Author Archives: John S. Walters

About John S. Walters

Writer, editor, sometime radio personality, author of "Roads Less Traveled: Visionary New England Lives."

Ethics, shmethics

Riddle me this, Batman: How is a political blogpost like a roadkill skunk?

The apparent answer: At first their stench makes them unfit for polite company, but after three weeks or so the smell goes away.

See, way; back on January 19, I wrote a piece about a bill before the legislature to establish a Latin motto for Vermont. Over time, the story went viral; it appeared on the Huffington Post, the Daily Kos, Reddit, Fark, and Gawker. It was shared on Facebook more than 10,000 times, and I literally got over 100,000 pageviews out of it.

But nobody else in Vermont media picked up on the story.

That is, until now. The Associated Press’ Dave Gram wrote a piece about it. The Burlington Free Press posted it on their paywalled website; here’s a link to the story on a non-paywalled site.

Nice of Dave to finally notice the story. Don’t know why it took three weeks.

Not so nice: he didn’t credit the Vermont Political Observer as the original source. Maybe the story’s blogorrific stench has dissipated, but the smell still permeates the dread name “theVPO.”

Gawker, that irresponsible gossipmonger, credited me; the local media, I guess, chooses not to.

Now I realize that (a) this is a trivial story, a sidebar to our coverage of politics and policy, and (b) nobody outside of the room I’m sitting in cares whether I get fair credit. But I do. And the giving and receiving of credit is always a lively topic whenever journalists gather; my salaried colleagues are quick to complain when they are slighted by another media outlet.

So here’s my complaint. For the vast majority of you who don’t care, my apologies and I promise something more relevant next time. Just needed to get that off my chest.

RNC leader thinks better of Israel trip

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Hmm. Apparently Reince Priebus, the chair of the Republican National Committee, ducked out of that big trip to Israel arranged by the hateful bigoted folks at the American Family Association.

Priebus was one of the many top Republicans, including Vermont’s own Susie Hudson, who were booked on a nine-day trip to Israel paid for, and guided by, officials of the American Family Association and its subsidiary, the American Renewal Project. The voyagers left last weekend, but Priebus was spotted this week in Washington, D.C. after a meeting with Senate Republicans. Talking Points Memo:

His appearance in Washington came as something of a surprise after the founder of the American Renewal Project, David Lane, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last week that he would be taking Priebus, Priebus’ wife and about 60 other committee members to the Holy Land.

The trip was scheduled in November, but became a source of controversy last week after the Israeli media outlet Haaretz spilled the inconvenient beans about the AFA’s extreme Christianist positions.

You know, it’s funny how the Republican Party doesn’t mind offending Americans with its close ties to a hate group, but it’s afraid to offend Israelis. Yeah, funny.

I guess Priebus decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and quietly canceled. Hudson and the others made the trip, and are currently getting their heads filled with AFA dogma about Middle Eastern politics. Perhaps when Hudson comes back on Sunday, someone from the Vermont media will ask her what she learned, and about the appropriateness of the Republican National Committee accepting the lavish hospitality of the American Family Association.

Let’s hope so. To date, Seven Days’ Paul Heintz is the only reporter to pursue this story. How about it, VTDigger, Burlington Free Press, Vermont Press Bureau, Associated Press, VPR, WCAX, and WPTZ? The Vermont Republican Party actively distances itself from the more extreme provinces of national conservatism; how do its leaders explain one of their own, who holds a top position with the national party, taking an expensive AFA junket and absorbing its poisonous worldview?

Elections: If it’s broke, don’t fix it

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Our Esteemed Leaders seem to be in the process of backpedaling away from a reform measure on the grounds that the problem hasn’t caused widespread mayhem just yet. In this case, it’s our antiquated way of deciding a gubernatorial election when no single candidate wins a majority. The problem slithered out of the dank recesses of Vermont history when Governor Shumlin barely eked out a plurality win over Scott Milne, and Milne refused to concede. Technically, we didn’t have a governor-elect until a couple hours before his inauguration.

Reminds me of my previous post about vaccines. Well, it’s a common theme in the Legislature. I call it Grandfather’s Lightbulb Syndrome, after the classic joke:

“How many Vermonters does it take to change a light bulb?”

“Change it? That was my grandfather’s light bulb!”

To which I would add, “And nobody’s fallen down the staircase yet!”

Several possible changes to our system have been proposed; all are simple, and any one would prevent future occurrences of a losing candidate fighting on or, worst case, a losing candidate actually winning election in the Legislature. Hey, it’s happened before.

