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Who exactly has it pretty good in Vermont? The state employees whose guaranteed high salaries come out of state tax revenues maybe? Anybody else?
We have a permanent welfare class and a class of working poor who see no other way to stretch their meager income than to buy questionable goods from dollar stores and we have it pretty good?
I've joked a few times about the VT economy being based on welfare, yard sales, and drug deals but these days it's with a hollow laugh. The money that gets spent in dollar stores and ultimately yields wealth to the store owners and to a lesser extent the suppliers (meanwhile creating yet more Mcjobs that don't pay a living wage) has to come from somewhere. Where is that money coming from? Taxes which go to support the welfare recipients? Wages earned by being a $7/hr cashier at a convenience store selling fuel, cigarettes and junk food or a $10/hr ski lift operator at a ski resort that the employee would not be able to afford a ski ticket for?
Housing prices are still dropping and sales are down while the rest of the country is seeing a recovery. I'm not seeing anything good about the VT economy.
Vermont is almost off the grid with respect to the rest of the country. It's like Wyoming, but with less natural resources and more history. In some ways it's good that there are a lot of low income people here, because that balances out the delusion most Americans have that they live in the Promised Land, a shining city on a hill, blah, blah, blah. Vermont survived the Great Recession much better than most states because it had less skin in the game in the casino mentality that dominates elsewhere. Not only are you less likely to get rich here, but you're also less likely to go broke if you know what you're doing. I'm fine with the local economy the way it is, but if you'd rather "grow the economy," I'm sure you can find plenty of support for that too. However, if the population quadruples, they run an Interstate down the Champlain Valley, etc., I'm leaving. Some of the suburbs of Burlington are already pretty bad.
Adult expression and development, resilience and authentic meaning vs. a life--a "life worth living" (!!) according to Logs 'n' Dogs--scraping together pennies to buy foreign-made plastic Halloween crap at the Dollar Store.
I'm not content to just shrug my shoulders and say "it's all good" because it isn't.
Farm-to-plate is not a mere adjunct to a "core economy"; it IS the economy: the only economy that makes any sense pursuing at all. I feel as though most people are continuing to follow the Pied Piper of "growth" even when it no longer makes any rational sense to do so and has become a "build-it-and-they-will-come" sort of cargo cult*.
One reason we moved to Vermont when we did was to escape this plague of trash. I think one of Vermont's greatest assets are people who actively fight this stuff. Its a slippery and short slope from the single Dollar General to Trenton New Jersey
VT is already NJ... Don't know if you live in Chittenden County, but we have tons of NJ residents and they've brought their attitude with them.
VT is not a theme park. Some people actually live here, were born here and didn't escape anything.
Adult expression and development, resilience and authentic meaning vs. a life--a "life worth living" (!!) according to Logs 'n' Dogs--scraping together pennies to buy foreign-made plastic Halloween crap at the Dollar Store.
I'm not content to just shrug my shoulders and say "it's all good" because it isn't.
Farm-to-plate is not a mere adjunct to a "core economy"; it IS the economy: the only economy that makes any sense pursuing at all. I feel as though most people are continuing to follow the Pied Piper of "growth" even when it no longer makes any rational sense to do so and has become a "build-it-and-they-will-come" sort of cargo cult*.
By the way, if you are trying to portray me as a real supporter of everyone buying plastic seasonal crap I think you need to re-read things.
A localized economy is a nice idea, in theory. I would love to hear a plan on how to get from 2012 America or even Vermont to that utopian idea.
In the current state of affairs and for the foreseeable future I maintain the whole farm to plate is a side salad to a core economy. Vermont isn't going to pay the bills with maple syrup a few cows and short a growing season. I believe most major industries in Vermont (except tourism) have taken a major hit over the past several decades......honestly, I'm curious how people think we can take a state/country/planet and just do an about face from a globalized consumption machine to a "localized economy".
For the sake of discussion, can someone please define the parameters of "localized economy" being referred to? Are we talking pre industrial revolution subsistence lifestyle or are you talking about one in which a substatial % of items consumed (both food and non-food) are produced within a relatively short distance (ie. not Hong Kong)?
By the way, if you are trying to portray me as a real supporter of everyone buying plastic seasonal crap I think you need to re-read things.
A localized economy is a nice idea, in theory. I would love to hear a plan on how to get from 2012 America or even Vermont to that utopian idea.
In the current state of affairs and for the foreseeable future I maintain the whole farm to plate is a side salad to a core economy. Vermont isn't going to pay the bills with maple syrup a few cows and short a growing season. I believe most major industries in Vermont (except tourism) have taken a major hit over the past several decades......honestly, I'm curious how people think we can take a state/country/planet and just do an about face from a globalized consumption machine to a "localized economy".
For the sake of discussion, can someone please define the parameters of "localized economy" being referred to? Are we talking pre industrial revolution subsistence lifestyle or are you talking about one in which a substatial % of items consumed (both food and non-food) are produced within a relatively short distance (ie. not Hong Kong)?
We're going to do an about face to a localized economy globally no matter what any economist or businessman wants. Peak oil will do it. The modern global economy is as doomed as our domestic oil reserves.
I think the key in VT is to make the state affordable again. To do that we need to get away from the tourism business, as it only attracts wealthy sorts who drive up real estate prices. We need to eliminate property taxes on homes and most land. We need to focus our energy and resources on our agricultural and forestry sectors. Not just farm to table, but produce new products from wood, use wood energy, etc., so people can actually make a living off it.
