Go Lean…Caribbean

Go Lean Commentary

“We need more people” – News Article conclusion below.

Economics is a complex social science. But it all boils now to advanced variations of this simple law:

Supply and demand

Whether it’s a product, service or population, there must be a good measure of supply and demand for eco-systems to work. When either side of the equation becomes dysfunctional, the supply or the demand, the stewards of the eco-system (company leaders or community leaders) must effect change in either the supply-side or demand-side, or both.

This is the actuality of the US State of Vermont today. They need more people! They need more supply and more demand. ‘Things’ are bad now, but will get even worse going forward if there are no mitigations to the current trends.

• Vermont’s aging population … the median age nationally has increased by almost five years to 37.8 while Vermont’s has increased by 10 years
• rapidly shrinking tax base
• 16,000 fewer workers [now] than [they had] in 2009
• “Must think outside the box …”

So that State is willing to pay $10,000 to people to move into the State.

Wait, what?

See the full news article and related VIDEO here:

Title: Vermont will pay you $10,000 to move there and work from home
By: Abigail Hess

Considering leaving the big city behind in favor of somewhere scenic? Now could be the right time.

On Wednesday, Quartz reports, Vermont Governor Phil Scott signed a bill into law that will pay people $10,000 if they move to Vermont and work remotely for an employer out of state. The Remote Worker Grant Program will take effect on January 1, 2019, and will help cover moving, living and working expenses. Grants can be used for relocation, computer software and hardware, broadband internet and access to a co-working space.

Currently, Vermont has budgeted funds to support 100 grants for the first three years and 20 additional workers each year from then on. Grant recipients will receive $10,000 over two years that will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis.

This policy is intended to address Vermont’s aging population. While the state may be rich in beautiful landscapes and maple syrup, it has a rapidly shrinking tax base.

“Vermont continues to age, and age faster than the nation as a whole,” writes Art Woolf for the Burlington Free Press. “Over the past quarter of a century, the median age nationally has increased by almost five years to 37.8 while Vermont’s has increased by 10 years.”

This trend has made Vermont one of the oldest states in the nation.

In addition to the remote worker grant program, the bill also launches the state’s Stay-to-Stay initiative. The program, aimed at convincing the state’s 13 million annual tourists to permanently relocate to Vermont, will be organized by the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing and will connect visitors with local employers, entrepreneurs, community leaders and potential neighbors.

“We have about 16,000 fewer workers than we did in 2009. That’s why expanding our workforce is one of the top priorities of my administration,” Scott said in a statement. “We must think outside the box to help more Vermonters enter the labor force and attract more working families and young professionals to Vermont. That’s exactly what the Department of Tourism and Marketing did with this program for out-of-state visitors who may be interested in living full-time in Vermont, and I’m excited to see it move forward.”

The initiative will take place over four weekends and will be piloted in three communities. One of those selected communities is Brattleboro, Vermont. “The one thing we need more of in Vermont is people,” says Adam Grinold, executive director of the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation. “We need more visitors, we need more employees, we need more business owners. We need more people.”

Source: CNBC Consumer & Business News – posted May 31, 2018; retrieved June 27, 2018 from: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/31/vermont-will-pay-you-10000-to-move-there-and-work-from-home.html

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VIDEO – Move to Vermont, make $10,000 –  https://youtu.be/Q5Pum5HfNkQ

Published on Jun 1, 2018 – Fox Business News’ Tracee Carrasco on a new bill signed in Vermont allowing the state to offer $10,000 to those who move there and work remotely for out-of-state employers.

• Category: News and Politics
• License: Standard YouTube License

Vermont has a problem and they are willing to throw money at it for resolution. This just might work! Another observed-and-confirmed principle in Economics is that:

People Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways

Think about the viability for Vermont. There are candidate individuals (and families) out there. These ones do work from home and can reside/live anywhere. Why not do it – reside – in Vermont and work from Vermont? Especially if “someone” will pay for it. These candidates have to live somewhere:

… an entity will pay you $10,000 to do something – Reside –  that you would otherwise have to do for free, or pay for!

This challenge for Vermont parallels with challenges for the Caribbean homeland. This commentary continues the series on Time to Go back to the Caribbean homeland as residents. In this instance, we are considering the reality for life in communities that constantly lose their population. Things will go from bad to worse. Considering the assessment of our Caribbean member-states:

Oops, too late! We are already Failing!
(See Appendix F below for references to Failed-State Indices for Caribbean member-states)

We have lost, and will continue to lose, so many of our professional population – one report measured the abandonment rate at 70 percent. Something must be done! Solutions must be sought!