So what will lawmakers do about it? Sad to say, my money’s on Jack Diddly Squat. Because on issue after issue, they respond to potential problems by saying, “Why lock the barn door? We haven’t lost any horses yet.”

Think I’m too cynical? Take a look at this.

The chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations said Wednesday she’s not so sure Vermont should amend its constitution to limit the legislature’s role in selecting statewide officeholders.

“We are more seriously looking at whether we need to have a change,” Sen. Jeanette White (D-Windham) said.

Well, Senator, what exactly would convince you that we need to have a change? An actual Constitutional crisis instead of a near-miss?

That’s bad enough, but there’s also this:

After the hearing, White said she remained “confused” about her own position.

“Part of me says it’s fine just the way it is,” she said. “It seems to work. People are elected.”

White’s committee has now held three hearings on the issue. And she’s “confused”? Jeezus H. Christ.

Don’t blame me, Senator, when your horse gets stolen or someone falls down the staircase.

Action needed on vaccines, and we’re not going to get it

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As the Great Disneyland Measles Outbreak continues to reverberate, attention is rightly turning to Vermont’s permissive rules on opting out of childhood vaccinations. The state allows parents to claim religious, medical, or philosophical grounds for refusing vaccinations; the vast majority of exemptions, according to the state Health Department, are in the undefined “philosophical” category.

Most of these are not philosophical at all; they are the result of anti-vaccine propaganda fomented by the likes of Jenny McCarthy and a disgraced former doctor. Their numbers in Vermont are growing, and getting close to the point where “herd immunity” will no longer be effective, and long-banished disease can make a comeback.

This is exactly the problem that caused the Disneyland outbreak, and it’s only a matter of time before it happens here. One brave lawmaker has stepped up to the plate; Sen. Kevin Mullin has proposed a bill to eliminate the philosophical exemption. He also did so in 2012; the Senate passed the bill, but the House backed away like a frightened child when the anti-vaxxers stormed their gilded corridors.

There seems to be little appetite for a repeat of that debate, in spite of the growing risk. Governor Shumlin, who strongly endorses vaccination, wants no part of another exemption debate, according to spokesman Scott Coriell:

The Governor believes that every child in Vermont should be vaccinated against deadly diseases, not only to protect them but also to protect others. …When it comes to the question of forcing those parents who refuse to follow common sense to do so, the legislature had that debate in 2012 and a bipartisan majority in the legislature passed a bill that requires enhanced education for parents and reporting on vaccination rates.

…While the Governor believes there is no excuse to forgo vaccinations, he thinks we need to be extremely careful about passing laws that put the state in the position of making decisions for children without parental consent.

That sounds almost exactly like the statement that just got New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in hot water:

“All I can say is we vaccinated ours,” Christie said, while touring a biomedical research facility in Cambridge, England, which makes vaccines.

The New Jersey governor added that “parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that the government has to decide.”

You tell me the difference between Shumlin and Christie. There isn’t any.

And hey, here’s a little tidbit that might make some of our leaders think twice about their timidity: they’re making a daily commute right into the heart of a potential measles vector. According to the latest Health Department figures, kindergartners at Montpelier’s Union Elementary School have a Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccination rate of only 88.7%. The standard for “herd immunity” is 90%.

The Governor and his fellow anti-vaxx coddlers might want to consider wearing facemasks to Montpelier, especially those with some kind of suppressed immunity.

Now, the anti-vaxxers are framing this the same way Shumlin is: as a matter of parental choice.

Problem: this is a matter of choice the same way smoking in enclosed spaces or wearing your seat belt is a matter of choice. On some issues, the public interest trumps individual rights. When parents opt out of vaccination, they are depending on the rest of us to supply their kids with herd immunity. They also pose a direct health threat to children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons, and to anyone with a suppressed immune system.

Vermont is trending in the wrong direction on vaccinations. We are needlessly endangering some of our more vulnerable residents and the general public health. But I guess it will take an actual outbreak before our lawmakers put on their grown-up pants and do the right thing.

Well, at least the Free Press dumped its political reporters BEFORE the list came out

Slicing the baloney with Art Woolf

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Expert-for-Sale-or-Lease Art Woolf has outdone himself in this week’s Burlington Free Press column. And that’s saying something, because just about every emission is a small shining jewel of cherrypicked statistics and unexamined dogma.

This week’s, though, hoo boy.

Herr Doktor Professor Woolf. Not exactly as illustrated.

Maybe he’s been reading this blog, because today’s column is a 300-word attack on the idea of taxing the rich. His argument relies on the unlikely, and irrelevant, assertion that rich folks’ incomes are too volatile to be a dependable source of tax revenue.

