A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Vermont legislature’s struggle with finding a path toward universal health care in this year’s session. In other states, the lawmakers must have more time on their hands than they do here in the Green Mountain State. In Wisconsin’s legislative session, an effort to allow citizens to kill feral cats was defeated while in Florida an effort to allow citizens to kill each other was passed into law.

Wisconsin’s Proposition 62 called for the issuance of small-game licenses to people who want to take aim at the state’s estimated population of 1.4 million feral cats, which are alleged to kill 7.8 million songbirds each year, for an average of one songbird per feral cat, every nine and a half weeks. If the Wisconsin wannabe cat killers would have us believe their feline bloodlust is motivated by deep affection for our warbling friends, they need better talking points.
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The national news media has not paid attention to it, but the Vermont Legislature has spent the winter and spring debating the merits of universal health care.

It’s a debate worth having. Vermonters spend $3.5 billion on health care each year, about $5,700 for every man, woman and child, sick or healthy. Those costs are rising at the rate of $350 million per year – almost a million dollars a day for the state as a whole or $550 per person, per year. Our Medicaid deficit for next year is projected to be $80 million. The worst part about this is that one-quarter to one-third of this money is spent on administration – red tape that makes no one healthier.

Someone has to pay for that. Employers find their overhead costs rising, employees have less take-home pay as they are asked (or forced) to pay for a share (or larger share) of their health care costs, taxes go up to pay for school and municipal employees’ rising premiums and the cost of every Vermont-made product – from ice cream to computer chips to ski lift passes – goes up.
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April is usually an unpleasant month in Vermont – cold, gray, muddy. This year (so far) it has been anomalously warm, sunny and dry. I took advantage of the weather to bicycle along the lakeshore Sunday afternoon, slowly picking my way along the crowded recreation path. Frisbees and soccer balls flew through the air; children and dogs scurried away from those attempting to control them. From a radio, Elton John sang, “… you can’t plant me in your penthouse, I’m going back to my plow…”

I passed the Coast Guard station and noticed the black POW-MIA flag snapping in the wind among the various jacks and ensigns. This is the 30th April since the fall of Saigon. The black flag flies at the Coast Guard station, the post office, the police and fire departments and the VFW and American Legion posts here in Burlington. It flies from thousands of flagpoles across the country. When will we decide to stop flying POW-MIA flags? What will it mean when we do?
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There’s an old joke about a mountain guide who tells his climbing party: “Watch your step on this ledge, if you slip you’ll fall 400 feet. If you do slip, however, look to your right, you’ll never see a view like that again in your life.”

We are all of us stepping along a ledge just below the summit of Hubbert’s Peak and regardless of how we step, there is no easy way down. Hubbert’s Peak is named for M. King Hubbert, a petro-geologist who showed that production from any given oil well can be plotted on a parabolic curve. The peak of the curve – the halfway point – is reached simultaneously with maximum production. Expanding his equation, Mr. Hubbert predicted in 1956 that U.S. oil reserves would reach maximum production – and be halfway to depletion – in the early 1970s. Many in the oil business laughed, but Mr. Hubbert was right and U.S. production peaked between 1970 and 1972.
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