISTRICT 1 – For a Term of 2 Years (Vote for not more than ONE)

• DONA BATE
• ANDY HOOPER

FOR COUNCIL PERSON, DISTRICT 2 – For a Term of 2 Years (Vote for not more than ONE)

• PAGE S. GUERTIN
• THIERRY GUERLAIN
• IVAN SHADIS

FOR COUNCIL PERSON, DISTRICT 3 – For a Term of 2 Years (Vote for not more than ONE)

• JUSTIN TURCOTTE
• DAN JONES