However, his proposal for a tax revolt seems to me an emotional response to today's and tomorrow's pain. The only realistic answer to reduce taxes is to control and reduce spending.
He's right that leadership and lawmakers must 1.) understand the nature of the problem, and 2.) exert the fiscal discipline needed by making very hard choices to constrain costs, rather than raising revenue.
His citing of job data is particularly telling and I had uncovered similar data in some of my research.
His data is here:
Some of the most troubling data I've uncovered show Vermont lost 11,000 private sector jobs between 2000 and 2006: 10,000 of those from Manufacturing and about 1000 in the Information field. In its place, 20,000 jobs were added for a net job gain of 9,000.
Of the 20,000 jobs added - and it's this number that is disturbing - over half or 13,000, were either from Government employment (4,000) or from the Education & Health Services field (9,000). Of this 9,000, over half are in the employment of "social assistance".
In essence, we've replaced high paying private sector jobs with relatively low paying public assistance and government jobs. Private sector job growth has almost been non-existent; all this according to "The State of Working Vermont 2007", prepared by the Public Assets Institute.
Mine is shown below:
From 2001-2005, Vermont, at 4.5%, had by far the highest growth in government (state and local) jobs among the six New England states. In fact, three states substantially reduced the number of government jobs while we had double the growth rate in Maine and triple that in New Hampshire! These jobs are funded by our taxes and we wonder why Vermonters complain about the high cost of government!
The only realistic approach to exerting some control over our government spending is for elected officials to become very serious about no new spending. If they won't, then a new crop of quality people must be convinced to run for office who have a realistic outlook on the future financial crisis facing Vermont.
To be candid, I'm not optimistic that we can bend the trend without a crisis. Americans seem predisposed to status quo unless a problem is right in their face. On the other hand, a tax revolt could be a contrived crisis, I suppose.
Within the last decade, technology advances have made it possible to unlock more oil from old fields, and, at the same time, higher oil prices have made it economical for companies to go after reserves that are harder to reach. With plenty of oil still left in familiar locations, forecasts that the world’s reserves are drying out have given way to predictions that more oil can be found than ever before.