State Economists: Smooth Sailing for Now, Storm Clouds on the Distant Horizon

Thursday marked the semiannual Festival of Numbers that is the consensus economic forecast, prepared as always by Vermont state economists Tom Kavet and Jeffrey Carr. The topline: Happy times will continue for another year and a half or so, but after that there’s tremendous uncertainty and huge downside risk.

Or, to put it in purely political terms, Phil Scott will enjoy smooth financial sailing through fiscal year 2024 (assuming he wins another term, and there’s no reason to think he won’t), but whoever is governor in 2025-26 may have a real mess on their hands.

The very short-term forecast is for even more money to flow into Vermont’s coffers. Carr and Kavet upgraded their revenue forecast for the rest of FY2022 (ends June 30) by $44 million.

The reason: Vermont’s economy and state revenues continue to be buoyed by the flood of federal Covid relief dollars — more than $10 billion in all. “We had a [fiscal] hole and we’re filling it five times over with federal stimulus,” said Kavet. Those dollars will continue to flow for 12-18 more months. Then comes a return to Earth, and a landing that might be soft, or… a splat on the landscape.

“There is no playbook from the last time the feds dropped $10 billion on our economy,” said Carr, meaning that it’s never happened before. When the money dries up, Carr said, “the amount of risk, especially on the downside, escalates… The economy will transition into something new and different.”

And while the short-term outlook is rosy in the aggregate, that doesn’t mean everyone is doing well. “One hand’s in boiling water, one’s in ice water,” said Carr. “On average, you’re okay.”

Continue reading →

The Empire Strikes Back on Qualified Immunity

Phil Scott Really Hates to Admit He Might Be Wrong

2 Replies

This was the facial expression Gov. Phil Scott pulled when he was asked if his administration got “caught with your pants down” by the Omicron variant. Yeah, he doesn’t like admitting he may have been wrong and he hates it when someone calls him on it. Maybe we can stop with the “nice guy” stuff, please?

Backing up for a sec. In a Friday newsdump at the end of last week, Education Secretary Dan French announced a complete change in Covid-19 policy for the public schools. At the time, I wrote: “There’s only one good thing about this fiasco. It’s the first time anyone in the Scott administration has admitted that their policies weren’t working.”

Well, at his Tuesday Covid briefing, the governor came out swinging against the idea that his now-inoperative school policies didn’t work.

“The process we’ve been using with school nurses acting as contact tracers was effective before Omicron,” he said in his opening statement, “but it no longer is as effective as it once was.”

I’d like to hear him say that to the face of any school nurse in Vermont. They, and other school staff, were overwhelmed by the workload involved in contact tracing and Test to Stay*. It was unsustainable, and the administration did nothing to help. That’s why the Agency of Education struggled throughout the fall semester to get school districts to sign up for Test to Stay. It was more effective than, say, doing nothing at all, but it never came close to being effective.

*Speaking of which, Scott announced that child care facilities will now be able to sign up for Test to Stay. Did anyone else notice the contradiction? “Test to Stay” is now ineffective in the schools, but it’s the latest thing for child care? Huh.

Hell, he couldn’t even bring himself to admit that the policy failed to meet the test of the Omicron variant. All he said was the policy was “no longer as effective as it once was.”

Which brings us to the pants question.

Continue reading →

Molly Gray 2.0

1 Reply

Pictured above is Patricia Preston, freshly-minted Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor who has a very low public profile. She’s got no track record in politics, but offers some decent credentials from the nonprofit world. She offers an unconventional resumé for a would-be politico. At 36, she’s young for a statewide candidate.

Are you starting to get serious Molly Gray vibes? Well, there’s more.

Preston is a native Vermonter who grew up on a family farm far away from the cosmopolitan (read: Not Real Vermont) precincts of Burlington. She graduated from the University of Vermont. She spent time working in the international nonprofit arena.

