The Dead Keeping Vermont Alive
By James Ehlers

Usually people are saddened when they hear of another’s passing. Not here. We celebrate. Not openly, of course. That is tacky. We disguise our glee with a few token words of feigned sorrow, but, hey, $13 million is $13 million. And $13 million is the sum that landed in politicians’ laps recently just when they could not agree how to keep our state fiscally alive due to a lack of funds and an unwillingness to slow spending. Plugging a budget hole, it seems, is just the tonic for coping with the loss of a fellow Vermonter. 

Now, reliance on the estate tax receipts of the super wealthy as we did this year is not the first way I would approach bolstering Vermont’s viability. I am a believer, however, in making lemonade when presented with a basket of lemons and without the time necessary for zesting fresh Bundt cake ingredients. Can you taste the lemon sauce, followed by a mouthful of cold Vermont milk? Pasteurized, for me, please. 

All this talk of death and dairy and lemons and budgets got me to thinking, though. Perhaps the assisted suicide lobby and the government-run healthcare lobby in Montpelier might be on to something. 

Since we are not resolute in our determination to keep Vermont viable following traditional economic models—fostering a business-friendly climate, authoring tax codes that attract private investment, appropriately funding and maintaining environmental and transportation infrastructures, writing sustainable budgets based on actual revenues, and the like—we could guarantee windfalls so commonplace that the associated money trees would no longer be felled by the acts of God, like natural death, but by government. Ironic, I think, given the etymology of the word, itself. With a political majority that seems to be warm to the idea of turning our care and death over to the government, you can see the pleasant possibilities presented for budget- makers. With a government overseeing our life and death, no more budget issues. No money in the budget. No more care. More death. More money. Kind of tidy, actually. No time needed for zesting lemons, either, as who needs lemon Bundt cake to experience a bit of sourness with this economic plan. 

With $67 million in unfunded liabilities identified in the 2011 budget and another $140 million in the 2012 budget, we don’t have a lot of time to wait around hoping Vermonters worth more than $75 million die all on their own to generate big tax dollars. A special session of the legislature seems to be in order. We need some serious wind, now. Matters this important surely cannot be left to God. They need to set to discerning how the younger folks will have any opportunity to amass the kind of wealth necessary to ensure that when they fall, the state prospers. 

Personally, I prefer traditional methods of economic development, like nurturing an atmosphere conducive to private sector job and career opportunity creation, rather than relying on fallen, fellow Vermonters. I realize this puts me in the minority, but for now the wind has stopped, and we still have a $160 million deficit in the Unemployment Trust Fund. Can’t imagine those expecting benefits can be worth much to the budget-makers dead. After all, they are unemployed. 

James Ehlers is the publisher emeritus of Elk Publishing, Inc. and the founder of Livin’ Magazine.