Seven Days contributing writer Kevin J. Kelley wrote this post.
A commentary in today’s Burlington Free Press offers inadvertent but persuasive proof that graduate degrees from Ivy League institutions are no guarantee against loopy thinking.
UVM business school assistant professor Allison Kingsley, who holds a master’s from Yale and a PhD from Columbia, groups Vermont with several failed states that, she claims, handcuff private business by imposing “high corporate taxes, high energy costs, arduous permitting, and extensive regulations.”
The failed states Kingsley, who earns $125,000 a year, is referring to are not Nevada, Florida or Michigan — all of which are suffering from rampant unemployment and destabilized housing markets. No, Kingsley is likening Vermont to such third-world sinkholes as Burundi, Mali and Sri Lanka.
Kingsley, who’s been mis-educating UVM students since 2010, concedes in her Freeps screed that she may be too recent an arrival in Vermont to understand how things actually work here.
For sure.
But she clearly has no clue, either, about the nature of the troubled countries that she claims are similar to Vermont.
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Having moved to Vermont recently from across the country – it has been eye opening to see the walls of regulation and red tape that plague our local businesses from being agile, growing and hiring. Sure, VT has a relatively lower unemployment rate – this is mostly a factor of our lower population density and agricultural based GDP. A number of my friends who own, and manage businesses here – even a couple mentioned by the misguided writer – have to spend considerable, internal resource and capital on burdensome regulatory governance, risk and compliance. My advice would be to collaborate with Prof Kingsley – and gain more insight rather than rush to a childish, “occupy” point of view…
Thanks! Well said!
Business is not an antidote to poverty. Red states are a testimony to that. Southern and western states are very business friendly, anti-tax and totally filled with have nots. All I am saying is a balance of business and government seems like a good thing. Also, having visited rural Vermont as well as third world countries, there is no comparison. Certainly we can improve, but we are far from the scenario you state.
I have not heard the statistic that Vermont is one of the worst states to retire in. References please? As a retiree, I have lots of peers, so I’m just wondering. Possibly the winters are daunting and I’ve given up shoveling snow. But in many ways, V. is quite supportive to elders.
Wow. Regardless of whether Prof. Kingsley’s analysis is right or wrong, Kevin Kelley’s snarky, substantive-devoid attack is the product of a jerk (vs.someone whose writing in 7D is usually good).
She’s not clueless and idiotic, but she is “too new to Vermont to know whether or how much of this is true”; she doesn’t “know enough about any of these cases to be confident in their application”; she bases her claim on “anecdotal evidence”; and the tool she uses to support her claim is “admittedly … an imperfect tool when applied to U.S. states.” It’s difficult to take her points seriously when the title of this piece could have easily been “Disclaimer.”