Which may be true for individual taxpayers, whose incomes shuttle between well-off, rich, and filthy stinkin’ rich depending on the stock market, the purchase or sale of costly assets, and the convenient laundering of wealth to screw the taxman. (Woolf doesn’t mention the many, many tax advantages of being wealthy, and how they might cause volatility in rich folks’ tax payments.)

Woolf spends most of his column puttering around the definition of “rich,” and showing (with carefully chosen numbers) that these folks pay an impressive share of our total income tax revenue.

Well, of course they do. They earn an even more impressive share of our total income.

Not to mention that while our income tax system is fairly progressive, our total tax system is not. Sales taxes hit hardest on the poor and working classes; property taxes hit the middle class. And the income tax isn’t as progressive as it should be. The rich may pay 40% of Vermont’s income tax revenue, but they sure as hell don’t pay 40% of our total (state and local) intake.

Now, if you look at statistics that Woolf conveniently ignores — total taxation as a percentage of income — you see that the rich pay lower effective tax rates than everybody else in Vermont. Here’s a chart from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that I’ve posted before, but it’s relevant here:

Take all of our state and local taxation together, the richest Vermonters pay a smaller share than anybody else. Woolf conveniently ignores these figures. And he evades the obvious question they pose:

Did they pay their fair share? That’s a question a philosopher, not an economist, can answer.

Wrong, Perfesser. It doesn’t take a philosopher, or even an economist, to look at that chart and conclude that they don’t pay their fair share.

Woolf’s actual premise, that the state can’t depend on revenue from top earners, is irrelevant. Nobody is arguing for confiscatory taxation. Nobody is arguing that soaking the rich should be the foundation of our tax system. The real argument is fairness: are the rich paying enough? The answer, clearly, is no.

The revenue volatility is one of many serious problems caused by income inequality. The solution to the volatility is a fairer economy — one that doesn’t concentrate the wealth at the top end. A fairer economy would also be a stronger and more stable economy, since supply and demand would be in balance.

Why have our economy and our public finances struggled since the Great Recession? Because there are too many people who can’t afford to buy stuff, and consumer activity is by far our strongest economic driver. That’s why programs like food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit provide more economic stimulus than any corporate tax break or across-the-board tax cut: when working people get a little extra cash, they immediately fritter it away on things like food, housing, and heat.

But I digress. Woolf’s argument is misleading and intellectually dishonest. His conclusion is irrelevant to the actual public policy question in play. He also leaves us without a hint of an alternative solution to wealth inequality, unfair taxation, and an economy slumping due to a lack of consumer demand.

Tax deductions: the big kahuna

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This is the third in a series of posts about the January 27 meeting of the House Ways and Means Committee, which explored the tax expenditures and deductions available under the state’s tax code. Part 1 concerned tax expenditures; part 2 focused on the tax deduction for medical expenses as an indicator of the widespread distress caused by our pre-Obamacare health system.

It’s no secret that state lawmakers are looking for ways to raise some extra revenue without causing too much pain. One area under close examination is the tax code, and all the ways we allow people and businesses to limit their tax liability.

Some tweaks are possible in the tax expenditure side of things. But tax deductions actually offer a better opportunity to make our tax system fairer while giving the money tree a modest shake.

It’s an underreported fact that the wealthy actually get the best deal in our supposedly progressive tax system. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the wealthy pay the lowest per-capita share of state and local taxes combined, and they pay the lowest actual income-tax rate of any group besides the poor. Top earners are subject to an income tax rate of 8.95%, but the amount they actually pay is only 5.1%.

The single biggest reason for that disparity? Our generous rules on taxable income and tax deductions. A couple of examples from the category of Bet You Didn’t Know… (all information from the Joint Fiscal Office; tax figures are from the 2011 tax year)

— “Interest You Paid” is tax deductible. For most of us, that means mortgage interest. But it also applies to vacation homes — and boats. That chiefly benefits the wealthy. Renters, who tend to be at the bottom of the income scale, don’t benefit from the mortgage deduction.

— Property taxes are deductible. Including property taxes paid in other states. Again, that benefits those sufficiently well-off to own multiple properties.

— Charitable contributions can be deducted up to 50% of a taxpayer’s adjusted gross income. Only the wealthy can support anywhere near that level of giving. And, given the proliferation of ersatz foundations, it’s easy for a person of means to effectively launder money through a nonprofit. (For example, check out the nonprofit empire spawned by the Koch brothers.)

