Yes, Burton has moved most of its operation to Austria. The nearly unanimous media chorus has echoed the line from everyone in the Douglas administration near a microphone; Vermont is just not a friendly place to do business. Not as compared to Austria, apparently.
So what can be done about that? Here’s Margolis:
To become more like Austria, Vermont needs:
(1) Higher taxes;
(2) stronger labor unions, probably meaning higher wages;
(3) Five weeks of paid vacation for almost everyone, said Renezeder, because “unions play a very important role in our economy and we do have very strong social rights;”
(4) An energy system that gets almost two thirds of its electricity from hydropower, wind, solar, and biomass, and none at all from nuclear reactors, which are against the law for generating electricity.
Since they’d never just parrot administration rhetoric in the face of all reason, I have no doubt our crack legacy journalist corps has already pointed all this out in the coverage… hmm… must be in here somewhere…
So what do you think? How can we make Vermont as business friendly as Austria?
You — or maybe Margolis, I haven’t read his take beyond these quotes — forgot one major issue: government-provided healthcare. Burton-Austria has no burden of finding and paying for private health insurance for its Austrian workers; the state takes care of that.
NanuqFC
Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have. ~ Winston Churchill
and is often excellent. File this piece under the latter.
We can either choose to be a country that takes care of workers, or we can pollute, build schools that collapse on schoolchildren, put people in black prisons, have a one (or one and a half) party state, and keep inconvenient truths (like the cost of war or pollution) off the books.