The Freeps is opining on a small piece of the governor’s and the legislature’s cuts to a specific state program, the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. To wits:
There is no question
about Vermont's need for more housing. By working with nonprofit agencies and
leveraging state money for additional federal and private funds to build or
rehab housing, VHCB's work helps to create jobs in construction when the
industry is struggling, while increasing the stock of affordable housing.
This is a wonderful sentiment, if, by mentioning VHCB’s “work”, the Freeps has determined that tax dollars (harvested from personal and corporate income) are appropriately used to help preserve jobs as determined by an unelected government entity. I would rather not see our state fund yet another questionable program when Vermont is already strapped for cash.
Vermont needs better roads, too, so why shouldn’t those tax dollars be spent on road-building, which will provide jobs, which subsequently provide income for those seeking a rental home or private property? It’s easy to create your own set of cause and effect rationales, isn’t it – and in this alternate scenario, we get a public good, not a private one that benefits a more limited constituency.
Vermont’s permitting process also makes new housing development construction a long, expensive process –which acts as a high barrier to new housing ever being built. Our job growth rate reflects this barrier, and if the job growth rate were higher (or at least a positive number), you’d see more houses being built in Vermont.
Lastly, VHCB’s conservation piece mentioned in the Freeps hardly has the farmers’ best interests in mind, since farmers cannot sell their land for what it might fetch in the open market if the land must be “preserved” as some kind of farming Mecca for future tourist visits:
The conservation
portion of the board's work helps make it economically feasible for many of
Vermont's family farms to be passed on to the next generation while providing a
nest egg for retiring farmers.
But it gets
worse. VHCB’s website claims:
The purchase of conservation easements on
farmland preserves Vermont's working landscape--the open farm fields, woodlands
and farmsteads that comprise the third largest sector in the state's economy
and help attract the visitors that make tourism the largest sector. Because of
the Board's investment in conservation easements, some of Vermont's most
productive farmland will remain undeveloped and available for farming in the
future.
In other words, “available for farming” means “perennially unoccupied land”, since I’ll bet the farm that droves of people are not moving to Vermont to work 14-hour days every single day of the year to bask in the glory of their preserved land. VHCB is actively stating that tourism is one of our biggest revenue sources – as if this is an ideal goal for Vermonters. I know how well-paying those tourist attraction jobs are, and so do Vermonters. A tourist trade does not a vibrant economy make, no matter how much the VHCB supporters want to drive past tidy, picturesque farms on their way to a condo ski weekend in Stowe.
Unmentioned in the article is how reliant the dairy industry in Vermont is on federal subsidies to maintain a viable price for milk – which is simply a tax in another form. So we’re taxed when we consume a dairy product to help prop up pricing on milk to maintain the industry, and then taxed to pay to preserve the industry by making sure farmland is not developed for any other viable commercial use.
Is there a Milk Party in our future?
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