Last week state Auditor Doug Hoffer outlined a strategy that he says could save as much as $16.3 million each year just for the state employee health plan. And even more savings would be possible in teacher health care.

Once again it’s Christmas time, and it’s worth thinking for a minute about what’s good in this troubled world. Here’s my short list of worthwhile and completely non-political organizations that I contribute to this time of year.

Last Friday’s paper brought the news that the Mid Vermont Christian School, in Quechee, had filed a lawsuit against the state Agency of Education, which had ruled that the school could not participate in future basketball tournaments, or accept students from tuition towns. Why not? Because the Christian school said it was simply unfair that schools that competed with it in basketball were using transgendered boys on their girls’ teams.

The Public Utility Commission has been charged  with designing and implementing the Clean Heat ^Standard bill passed last session, over Gov. Scott’s veto. This measure is designed to raise the cost of heating oil, natural gas, propane and kerosene , supposedly to defeat the menace of climate change, The PUC wants people to pay a fee to the PUC so the PUC can raise the prices of their heating fuel, which doesn’t sound like a very attractive proposition to me.

One of the alarming crime statistics to emerge recently is car thefts. According to an analysis of federal crime data in major cities by the Council on Criminal Justice, there has been a 67% Increase in motor-vehicle thefts between 2019 and 2022.

Thirty years ago I spent four days in the small Baltic nation of Estonia, attending a liberty conference. In the Soviet era (1940-1991) communist apparatchiks appointed in Moscow ruled the three Baltic countries as sham Soviet “republics”. The enterprising Estonians were shackled, and by 1946 more than one-quarter of the population had been deported to a Siberian Gulag, or executed, or had fled the country.

Two new reports on Vermont’s Renewable Energy Standard, one by the Department of Public Service and Sustainable Energy Advantage and the other by an organization called Brattle, confirm what we’ve been pointing out for a long time – Vermont’s so called green energy mandates are all cost and no benefit for the Vermonters who get stuck paying the bills. And those costs are huge.

Last week the Vermont Departments of Health and Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living (DAIL) released a comprehensive document, produced by a wide range of state officials, nonprofit organization employees, and volunteers. It’s titled Age Strong VT: Our Road Map for an Age Friendly State. (Read it at www.healthyvermont.gov/agestrongvt).

Last week WCAX featured Stand Your Ground Vermont , a citizen gathering in Rutland to battle street crime, with the city police down three officers and the prosecutors complaining how their hands are tied. This is a very encouraging report.  I hope it leads to a Rutland Guardian Angels group.

From The Dispatch news service November 6:

"Late last month, a man killed 18 people and injured 13 others in Lewiston, Maine. A common refrain in the wake of such tragedies is that “no one saw it coming,” but that’s typically not entirely true. Killers often have mental health issues and have threatened violence in the past, and this case was no different. The killer was an Army reservist, and the military had determined that he should not have access to a weapon or ammunition. An Army colleague had alerted the local police, who contacted the family but did little else…."