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.

S&P Global Ratings changed its outlook for two major types of bonds to negative last week. Vermont's general obligation debt and the Vermont State College bonds outstanding each had a “stable” outlook after being downgraded from AAA in 2018, but both were changed to a negative outlook after a press release last week.

The 2021 legislature faces major challenges on Fiscal Worries, Revenue Shortfalls, Retirement Fund Deterioration, and Electric Grid Challenges, but the governor surely won‘t launch a much needed Performance Review.

Yesterday the Vermont House of Representatives voted in favor of the Global Warming Solutions Act (GWSA), sending the controversial legislation to the Governor’s desk for either his signature or a veto stamp.

Here are 16 incisive questions, fairly stated, to put to your candidate for the legislature, Governor and Lt. Governor. Voters deserve to know what they’ll get by giving their votes. That’s what makes democracy work.

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