The power of this virtually unlimited allowance? Among Vermont taxpayers with incomes over $1 million, the average charitable deduction — the average — was $131,360. That’s a lotta stops at the Sally Army bell-ringer.

But here’s the biggest eye-popper of them all. If you add up all the average deductions for Vermont’s million-dollar class, you get $528,000.

That’s right: the average million-dollar taxpayer claimed deductions worth more than half their income.

And that’s how 8.95% turns into 5.1%.

The numbers for those earning less than $1 million are not quite so appalling, but the upper and upper middle classes clearly benefit from our current tax code. The primary reason: our permissive rules on tax deductions and taxable income.

Setting limits

The 2011 standard deduction in Vermont was $5,800 for a single taxpayer, $8,500 for a head of household, and $11,600 for a married couple filing jointly. Peanuts by comparison. I bring this up because Betcha Didn’t Know that 10 of the 50 states don’t allow itemized deductions. Everyone gets the standard — no more, no less.

That option could be on the table. It would bring the effective tax rate for top earners much closer to statutory levels. The resulting revenue could be used to cut taxes on the middle class, who get hit hardest by Vermont’s tax system; or they could be used to close the budget gap without sacrificing state services.

I’m not expecting anything that radical from our frequently timorous Legislature. But as recently as two years ago, the House passed a bill that would have capped itemized deductions at 2.5 times the standard. That bill died in the Senate, mainly because of Governor Shumlin’s opposition.

Yes, our Democratic Governor blocked the path to a fairer tax code. Wait, let me double-check… Yep, he’s a Democrat. Says so, anyway.

If that bill had passed, members of the Million-Dollar Club would have seen their deductions capped at $29,000 — a far cry from $528,000.

The situation may be different this year, as the state faces a large budget gap and Shumlin has deliberately soft-pedaled his anti-tax stance. During his budget address, he stated his opposition to “raising income, sales, and rooms & meals tax rates” — very deliberately emphasizing the word “rates,” which had not been part of his boilerplate in the past.

If that wasn’t signal enough, Shumlin’s budget proposed an end to the tax deduction for state income taxes paid in the previous year. And with that, as Ways and Means chair Janet Ancel told me, “He put the whole discussion about itemized deductions on the table.”

Ancel would not commit to revisiting the deduction-capping bill, but it’s clearly on her mind. “It [would have] made the tax system more fair,” she says. She may get a second bite at the apple this year, and thanks to our budget situation it might actually pass muster with the Governor. One can only hope.

… and a child shall lead them.

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About a month ago, a journalism class at Bennington’s Mount Anthony Union High School posted a video on YouTube in which they systematically dismantled the integrity of Fox News “journalist” Jesse Watters. The video’s gotten 370,000 hits, and is well worth watching.

This has received quite a bit of notice outside Vermont, but not much within our borders. Probably something to do with Vermont media’s northern orientation; Bennington is a virtual black hole because it’s far away and not easy to get to.

A while ago, Watters ran a piece on “The O’Reilly Factor” in which he visited Vermont to confirm its reputation as a liberal hotbed. His visit was as pro forma as it could have been; he went to Bennington, the closest town to his NYC base, and did a handful of “man on the street” interviews with questions designed to prove his prefabricated point that Vermont is a haven of the far left. Questions like, “Why do you think the President has allowed terrorists to take over a third of Iraq?” (Pronounced eye-RACK.) His interview subjects were stereotypically flaky young people. (I doubt he considered asking anyone in a business suit to take part.)

Mr. Integrity.

The MAUHS students compared Watters’ report with the ethical standards of the Society of Professional Journalists, and found him guilty of “too many violations to count” resulting in a “wholesale distortion of truth.” As one student concludes, “By watching Fox News, we have learned buckets about journalism: what to do, and more importantly, what never to do.”

The conclusion isn’t a surprise, but what’s notable is the diligence and thoroughness of these students. Their work is worth noting and celebrating. Fox News didn’t see it that way, naturally; Bill O’Reilly referred to the students as “pinheads.” Stay classy, Loofah Man.

Oh, and just in case you want to stereotype these kids as loony liberals, the same class has taken the New York Times to task for its overheated reporting on drug abuse in Vermont, particularly the Times’ assertion that “the hallways of Mount Anthony Union High School… were littered with bags of heroin.”

Tweaking the noses of the powerful: one of the core functions of real journalism.

Tomorrow’s Burlington Free Press might be a bit thinner than usual

Leahy re-ups; a mixed blessing

The Vermont Political Observer.

a.k.a. theVPO: Analysis and observation of Vermont politics from a liberal viewpoint