Her initial campaign video is practically a carbon copy of Gray’s, not that Gray’s was anything exceptional. It leans heavily on personal biography. Open and close feature Preston speaking directly to the camera; in between are images of a rural road, the family farm, aerial shots of Vermont towns, the Statehouse, a classroom, renewable energy projects, herself walking outside, herself staring into the sun. The only remotely controversial images show a solar farm and a scale model of two wind turbines, onscreen for a half second or so each.

Which brings us to her Gray-like agenda. It’s long on bromides and short on specifics. It’s full of praise for her home state and a hazy vision for how to make it even better. What does she hope to do as LG? “…help Vermont rebuild a resilient, safe, and healthy future for our families and loved ones, our communities, and this incredible state.” Yeah, that’s the stuff.

Continue reading →

Law and Order: Discriminatory Intent

1 Reply

While the bulk of our attention was focused on Dan French’s abject surrender to the Omicron variant, we got hit with a double dose of bad news regarding the equity of our justice system. Or should I say the lack thereof.

The first hit was a study showing that Black people were six times as likely to be jailed in Vermont as white people. The second was the latest installment in a series of studies showing a substantial racial disparity in traffic stops, searches and seizures. Those are, respectively, the endpoint and the beginning of the so-called “justice” system.

Can there be any doubt that we have a big problem in our law-n-order process? Can there be any doubt that Black people are getting the short end of the stick?

Nope.

Well, unless your name is “John Klar,” but more on that later.

Stop me if you’ve seen this movie before. Statistics showing racial disparities are revealed. They are met with furrowed brows and Expressions of Earnest Concern^TM, along with determination to Get To The Bottom Of This. Time passes, another round of statistics is revealed, lather, rinse, repeat. Makes me tired, sad, and mad.

Continue reading →

There’s Only One Good Thing About This

3 Replies

In the Friday newsdump of all Friday newsdumps, Education Secretary Dan French, seen above realizing he forgot to wear pants to the office, has thrown his school Covid policies into the dumpster and promised something new and better… sometime next week.

Holy fucking hell.

In a memo sent to school officials (and quickly leaked to the media), French advised them to stop trying to do contact tracing and PCR surveillance testing because both strategies are ineffective against the impressively virulent Omicron strain. He wrote of an “imminent policy shift,” so after a disastrous first week of the winter semester, our schools will sail blithely into week 2 with no policies in place whatsoever.

Also, the AOE is now trying to supply schools with enough test kits for all their students. Seven Days, which first broke the story, reports that it’s “unclear how many kits each school will get and whether the state already has them stockpiled.”

Yeah, AOE policy is known for its lack of clarity. And substance.

This isn’t the first time French has failed to foresee the eminently foreseeable. The Delta variant was a known threat by midsummer, but AOE didn’t devise new testing and screening policies until several weeks into the school year. And the crown jewel of the strategy — Test to Stay — has had a slow and trouble-plagued rollout because the schools lacked the resources to carry it out and the state offered zero help.

And now he’s done it again with Omicron.

Continue reading →

Performative Lamentation on Reapportionment

2 Replies

The Vermont Legislature is in the middle of the reapportionment process, the redrawing of legislative districts that occurs every ten years. By the time you read this, the House Government Operations Committee may have given initial approval to a draft redistricting plan. It’s only the first step in a lengthy process, and nothing will be finalized for some time yet. But that hasn’t kept Republicans from whingeing about how majority Democrats are rigging the system to ensure another decade in power.

Sen. Corey Parent is out with an opinion piece calling the process “unnecessarily rushed” and “outrageous.” David Flemming of the Ethan Allen Institute notes that Vermont is at high risk of partisan gerrymandering. GovOps Committee Republicans reportedly favor a redistricting map that’s being sidelined by majority Dems.

And you know what? I don’t want to hear it from any Republican. The GOP is the reigning champion of the gerrymandering game. Vermont Democrats are not going to do anything nearly as perfidious as the legislatures in, say Ohio or Texas or Florida. The only reason Vermont Republicans are complaining is that they’re in the minority. If they were in power, they’d throw principle out the window in service of protecting their advantage.

