Spend wisely, tax fairly

The governor made a compelling case in his Inaugural Address last week that Vermont needs to strengthen its education system—starting with early education and continuing right through college—in order to strengthen the economy and build a better future for all Vermonters. We’re all better off when all our children are well educated and have the skills they need to get along in the world and become productive members of society. That will help to strengthen the economy, and a stronger economy helps everyone in the state.

In that vein, he argued that Vermont was failing children of poor families, and he proposed to increase access to child care for these families to help insure that the children get a good start in life.

It was a visionary message, and it’s wise strategy for Vermont.

But then the governor lost his footing and fell back into the tired, old, manage-to-the-money mindset: We have a fixed amount of money we can spend on behalf of low-wage working Vermonters, and we think it would be better to expand child care for them than to keep their taxes down. So, he proposed to pay for the expansion of child care by raising taxes on poor, working families.

The governor made a great case for why his initiative to provide more and better child care would benefit the entire state, but instead of asking the entire state to pay for it, he proposed that working families with the lowest incomes in the state foot the bill.

Last year, the Legislature changed its approach to budgeting with adoption of People’s Budget principles. The goal, it said, should be to address Vermonters needs and improve their well-being, not simply manage to the money and match expenditures to whatever revenue happened to be available.

How the Legislature chooses to fund expanded child care has implications for other budget and tax decisions the state needs to make soon—such as highway maintenance and health care reform. We need to move away from the practice of looking in the till and divvying up the money in ways that won’t hurt the politically powerful. There is no vision in that approach. Instead, we should be developing a spending plan each year that helps to create a state that works for everybody, and then figure out the fairest way to pay for it.