Vermont Tiger

Wrestling Horses

by Michael Gardner

Horses are generally great animals, you can bet on them, ride them when gas hits $5 a gallon, and sometimes you can even get things directly from their mouths. Such is the case when we need to get a better feel on total spending on education in Vermont. A simple trip to education.vermont.gov can provide us with useful information on total spending as recently as 2010.

The pie chart  below is a great example. (click to view in larger format) On the left you can see the cherry picked data titled Current Expenditures. This has been bantered about frequently as what we "actually spend" on education. However, just as if you only paid  88% of your mortgage every month, there is more to the story. Things like debt service, construction, and payment to other parts of the government need to be considered. These are Other Expenditures, combined they provide Total Unduplicated Expenditures.

 

 

An Inquiry Into the Nature of Carts & Horses

one of them must go first; it's a rule

We talk a lot, here in Tigerland, about economic growth.  Even when it is not the specific topic of conversation, it is the subtext.  It would be fair to say that we believe that while economic growth does not fix all problems, it makes almost all of them easier to endure.  We had a couple of years of negative growth in Vermont and such economic expansion as we are now experiencing is pretty anemic.  The discussions in Montpelier about funding education, reforming health care, mandating renewables, and all the rest would be much less stressful if the economy had grown at 3% or more for the last few years,  for the obvious reason that there would be a lot more money to spend.

Anywhere USA – Not

Vermont; a special place, naturally.

by Tim Hayward

Over the years those responsible for marketing Vermont to travelers from away have coined catchy words and phrases designed to shape Vermont’s image as iconic, bucolic, far (but not too far) from the madding crowd; a place of quiet beauty, home to independent yet interdependent souls, folks who care for their neighbors, and yes, visitors.

These marketing campaigns have been largely successful because it just so happens that the pictures painted are in many measures who we are, and what our state is. This isn’t any recent happening; it’s been true ever since Vermont decided to become an independent republic, giving the original 13 states a tryout period before opting-in to statehood.

Downward Spiral or Downtown Revival

comes down to the taxes

by Tom Pelham

The Montpelier City Council voted ballot items last week for Town Meeting Day that raise the meals and rooms, the alcohol and the retail sales taxes to 10%, 11% and 7% respectively, amounting to increases of  10% to 16.7%.  The Times Argus reports the “passionate objections of Montpelier’s business community” to this proposal. The business community’s opposition is more than justified. Further, the City Council could choose a viable alternative that helps, not hurts, Montpelier’s struggling downtown.

In this era of big box shopping malls and internet retailing, Vermont’s traditional downtowns have stiff competition.  As evidence, residents need only recall the turnover and vacancies in Montpelier’s storefronts in recent years. The owner of Bear Pond Books and Rivendell Books, who expressed opposition to the Council’s tax increase proposals, today must worry about Kindles and Nooks and iPads. Now, their worries include the actions of their City Council. How many sales will be lost because of higher Montpelier taxes than at competitors or on the internet?

In addition to the Council’s proposed new taxes, retailers must worry about municipal property taxes, which are on the rise if voters approve the budget, as well as school property taxes, which are also heading higher.

Start Your Startups

Our friend Cairn Cross is involved in a new initiative aimed at helping the state's entrepreneurs get into the race. It sounds like a good program and it certainly has brought in the right people.

more here

Arrogance Unleashed

by Chris Campion

This is where the rubber hits the road. Six House Democrats have finally taken their masks off and decided that they will decide how much money certain, specific companies will make, all based on yet another "Board" that will make the determination of what constitutes a "reasonable" profit. The industry they're targeting? The oil industry, of course.  Why is Congress spurred into action?  Well, to use the taxes generated from "excess" profits in order to fund alternative transportation efforts "when prices spike", according to Financial Overlord Dennis Kucinich.  In other words, the best idea in the world this week is to pay non-competitive energy producers money earned by someone else to prop up their failing enterprises.  To create backdoor funding for a hundred Solyndras.

This is so flatly antithetical to anything resembling what used to constitute the United States that some time is required to absorb the implications. These are the same actors in Congress that happily spend $1.5 trillion in borrowed money each year, over and above the $2.2 trillion taken in taxes, and these are the "reasonable" few who can and will make decisions as to what constitutes a reasonable profit?  Or if a profit is to be granted at all?

