Sinking Ship

Art Woolf has it right (of course he does) in his preliminary analysis of the statewide votes on school spending.  Only nine budgets defeated.  Budgets up an average of about 4% statewide.  More money for fewer students.  And the sun rising, blessedly, in the East.

Income sensitivity works just as it was designed to by inoculating many voters.  A vote for higher spending does not necessarily mean you pay correspondingly higher taxes.  The surprise, under the prevailing regime, is not that so few school budgets were defeated, but that any were.

Tuesday's votes may have gratified custodians of the status quo but they did nothing to alter the long run outlook for the state's economy.  Art Woolf has it right, here, too.  Vermont spends more than half the money raised through state and local taxation on K through 12 education and continues to spend more every year.  This is not -- to use a word sacred in the Vermont lexicon -- "sustainable."

Tuesday's outcome made things neither worse nor better in any appreciable sense.  Vermont is sinking and taking on water by the gallon.  Some Tuesday -- and rather sooner than later -- the voters who can't afford to jump ship will have to start bailing.  It won't be pretty.

Comments

[GreggB]

You guys are such pessimists the ship isn't sinking it's just becoming buoyantly challenged.