This is commentary Number 11 in this series from the movement behind the book Go Lean … Caribbean which started in September 2016 with the first 6 issues. Now, this commentary, examines the actuality of an American State trying to recruit “good” people away from their current abodes. This is something we must be conscious of. Our advocacy is simple:

• Our Caribbean Diaspora need to plan to repatriate to the region – we need them back!
• While our young people, in the homeland, many times set their sights on foreign (American) shores – we need to dissuade this.

So, is this a competition? Are we trying to recruit people to come to the Caribbean instead of going to Vermont?

Ready or not, we have a battle on our hands.

The Go Lean book – available to download for free – serves as a roadmap for the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The book specifically states (Page 49):

Who are our competitors and how do we stack up against them?

Considering the customers of the CU (citizens, governments, business community, Diaspora, visitors, bank depositors, investors, monitors, NGOs), who else will be competing for their attention? From the Trade Federation perspective, this “attention” includes their time, talents, and their treasuries. Even as basic as the citizens of the region, though we’d like to think that we have a captive audience, the truth of the matter is that other role-players are campaigning to the same marketplace and audience. Consider the aspect of media: Caribbean citizens can listen to radio, watch television and read newspapers/magazines from anywhere around the world. Also, consider the City of Miami – Florida; they brand themselves as the “gateway to the Americas”. So they would rather provide most of the services – for profit – that the CU intends to provide for its citizens.

The world is flat … and as such, all societies are now competitors for the resources of Caribbean society. …

(The US State of Kansas is also incentivizing people to move there. See here: https://youtu.be/d7Gj1wDfKFM)

Vermont is cold … in the winter months! The same as Canada, the UK and Europe; they are all cold-weather locations during the winter season, yet the Caribbean has lost large numbers to those countries – our Diaspora. Weather is therefore nullified as a competitive disadvantage; it’s all about economics … and security … and governance. See more here:

• 10 Things We Want from Canada & 10 Things We Do Not Want from Canada
• 10 Things We Want from the UK & 10 Things We Do Not Want from the UK
• 10 Things We Want from Europe & 10 Things We Do Not Want from Europe

The Go Lean roadmap posits that the Caribbean region is in crisis now, and so many are quick to flee for refuge in foreign countries. But the “grass is not necessarily greener on the other side”. Those destinations need our “new blood” the same as we need our people to remain. But in those countries, racial disparities continue to present challenges for new immigrants, especially those of Black-and-Brown characteristics. It is therefore easier and better for all stakeholders, that our people remain in the homeland; plus for those that have departed, that they would repatriate to the homeland.

But words alone will not suffice, we must also compete.

No, we do not need to give $10,000 to each individual. But we do need to invest … in our people and our infrastructure! We must give the effort to reform and transform our societies. We do have defects; we do have inadequacies; we are flirting with a Failed-State status. So we have heavy-lifting to do! The Go Lean/CU roadmap is designed for that heavy-lifting … to optimize Caribbean society through economic, security and governing empowerments. The Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives for optimizing our societal engines:

• Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
• Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
• Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

This is the conclusion (for now) on this series of commentaries on this theme Time to Go! There are 11 in total, starting in September 2016; those 6 submissions were as follows:

1. Time to Go: Spot-on for Protest
2. Time to Go: No Respect for our Hair
3. Time to Go: Logic of Senior Immigration
4. Time to Go: Marginalizing Our Vote
5. Time to Go: American Vices; Don’t Follow
6. Time to Go: Public Schools for Black-and-Brown

Now, we consider these 5 new entries along that same theme:

7. Time to Go: Windrush – 70th Anniversary
8. Time to Go: Mandatory Guns – Say it Ain’t So
9. Time to Go: Racist History of Loitering
10. Time to Go: Blacks Get Longer Sentences From ‘Republican’ Judges
11. Time to Go: States must have Population Increases

All of these commentaries relate to Caribbean people and their disposition in foreign lands and why they need to Go Back Home. Communities need their populations to grow! Our Caribbean member-states need our populations to grow. So many macro-economic programs – pensions, unemployment insurance, etc. – need gradual increases to remain solvent!

