Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[T]he first month of the 2018 session of the Legislature is shaping up as proof of the General Law of Contradiction, which holds that not only is everything complicated (which is simple) but also everything is contradictory.
Or to put it another way, the opposite of everything that is true is also true.
Start with the conventional political wisdom, Vermont version. It holds that Gov. Phil Scott is a respectable, conventional, cautious Republican who won’t raise taxes or approve any new-fangled social experiments, while the Democrats who run the Legislature are the daring ones who want to pass new laws.
True enough. The Democrats want to raise the minimum wage and require businesses to offer up to six weeks of paid family leave. A few of them have plans at least to study creating some kind of carbon tax (H.394) as well as a system of free primary health care (H.248).
(In both cases, the primary sponsors are Progressive Party lawmakers, but the bills have Democratic co-sponsors).
Scott is against all that stuff. “It’s not bold to spend more than Vermonters can afford or to experiment with policies our economy cannot sustain,” he said in his budget address last week, dismissing those who want “new or higher taxes, or more expensive mandates on job creators.”
He’s the steady hand on the tiller. It’s the Democrats who want to chart a new course.
That’s one valid way to look at it. But here’s another: Gov. Scott is a starry-eyed dreamer who would creatively use the power of government to intervene in the market economy much more than the Democrats, who are the staid, stodgy sticks-in-the-mud.
Start with Scott’s proposed solution to what he considers one of Vermont’s major challenges: Some employers are having a hard time finding qualified workers.
In a market economy, the established remedy for this problem is the market itself. According to the economics textbooks, if the demand for a product outstrips the supply, then the price goes up. In this case, the demand is for skilled labor, the supply is the number of workers, the price is the compensation for those workers – some combination of wages, benefits, training, perhaps relocation expenses. Offer enough compensation, say the economic textbooks, and enough workers will show up.
That’s not Phil Scott’s remedy. Instead of relying on the market, he is proposing a government subsidy, using $3.2 million of taxpayer money, for a plan to convince, cajole (dare we say seduce?) people from other states to come live here.
There’s nothing new about this. Reverence for the market is the province of a few academics and the flacks who work for outfits that call themselves think tanks but are really adjunct public relations firms. Actual businesspeople have always sought government subsidies, which explains why almost everything – coal, oil, houses, food, clothing, medicine, electricity, the Super Bowl – is government subsidized. Why should Vermont businesses pay to relocate and retrain workers when the state will do all that for them?
In this case there’s also a real question about whether the subsidy will have its desired impact. The idea is to use the latest information technology to learn the individual preferences and tastes of potential in-migrants, and appeal to them on that basis.
“There’s no question,” Scott said, “this approach is different.”
And close to untested. Asked whether any other state had done anything similar, Secretary of Commerce and Community Development Michael Schirling said yes. One. South Dakota. Its “South Dakota Roots Project,” he said, had increased the state’s population by one person a day.
Perhaps it has. But the Roots Project was not mentioned in a 24-page presentation on “State and Local Demographic Changes” made at a conference in the capital city of Pierre last fall by Professor Weiwei Zhang, South Dakota’s state demographer and an assistant professor of sociology and rural studies at South Dakota State University.
Professor Zhang did not respond to an email seeking elaboration. But in her presentation, she attributed most of South Dakota’s population increase (6.3 percent between 2010 and 2016) to natural increase (more births than deaths) plus a small but noticeable bump in the minority population. Nothing about South Dakota Roots.
This does not mean that the Vermont version Scott envisions won’t work. It may be worth trying. But it’s an experiment. The grounds for believing it will work are hope and conjecture, not experience. It’s the kind of government spending program some Republicans used to call a “pie in the sky” waste of taxpayers’ money when proposed by Democrats.
And so is the plan he unveiled last week to extract excess phosphorus from the waters of Lake Champlain (and perhaps elsewhere), and sell it for a profit. It was, he said “another example of how my administration is looking at things differently.”
Differently, yes.
Practically?
That appears more debatable, both how feasible it is to collect the stuff and whether there’s much of a market for it. Of course, it could be a very practical way of diverting attention from actually doing anything about preventing the phosphorus from getting into the lake in the first place.
Or – again – maybe it’s a great idea. Maybe it will really lead to “economic growth by generating revenue and jobs and could be exported to places struggling with this very same challenge.” Maybe it’s really “the kind of creative thinking” Vermont needs.
But what happened to that conventional, cautious Republican who mostly wants to hold down taxes? He seems to be morphing into the daring trendsetter in search of the latest Big Idea.
Meanwhile, the stodgy Democrats just want to raise the minimum wage. Nothing new or innovative about that. It’s been around forever.