I have news for these six kleptocrats. If prices are too high, people buy less, and producers reduce profit and costs if they want to continue to move produce. It's that simple. It also requires absolutely no government involvement whatsoever, despite what our patriarchy seems to deeply wish to be true.

Next up for The Unstoppable Congress: A Reasonable Income Board. You did not hear it hear first.

The Romney Reforms?

could Mitt fix the mess that is our tax system without even getting the nomination. 

by Tom Evslin

The President's own National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform recommended a much flatter tax structure and elimination of most tax deductions and credits in its draft report. The President – and almost everyone else – ignored this recommendation. Ex-candidate Herman Cain made a 9-9-9 flat tax almost famous before he sunk from view. Ron Paul advocates a very flat income tax – zero . The other Republican candidates have advocated flatter taxes without much fervor. But Mitt Romney's incredible political miscalculation in attempting to withhold the fact that he pays only 15% of his income in taxes may have actually given us a leg up on tax reform.

The fact is that we do have a somewhat progressive federal income tax. The 40% of families with the lowest incomes don't pay any income tax at all as a group. The rich AS A WHOLE pay a higher rate than the rest of us. But the statistics obscure huge individual variances in taxes paid because of a tax system riddled with loopholes and special exceptions – like the so-called carried interest deduction and concessionary rate for capital gains, which probably are the reasons why Romney paid such a low rate (see a great post by my friend Fred Wilson who benefits from these concessions but argues they should be eliminated).

Real and Rate-Friendly

that's the kind of energy plan Vermont needs 

by Bruce Lisman
 
The state’s renewable power plan is filled with contradictions and unknowns.  Like the proposed health care reform, it has no cost framework, no clear understanding of consequences, nor even a firm grasp on the problem it would “solve”.  As such it threatens all Vermonters’ economic prosperity.
 
Campaign for Vermont supports renewable power and energy innovation because enriching unfriendly countries is bad policy, and fossil-fuel emissions are dangerous.  Vermont and its citizens require energy reliability and affordability.  Vermont needs more information.  In a nutshell, here’s what we know about renewables right now: who pays?  We do.  But how much will it cost and how reliable will it be?  We don’t know.
 
Campaign for Vermont believes our state needs an electricity plan without empty sloganeering.  Politicians say building a 90% renewable energy future will create jobs, save the climate and foster energy independence.  It all sounds good.  And it is, in the abstract, until we learn about the cost and reliability.  For example, most renewable power sources are intermittent; that is they don’t operate reliably all the time.  But citizens and job creators need affordable, on-demand “base load” electricity every minute of every day.  Furthermore, Vermont state law obliges utilities to provide customers with low-cost, reliable power.

We Are The 62%

by Chris Campion

Vermont has grown jobs by 62% in a year, according to Governor Shumlin, a claim he made publicly in his State of the State address, and elsewhere.

This might come as a shock to the job-creating wonder that is the Shumlin administration, but the actual new job growth rate is something closer to 1% to 1.5%.  Shumlin also fails to tout the last 10 years or so of this same data, that shows a net job growth rate of zero percent.  I guess a few percentage points between friends are hardly missed, are they?

And in other news that might shock the Shumlin administration, tax receipts were down more than 9% of their December target, after four months of exceeding their targets. 

Wasn't the economy supposed to be on the rebound?

 

Flak Over Flack

the governor shoots down the board's proposal for hiring a pr person and it's a lose/lose deal.

Politics by Emerson Lynn

The Green Mountain Care Board has met the first public relations conflagration of its youthful existence and capitulated.

The board, in charge of determining the size, shape, and form of the state’s health care reform law, voted 4-1 to rescind its decision to hire a communications consultant to help it gather and disperse information. The decision to hire was made because the board doesn’t have the expertise, or the time, to do the job itself.

The eruption came about because opponents were able to label the proposed expenditure as nothing but political spin. The board was hiring a public relations flak to put a positive spin on the board’s efforts.

Shooting fish in a barrel is harder work.