This subject is a familiar theme for this Go Lean commentary. This movement has consistently related the economic realities from societal abandonment. Less is not more! Consider these prior submissions:

To Caribbean people: do not move to Vermont. While they are good people there – they are a great role model to emulate in terms of Green Energy initiative – it is not home. The Black-and-Brown of the Caribbean may forever be a minority there as their demographics feature 90.5% Non-Hispanic White with only 1.2% Black, 2.3% Hispanic and 2.7% Asian. This is still America; a society not built for the Caribbean’s Black-and-Brown. It is a dangerous proposition to be Black in America.

But to better compete, we must still “take care of our business” at home. The Go Lean book identifies the reasons why people abandon their homeland as “push and pull”. While the “push” refers to the societal defects that people take refuge from, the “pull” is mostly due to messaging. Our people perceive that the US is better for them, and that landing in the US will assuage all societal short-comings.

This is far from the truth. And it’s cold … in the winter!

You see! Good messaging will help mitigate our societal abandonment rate.

The Go Lean book asserts that it is easier for the Black-and-Brown populations in the Caribbean to prosper where planted in the Caribbean, rather than in Vermont or any American State, or Canada or Europe.

We need our Caribbean people to remain in the homeland, and they need to Stay Home! This is the quest of the Go Lean/CU roadmap. The book presents 370 pages of instructions for how to reform and transform our Caribbean member-states. It stresses the key community ethos that needs to be adopted, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies necessary to optimize the societal engines in a community.

No doubt, it is Time to Go! We urge all Caribbean stakeholder, in the homeland and in the Diaspora to lean-in to this Go Lean/CU roadmap. This is our quest to reform and transform our society and make it better to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the free e-Book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

Sign the petition to lean-in for this roadmap for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation.

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APPENDIX F – CU Indicators & Definitions

The Bottom Line on the Failed States Index  – Go Lean … Caribbean (Page 134)
The Failed States Index (Appendix F) is an annual ranking of 177 nations based on their levels of stability and capacity. The Index is compiled by the Fund for Peace Institute, an independent, nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) non-profit research and educational organization, based in Washington DC, that works to prevent violent conflict and promote sustainable security. As a leader in the conflict assessment and early warning field, the Fund for Peace focuses on the problems of weak and failing states. The strength of the Failed States Index is its ability to distill millions of pieces of information into a form that is relevant as well as easily digestible and informative, as an indicator code.

Each Indicator is rated on a 1 to 10 scale with 1 (low) being the most stable and 10 (high) being the most at-risk of collapse and violence. Think of it as trying to bring down a fever, with high being dangerous, low being acceptable. An obvious example, consider Somalia, the state’s complete inability to provide public services for its citizens would warrant a score of 10 for the Public Service indicator. Conversely, Sweden’s extensive provision of health, education & other public services would produce a 1 or 2 for that indicator. – Fund For Peace®

Source: Appendix F of Go Lean … Caribbean (Pages 271 – 272)

For the Caribbean Failed-State rankings, some states are too small for consideration (i.e. Antigua, St. Kitts, etc.) and the Overseas Territories (Aruba, St. Martin, etc.) are not considered due to the fact that their legacy countries are ranked. The rankings for 2012 are as following:

Failing Indicator:

REF – Massive Movement of Refugees or IDPs
Forced uprooting of large communities as a result of random or targeted violence and/or repression, causing food shortages, disease, lack of clean water, land competition, and turmoil that can spiral into larger humanitarian and security problems, both within and between countries. This indicator refers to refugees leaving or entering a country.
This indicator include pressures and measures related to: Displacement, Refugee Camps, IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) Camps, Disease Related to Displacement, Refugees per capita, and IDPs per capita.

HF – Chronic and Sustained Human Flight and Brain Drain
When there is little opportunity, people migrate, leaving a vacuum of human capital. Those with resources often leave before, or just as, conflict erupts. This “brain drain” of professionals, intellectuals and political dissidents fearing persecution or repression is an indicating of the failing status of a state. Other features are voluntary emigration of “the middle class”, particularly economically productive segments of the population, such as entrepreneurs, businesspeople, artisans and traders, due to economic deterioration. The end result is the growth of exile communities and Diasporas.
This indicator include pressures and measures related to: Migration per capita, Human Capital, and Emigration of Educated Population