Besides, the courts have approved all but the most extreme gerrymandering. It’s officially fair game, right? Well, only if you’re the victim, not the perpetrator.

Continue reading →

The Moral Panic Merchant

1 Reply

Has my old frenemy Bradford Broyles become a pillar of purity? Or does he simply see a marketing opportunity in fanning the flames of hate? It’s hard to tell, but my bet’s on the latter. Either way, he’s jumped with both feet onto the book-banning bandwagon, hectoring a Vermont high school for including a transgender person’s memoir on its library shelves.

Oh, you need some background? Broyles is a wannabe Hollywood producer of tediously unfunny right-wing “comedy” in partnership with Len (billed as “Lenny” because comedy?) Britton, former ski resort operator and very unsuccessful candidate for U.S. Senate in 2010. (Pat Leahy spanked him by a better than two-to-one margin.)

Brad and Lenny are best known around these parts for producing “News Done Right,” a series of short videos critical of Vermont’s left, Phil Scott included. The “stars” of NDR were a couple of aspiring actors willing to don flannel shirts and pretend, not convincingly, to be Vermonters.

Last I heard, Broyles and Britton were flogging a sitcom starring Kevin Sorbo, the guy who played Hercules for five years on the teevee and went on to became a QAnon-style conspiratorialist. Sorbo plays a politically incorrect (read: asshole) suburban dad in “The World According to Billy Potwin.” A handful of episodes have been produced; somehow, it has yet to be picked up by any major media outlet. (You can find clips and a whole episode on YouTube if you’re a glutton for punishment.)

Lately, Broyles has been making waves, or should I say ripples, here in Vermont. Last summer he was the campaign manager for Republican Burlington City Council candidate Christopher-Aaron Felker. I don’t know why Brad bothered; Felker was a sure loser in a Prog-heavy ward even before his history of transphobic remarks on social media was uncovered. Afterward? Well, he finished with 14% of the vote. (And he is now, because desperate times call for desperate measures, the chair of the Burlington GOP.)

Broyles’ latest caper involves sending a letter sent to the Essex-Westford School Board (and sharing it for publicity purposes with Vermont Daily Carbuncle), decrying the inclusion of “Gender Queer,” a graphic memoir by Maia Kobabe about Kobabe’s search for gender identity, in the high school library. (The story was picked up by, you guessed it, John Klar on True North Reports.)

Continue reading →

Still the Luckiest Man in Vermont

The Quality of the “Good” News Continues to Plummet

2 Replies

Am I a little bit relieved that it’s not worse? Yes, I have to admit, I am. I thought we might see the numbers go through the roof by Monday. Instead, they’re only threatening the roof.

And that’s where we are now: an all-time record high daily case count, a rapid rise in Covid hospitalizations, and a new high in test positivity constitutes “good” news.

As for Monday’s “good” news of 245 fresh cases, only 1,313 tests were processed. By my calculation, that’s an 18% positivity rate for Monday. The Tuesday count was 1,727 cases out of 10,572 tests. That’s “only” a 16% positivity rate.

So yeah, Omicron is here and just beginning to hit us hard.

Meanwhile, Gov. Phil Scott is taking a week off his Tuesday Covid briefings. He told us last Tuesday there wouldn’t be one today because he’s delivering the State of the State address Wednesday afternoon.

So… he’s spending 24+ hours practicing? Can you say “I didn’t take a walk today because I was chewing gum”?

Continue reading →

The Vermont Political Observer.

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

State Economists: Smooth Sailing for Now, Storm Clouds on the Distant Horizon

The Empire Strikes Back on Qualified Immunity

Phil Scott Really Hates to Admit He Might Be Wrong

Molly Gray 2.0

Law and Order: Discriminatory Intent

There’s Only One Good Thing About This

Performative Lamentation on Reapportionment

The Moral Panic Merchant

Still the Luckiest Man in Vermont

The Quality of the “Good” News Continues to Plummet