Culture Vulture

 
Some say economic hard times are viewed as a recession when your neighbor loses his or her job. It becomes a depression when you lose yours.
For about 40 employees of the Orvis Co., one of the pillars of the Northshire economy, recession became a depression over the past few weeks, as the venerable firm, more than 150 years old, laid off employees in two installments over the past few weeks. They were by no means the first to get pink slips around here and they unfortunately in all likelihood won't be the last.
The economy of the Northshire has been bleeding in a quiet way for the past three or four months. But without many large employers who, with their backs to the wall and their very survival at stake, have to let go of large numbers of employees in one painful round of layoffs, it's been more a case of one or two, or five or six, people punching our for the last time here and there. Collectively, it starts to become worrisome, but we've been spared the stunning thunderclap of 500 or more workers joining the ranks of the unemployed overnight, as has happened elsewhere. Farther north, there is plenty of reason to worry that the still large IBM plant in Essex Junction could indeed make such an announcement. That would be a bad day for Vermont. IBM pumps a lot of money into this state.
Unemployment is like a right cross to the head for workers. Not only does your earnings outlook darken, but for many people, what we do for work also plays a huge part in defining who we are as people. It's important to re-join the workforce as fast as possible, not only to keep up with the mortgage and put food on the table, but for self-esteem.
In a dynamic economy, layoffs are going to be a fact of life from time to time. Many would argue that the right to a job should be a guarantee. It can't be. Old skills get overtaken by new ones, industries rise and industries fall. Without that push and pull, societies stagnate.
The trick is to get the economy moving again and offer the needed training for those who need it to get new jobs in potentially whole new industries and businesses making new, cutting edge products. There's no reason why some of those 21st century industries can't be right here. It's not easy for government, be it state, local or federal, to wave a wand and magically create new jobs. All government can really do is create conditions to attract and lure private sector entrepreneus into taking a risk. they in turn also have to find financing, and the tightness in the nation's credit markets is at the heart of why it's hard to expand and create jobs now.
Unlocking the credit markets is the federal government's job, but here at the state and local level we can do things like make the permit process simpler and less time consuming, and even take a pro-active view of what types of industries might make a good fit with a given locality.

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 5:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s a well known fact that Vermont’s population growth is stagnant. Those of us who are already here aren’t reproducing ourselves in sufficient quantities and unlike the 1960s and 1970s, when Vermont was considered a cool place to come to and live, contemporary twenty and thirty-somethings aren’t following in the footsteps of their Baby Boomer antecedents and moving here. Why that’s so is an interesting question. Getting back to the land isn’t quite the draw it used to be.
It may be a sign of the times – as in the Age of Aquarius is definitely over – but a new inducement might be a dramatic cut in the income tax rate.
Right now Vermont ranks as one of the top states in the nation in terms of per capita tax burden — eighth, to be exact, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group based in Washington, D.C. More than 10 percent of Vermonter's income goes to pay state and local taxes.
The flip side of a steeply progressive tax structure, such as we have in Vermont, is that while it pleases many to make the rich pay a disproportionate share of their wealth into the public till, easing the burden on those at the lower end, it also means the state becomes more and more dependent on fewer and fewer people. These are the very folks with the means to leave the state and re-locate somewhere else where the tax code doesn’t discriminate quite so blatantly in terms of wealth – a place like New Hampshire, for example, although Florida apparently has its charms as well.
Before everyone trips over themselves to sputter that Reagan-style supply-side economics is so last century, think about it – if Vermont were to cut its income tax in half, would more people want to move here? More to the point, would fewer people want to leave?
Ah yes, there’s that little matter of a more than $60 million deficit in the state budget this year, coupled with the prospect of a much bigger deficit in the next fiscal year. Presumably, some of that will be taken care of by Uncle Sam, but not all of it, and it would be a bad idea to wait around for the federal largesse which won’t come without some kind of string, or strings, attached.
So if we were to cut the income tax rate in half, do you think more entrepreneurial people who are high achievers and already fairly wealthy would want to move here and spend a larger chunk of their disposable income here? We wouldn’t have to attract a whole lot of people to make that happen, offsetting the initial drain on the state’s treasury and neutralizing the financial impact. Meanwhile, they’d still be buying local and pumping more money into the state sales tax ledger.
And hey, those of us who are already here, and have been living life in Vermont, making $40,000 or so — or less — a year — would also stand to benefit a little, wouldn't we?
It’s an interesting idea. Too bad it probably stands no chance of passage in this session. Or does it?

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)