To be perfectly honest, the state is probably overpopulated. The population crashed (people moved out in droves) around the Civil War because the land couldn't support the population it had. Then it was relatively stable until the 1960's. I think if we encourage the suburbanized areas to sort of depopulate, emigrate to other states, what will be left is a rural state that can be largely self-sufficient without a lot of money. The Champlain Valley contains the best farmland in the state, but it's being paved over and covered in mcmansions. It's sheer idiocy really. Moreover, I'd truly love to see the states wildlife and forests truly restored: caribou, elk, martens, etc., roaming healthy forests. This could actually be quite helpful in the most rural, isolated parts of the state (elk and caribou for food, martens, wolves, etc., for furs as they are still valuable). I dread the tourism business, but a little tourism based on wildlife/nature can be somewhat healthy. I think the ski resort sort of tourism is what has destroyed this state as far as affordability.
Now how to actually do this is the real question...
OK, so now we're talking about kicking people out of the state and returning to something like a pre-industrial revolution subsistance lifestyle?
How do you figure returning Vermont to a rural state would be self sufficient?
Heck dairy farming isn't even self sufficient and is artificially supported (well not for much longer since MILC is gone).....
I do agree on your point of making things more affordable; either you increase income while expenses stay the same or you decrease expenses to become affordable on current income levels.
I'm not saying you are entirely nutts (yet :-) ) I'm just trying to understand how people think in 2012 as people are raising the IPhone generation who can't even cook for themselves let alone grow, gather or kill their food, we are going to be able to suddenly turn the bulk of them into devoted followers of Mother Earth News more interested in the weather and growing seasons than Justin Bieber.
Last edited by Logs and Dogs; 10-22-2012 at 01:32 PM..
Dairy farming can contribute to the state's self-sufficiency but we'd need more than just dairy. We need meat and grain production too. The federal money some farmers currently count on wouldn't be needed if we weren't subsidizing the mega farms of the Midwest and West. Our system is way out of whack I think, we subsidize these mega farms out West that can only exist with massive amounts of chemicals, petroleum, etc., so they can ship things thousands of miles to the consumers, rather than producing food more locally.
We had some small scale industry in the past. Textile mills, tool makers, gun makers and I've got an 1839 Tyson Furnace woodstove made in Plymouth (Tyson still appears on maps as a village though little is left but old buildings), the site of an iron foundry before the Midwest out competed it. I think we need a little manufacturing of useful items. But it should be concentrated in already developed areas.
I think most of the Iphone-technology nuts leave states like Vermont as quick as they can for the big cities. I really see no future in any of that, over the long run. The modern world is a house of cards that's going to fall apart, as I see it. It can't continue forever, so much petroleum being used, and no effective substitutes are being found. I realize I probably sound nuts to people only thinking about the next few years, but if you really take stock of the current levels of use of petroleum globally, it becomes pretty obvious the future isn't bright for the technological and industrialized world, nor for large cities, automobiles, etc.
What arctichomesteader said. Read what he/she wrote twice.
Dollar stores are a symptom of the industrialization/globalization/corporatization-and-extraction disease, and in no way any sort of cure.
Yes, we will all have to decrease expenses. I grew up in a nice middle-class suburb of southern NE, and I remember when frozen vegetables and TV dinners were big new things, and relatively expensive. As were moon landings. We just aren't going to be able to power that sort of life anymore, and there is no point in blaming the messengers.
"Growth" is a red herring, a false god whom we have been led to worship. If every MBA over the last few decades had studied thermodynamics instead, we'd be in a whole lot better shape today. "Economic Growth" as we know it can only occur in an exponentially-expanding system, whereas we live in a finite system. Several hundreds of years' worth of empires (Dutch, British, Spanish, American) inculcated us in a system which indeed expanded exponentially (as our monetary system impels it to do), but only by cheating: by sleight-of-hand: by bringing new conquered lands and resources into the system and PRETENDING that they came from within the system itself—pretending that capitalism created profitability and well-being out of nothing.
Now that there is no more easy "elsewhere" to conquer or mine for profit, the capitalist system is breaking down, as it must do, because it only has ever had one continuously-accelerating forward gear. This is not an ideological argument but a logical and factual one, an unavoidable mathematical one. You can *wish* for capitalism to work, but at some point, if no one is putting fresh oil or slaves and/or topsoil into the hopper, nothing comes out the other end anymore.
The point we are at now is that of the Pacific Islanders and their cargo cults: building radio towers out of bamboo ("enterprise centers") and expecting airplanes to come back and bring us stuff.
Arctichomesteader, the ski crowd will be greatly thinned out on its own except for the true 1-percenters.
You don't sounds crazy, it is just a different way of looking at things. Trust me I love the idea of a simpler life, heck that is why I work where I do, to afford to be where I want to be in my free time, in the woods.
I just can't fathom today's society getting from A to B.
The modern world is a house of cards that's going to fall apart, as I see it. It can't continue forever, so much petroleum being used, and no effective substitutes are being found. I realize I probably sound nuts to people only thinking about the next few years, but if you really take stock of the current levels of use of petroleum globally, it becomes pretty obvious the future isn't bright for the technological and industrialized world, nor for large cities, automobiles, etc.
I agree with most of your points here. One part of the problem is that you don't hear many politicians talking about anything negative like global warming, poverty or America's excessive consumption of energy. The situation is getting worse and nothing is being done about it. Vermont is such a small part of the picture that I don't think it's going to affect any national outcomes. Vermont's best bet is to keep the population low and conserve its resources. Let the big corporations go some place else.
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