[T]he Statehouse is abuzz with talk about whether the Legislature will finish its work by Friday night.
The state is not. Normal people do not and should not care when legislative sessions end. Normal people have work to do, children to raise, lawns to mow, ball games and TV shows to watch, and all that jazz.
Still, as the session heads (gropes, hurls, lurches … choose your own verb) toward its conclusion, even normal people do pay some heed, if only because of all the shouting.
Heed should be paid. Some of what the Legislature does affects normal people’s lives.
Just not the way that — or as much as — the shouting suggests.
With a Republican governor and a Democratic-controlled Legislature, a certain amount of partisan rancor is inevitable, and of course the rancor gets ranker as the session nears its end.
But normal people might bear in mind that:
— What is happening in Montpelier right now is politics as usual;
— Whatever happens will matter, but it will be neither disastrous nor wonderful. Either way, life will go on.
“Politics as usual” is often used as an insult. It shouldn’t be. Politics is the mechanism by which free people govern themselves, and when that mechanism operates “as usual” it’s working. Elected and appointed officials represent opposing interests and have conflicting points of view. They argue. Sometimes they get snippy with one another or even downright obnoxious because they think obnoxious snippiness is effective. Or because they like it. It’s not always pretty to look at. It’s democracy.
As the end grows nearer and the rhetoric grows hotter, each side exaggerates how much good its proposals would do and how much harm would come should the other guys prevail.
None of this need be taken too seriously.
Thus on Tuesday the House passed a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15. The higher wage will enable low-income people “to meet their family’s basic needs,” said Rep. Sarah Copeland Hanzas, D-Bradford. No, it will raise prices, damaging “the purchasing power of low-income Vermonters,” said Rep. Heidi Scheuermann, R-Stowe.
Maybe a little of both or a little of either. To attract enough votes for House passage, the bill was watered down enough to limit its benefit to low-income workers. And the price-raising, business-harming, impact of raising the minimum wage is merely stated, not supported by evidence.
Much the same is true of the big squabble, the one about school spending now and in the near future, the one that might bring the lawmakers back to the Statehouse next week or even force a special session in June.
Scott wants to take a budget surplus and some other “one-time money” and transfer $58 million to the education fund to avoid any increase at all in the statewide school property tax.
Senate President Pro Tem Tim Ashe, House Speaker Mitzi Johnson and other Democratic leaders think that money would be better spent elsewhere, such as paying off some of the state’s pension fund backlog.
Unlike many of the fantasy adventure films now at your local theater, this is not a battle between the forces of wisdom and virtue on one side and the forces of evil and ignorance on the other. There is a case to be for either option. All else being equal (it never is) avoiding a tax increase is a good idea. The tax increase Scott wants to avoid would be five cents per $100 of a home’s assessed value.
For a $200,000 house (the median home value in Vermont is $199,336, according to the Zillow realty firm) that would increase taxes by $100 a year, or $8.33 a month for those who add their taxes to their mortgage payments.
And that’s just for the 30 percent or so of homeowners whose taxes are based only on their home values. For the other 70 percent, the cost would be lower. A doctorate in economics is not required here to see that the socio-economic impact of a tax increase of this magnitude would fall somewhere on the spectrum between non-existent and inconsequential.
But then it wouldn’t be a tragedy if Vermont didn’t pay down some of its pension arrears, either. They exist because the state chintzed on its pension payment obligations in the past. A mistake, but a common mistake. Chintzing on pension payments is as American as apple (or pizza) pie, which is why almost all the states did it. Paying more of it sooner rather than later would save the money. But the state, the taxpayers, and the pension plans will survive either way.
The other half of the school spending dispute stems from Scott’s determination to set a firm (and arbitrary) public school student-to-staff ratio and then penalize districts (meaning their taxpayers) which do not meet that ratio goal.
Like any public policy proposal, that one can be defended. There’s no doubt that Vermont has one of the lowest student-to-staff ratios in the country, which is expensive. Bipartisan majorities have approved legislation designed to encourage local school districts to consolidate, streamline, and otherwise hold down spending.
The problem is that for the last two weeks the Scott administration has put forth this policy proposal with all the finesse of a safecracker plying his trade while wearing a catcher’s mitt.
No, not the business about how, for the second time in two years Scott waited until late in the session to demand major changes in education spending. He did, but that’s Statehouse talk, no more interesting to normal people than the Legislature’s adjournment date.
Normal people do tend to admire minimal competence, which the governor and his senior officials have not been demonstrating. First, administration officials outlined a proposal that they insisted was “not a proposal.” Then, as this week began, they brought forth statistics that had problems statistics should not have: bad arithmetic, sloppy assumptions, double-counting.
OK, nobody’s perfect. But right now the administration’s plan to hold down future education costs does not really meet the definition of a plan. It’s more like an idea, one whose time has not come.
