Vermont’s fiscal 2014 budget development process is officially under way. And in what has become the new normal, the Shumlin administration is asking its agency managers to cut their budgets.

Fiscal 2014 begins on July 1, 2013; this budget will occupy the Legislature’s attention beginning in January. Read more

For each of the past five summers, Public Assets’ Jack Hoffman and Paul Cillo have spent a day in each of five Vermont communities speaking to Rotary Clubs, discussing school budgets and taxes with local elected officials and legislators, meeting with area newspaper editors, and visiting with other community leaders. Read more

By WENDELL POTTER

When I read that Fletcher Allen Health Care and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center were forming a new for-profit entity to administer Vermonters’ Medicare benefits, one thing leapt off the screen: the term “for-profit.” As someone who worked for two of the country’s largest for-profit health insurers over nearly 20 years, I know how the quest for profit can supercede the best interests of patients. Read more

The Vermont Census data released yesterday bring to mind a book title from the 1960s: “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.” According to the Census, Vermont saw improvement in 2011 in a couple of key indicators, including median household income and poverty. Read more

By WENDELL POTTER

After watching Vermonters for Health Care Freedom’s new commercial, I was reminded of what my former colleagues in the health insurance industry and I used to do to influence public opinion, often using deceptive tactics. I was also reminded of why I left my job as an industry executive and began speaking out about how the use of those tactics helped perpetuate a system that fails more and more Americans, including Vermonters, every year. Read more

The Labor Day holiday is intended to celebrate working people. But this Labor Day there are still many Vermont workers who are out of work. Between February 2008 and October 2009, Vermont’s private sector employers eliminated more than 14,000 jobs in response to the recession. Read more

The Legislature has passed five budgets since the start of the Great Recession in fiscal 2008, and it didn’t use the pot of money set aside for just such a crisis: the state’s rainy day funds. The $50 million-$60 million in reserves in just the General Fund could have helped the state through difficult times, maintaining services when Vermonters needed them most. Read more

Income disparity between those at the top and those at the bottom has been growing in Vermont for over two decades. As we showed in our report earlier this year on the plight of Vermont’s middle class, the share of income that went to the top 1 percent of Vermonters rose from 6 percent in 1981 to 19 percent in 2005. Read more

The Shumlin administration just released the latest revenue figures, and it looks like Vermont finished fiscal 2012 at the end of June with about a $12 million General Fund surplus, which is earmarked for flood repairs at the Waterbury complex. Still, revenues were more than the regular spending approved by the Legislature. Read more

Three years ago this month Public Assets Institute published its first monthly Jobs Brief—our one-page update on Vermont’s employment picture, published the same day as the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its monthly data.

In 2009, Public Assets got interested in what was behind these numbers. Read more