The pressure of the pandemic and imminent huge budget deficits require that Vermont launch a thoroughgoing Performance Review, not just to “squeeze out waste”, but to bring state government back to focusing its core functions. Barack Obama can explain to Democrats the need to tackle this task.

The pandemic lockdown is decimating small businesses, many of which will never reopen. Here are four things you can do to help your favorite local small businesses weather the storm.

A year ago VSC Chancellor issued a white paper making clear the grim future of three Vermont State Colleges: Vermont Tech, NVU-Lyndon and NVU-Johnson. Things are far worse now, with the COVID pandemic and an enormous General Fund budget shortfall. Here are four alternatives that have been proposed.

Vermonters battled their way out of the devastation of the 1927 flood.  But Vermont is now a far more expensive enterprise, that can’t be sustained when state revenues disappear. Spending $17,873 per K-12 pupil in public education is too much for next year’s taxpayers to pay, after the economic disaster of 2020. This hard fact will force us to rethink the whole question of how we educate our children

The coronavirus pandemic alerts us to the depths of our complacency over destructive viruses for which we have no treatment. There are treatments, but official medicine has driven them out of sight. Now we need to put them to the test. One benefit from the pandemic is that senseless regulations are getting brushed aside, and another is that Vermont’s civil society has stepped up to aid the afflicted.