The Vermont House will act on bill H.157 the week of April 5 to require every contractor to register with the state Office of Professional Regulation if the value of the work and  materials provided to a home owner amounts to $2500 or more.

Vermont ranked 41^st out of 50 states, when it comes to taxpayers' return on investment (ROI). What Vermont taxpayers pay to Montpelier doesn’t get a great return relative to what taxpayers from most other states get.

There is a proposal making its way through the Vermont House of Representatives to raise and expand Vermont’s bottle deposit law (H.175). The bill would double the cost of a standard bottle deposit from 5 cents to 10 cents, and it would apply the deposit to “water bottles, wine bottles and containers for all noncarbonated and carbonated drinks, except for milk, rice milk, soy milk, almond milk, hemp seed milk, and dairy products.” It would also create a 15 cent deposit requirement for liquor bottles.

The Vermont Tax Structure Commission has delivered its report, and its recommendations should trigger an intense debate. Switching public education support to the income tax and expanding the sales tax to include services will be very controversial. It’s regrettable that the legislature didn’t begin with a performance review, to decide what state government should be doing with $4.5 billion a year, and then address the tax structure needed to pay for it.

The Public Utility Commission, at the direction of the legislature, has “joined the chorus of voices seeking climate action”. Its all-fuels energy report takes note of the state’s ambitious carbon dioxide emission reduction goals, and almost screams what’s needed on every page: “More Funding!”

The Vermont Tax Structure Commission released its 180 page draft report to the legislature, and one of the major recommendations it makes is to expand Vermont’s 6% sales tax, currently limited to goods and a few singled out services such as ski rentals, to everything but healthcare, and to reduce the overall rate to 3.6%.

The Peterson Foundation, that tracks government spending, recently came up with a surprising result.

Vermont’s state employee and teacher retirement funds, plus their associated Other Post Employment Benefit obligations, now total $5.657 billion – a Billion dollar increase in just the past year. The pension funds are just 66.4% and 52.3% funded, respectively. The clock is ticking toward calamity, including downgrading the state’s credit ratings.

The new Democratic House of Representatives organized itself this week, and James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal reports that one notable achievement was gutting the existing and not very effective spending controls.

A new book “Welfare for the Rich” explains the many ways that government policies benefit the rich, leaving the not-rich to hold the bag. We need to “raise the hue and cry” to put a stop to it.