Facebook Under Attack

Last week I watched news reports on WCAX and WPTZ, featuring the “Facebook whistleblower” Francis Haugen. She’s the former Facebook employee who copied thousands of pages of internal documents to prove that Facebook designs its products to attract customers, whose fees pay their bills and generate lots of profit for CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Well, duh.

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Climate activists One-up Each Other in Recommendations to Climate Council

The penultimate Climate Action Plan Virtual Public Engagement Event last Thursday was full of drama, despair and even discussion of rationing to beat climate change.

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GWSA: Political Suicide Mission

For a while now, we have been reporting and commenting on how utterly unrealistic, economically irrational, logistically impossible, and downright nutty the policy prescriptions being kicked around by the Vermont Climate Council are. Turns out members of the Council and its subcommittees aren’t totally oblivious to this fact either. They are fully aware that they are setting up the elected legislators who ultimately support their recommendations for a political suicide mission.

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Commentary: A Capitalist Success Story

            Here’s a tale of two savvy young men from Vermont who hit the jackpot by selling their startup company to a larger one for $40 million. 

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Commentary: Questions for the Climate Council

As the Vermont Climate Council readies its plans to dramatically reduce Vermont’s greenhouse gas emissions, they embarked on a series of public engagement events to field questions from curious citizens. Here are some we all might consider asking.

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Guilt for Underfunded Pensions Lies with Legislature, Not Taxpayers

In testimony provided to the Pension, Benefits, Design and Funding Task Force on September 9, Paul Cillo, President of the Public Assets Institute, came to testify about the “fiscal issues related to the state’s public employee pension systems.” He suggested that “it’s irresponsible to not raise revenue” to pay for the pension underfunding crisis. According to Cillo, “Many Vermonters at the top, with much greater amounts of discretionary income, still pay less as a percentage of their income in state and local taxes than their lower-income neighbors, according to a 50-state analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy” (a left-leaning think tank).

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Shameless Climate Misreporting

Here’s an outstanding example of how your government, in this case the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,  puts out deliberately misleading or false news about the terrors of climate change, and how Associated Press inflated it into a scare headline.

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Commentary: Unsustainability Crisis Facing Seniors

            The national debt is $28.43 trillion and rising steadily. Even at historically low interest rates, that can’t last forever, the Federal government is paying almost a billion dollars a day in interest on its debt. Social Security will run out of money to make promised payments in 2034. More seriously, The Medicare HI Fund will have to reduce expenditures by nine percent as early as 2026 – and two years earlier than that if Congress and President Biden enact the Sanders $3.5 trillion entitlement bill. What’s the remedy? At the very least, don’t make this worse.

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Everything’s on the table to save the planet! (Except the one thing that might work.)

At the September 2 meeting of the Cross Sector Mitigation subcommittee of the Climate Council, member Christine Donovan asked hired consultant David Hill a reasonable question, “If we have missed an important pathway [to decarbonization] or have been promoting a pathway that isn’t really a highly effective pathway for the state moving forward will you all be telling us that?”

The expected answer would, of course, be “Of course!” If there was some way to meet the carbon reduction benchmarks mandated in the law then one would expect the person you’re paying good taxpayer money to help find a solution to say so. Not so David Hill.

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