Schubart.com Opinion and Fiction

The gubernatorial campaign is underway, the fabulist hymnal is open and campaigners are in full-throated song, These are a few of my favorite things…. “As your Governor, I’m going to lower taxes on working Vermonters and businesses, and do away with regulation so that we can create jobs for Vermonters.

How sweet the sound, but I’m having trouble singing this hymn.

We all love miracles. We spend billions on weight loss nostrums, sexual enhancement pills, baldness cures and other nonsense. The problem with reductive and illusory solutions is that they distract us from understanding and solving our real problems. I know nobody wins an election by telling truth to voters. We want feel-good mantras and we vote for people who tell us what we want to hear. Keep it simple, stupid. But are we really that stupid?

Since I’m not running, I’ll say a few things that no one wants to hear.

Taxes and regulation are not the only things businesspeople think about, they are one of many, along with education, the environment, workforce wellbeing, and healthcare. After years of being told that Vermont is a bad place to do business, Vermont businesses still manage to provide employment well above that of almost every other state. With just over 300,000 tax filers and inefficient rural infrastructure to maintain, we will always be a relatively high-taxed state. And, no, we don’t have the highest tax burden of any state in the union.

Taxes don’t necessarily need to rise or fall. That’s the wrong discussion, tax burden needs to be fairly apportioned and more wisely invested in common goals.

Yes, we do have substantial unfunded liabilities looming in our state pension and benefit funds that will need to be honored but amended going forward.

State government needs better leadership and management than it has had. It needs to be leaner, more efficient, and more transparent to the taxpayers who invest in it. It needs to have social, economic and environmental goals that are public and can be measured. The Governor must regularly report to the investor-taxpayers on how he or she is doing.

Government does not need to be dismembered by one-trick politicians who have never managed a complex business enterprise.

After the most disastrous national experiment in deregulation in modern times and the resulting economic meltdown that evaporated the jobs, savings and retirement accounts of so many American workers, is Vermont really going to revert to Reaganism?  Surely we learned that, like families and societies, businesses need rules by which to play. These rules need to be fair, consistent and free of politics. The idea that business freed from the bonds of regulation will always operate in the best interests of society is dead.

“I’m gonna reduce government, taxes and regulation is a hallowed but hollow mantra. Vermont needs good government and leadership that reflects our state motto “Freedom and Unity,” leadership that balances the freedom to live as one chooses and to create wealth with the obligations imposed by our choice to live together in communities.

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