Lessons from New Zealand

Over the last year or so, we’ve written about transportation, education, telecommunications, railways, bus services, agriculture, and much more. In all these areas we’ve offered criticism and policy proposals while wistfully hoping that someday even a few of our ideas would reach fruition. It's difficult to imagine what would happen if the entire  pro-free-market, minimalist government agenda were ever adopted in wholesale. Well, as it turns out, New Zealand did exactly that – not our ideas per se; rather, ideas that we’ve advocated for Vermont. Here’s a teaser of what happened,

"We achieved an overall reduction of 66 percent in the size of government, measured by the number of employees. The government’s share of GDP dropped from 44 to 27 percent. We were now running surpluses, and we established a policy never to leave dollars on the table: We knew that if we didn’t get rid of this money, some clown would spend it. So we used most of the surplus to pay off debt, and debt went from 63 percent down to 17 percent of GDP. We used the remainder of the surplus each year for tax relief. We reduced income tax rates by half and eliminated incidental taxes. As a result of these policies, revenue increased by 20 percent. Yes, Ronald Reagan was right: lower tax rates do produce more revenue."

Read the whole thing… you’re sure to like their solution for fixing education.

Comments

[GreggB]

Blah- what about my RIGHT to lifelong public employment- I have a college degree you know.

[Jack Harding]

Memo:

To: Kevin Dorn and Mike Quinn
FM: The Citizens of Vermont

Kindly print a copy of the enclosed speech in this posting and place it on Governor's desk.

Place a sticky on it marked, "How to lead in the face of inevitable finacial disaster".

Then, schedule a meeting and tell him what you both already know: there is nothing you are doing that will attract companies and jobs to this state. It may not be your faults, but the outcome will be the same.

[Gordon Smith]

Hello Mr. Harding - I once worked as an applications engineer for a formerly-large ATE firm based in the Silicon Valley, and have worked on projects for E-Silicon. I can think of many reasons, but I would find it interesting for you to tell on these pages why your company, being fabless, could not or would not set up shop in Vermont. Yours (I think) is not a particularly capital intensive business, other than computing power needed for design simulations and the like. So the material to run your business would be available. Other than proximity to major customers, what else might there be? It would be very interesting to know. Thank you.