What’s the lesson learned from the clean up after Tropical Storm Irene?

Deputy Transportation Secretary Sue Minter summed it up best in a New York Times story last week. The Shumlin administration received well-deserved front-page kudos for getting the state’s highways and bridges fixed and functioning in record time. Read more

Except as further evidence of Congress’s dysfunction, we shouldn’t mourn last week’s failure of the so-called Super Committee. Newt Gingrich’s critique was right on the money: Such a committee never should have been created in the first place. Addressing the country’s fiscal problems is the responsibility of the existing committees of Congress, and the job needs to be done openly, not in secret meetings that only lobbyists can attend. Read more

Unlike his predecessor, who used to rail at local school officials, Gov. Peter Shumlin sent out a letter to all school board members last week thanking them for their service and for working to hold down education costs. “The fact that overall school spending increases have been basically zero over the past two years proves that school boards, administrators, and voters have been diligent in keeping costs in line,” the governor wrote. Read more

The Shumlin Administration announced this week that they will hold a series of “listening sessions” on how the state should finance Green Mountain Care, Vermont’s soon-be-be reformed health care system.  Since individuals, employers, and the state and federal government are already paying the $5 billion annual cost of Vermont’s health care system, this financing exercise is really about re-arranging how we pay for health care, not trying to find new money.   Read more

In an insightful and intelligent VTDigger.org commentary yesterday, John Margolis put his finger on an important public policy struggle going on in Vermont: people vs. money.

While he doesn’t frame it that way, Margolis points out that Gov. Peter Shumlin, in a speech at the University of Vermont last week, urged the school to focus on preparing students for business, without mention of the arts, culture, or philosophy. Read more

Critics of anti-poverty programs have complained for years that poverty measures are flawed because they don’t take into account the effects of these programs in mitigating poverty. They have a point. There is no before and after measurement.

The state looks at income to determine whether people are poor enough to qualify for food stamps, which we call 3SquaresVT in Vermont, or Reach Up (formerly welfare) or Medicaid. Read more

Recently released Census data are both a wake-up call and a gift for the Shumlin administration and the Legislature.

A wake-up call because the statistics show that middle-income Vermonters are earning less and more of them are slipping into poverty—evidence that things are moving in the wrong direction for Vermonters. Read more

One of the good things to come out of Tropical Storm Irene was seeing the state respond to human needs. Individuals, businesses, government, and other institutions all had a similar reaction to the crisis: they jumped in with both feet and did what they could to help their fellow Vermonters. Read more

Providing a good education for each of its citizens is one of the most important jobs of state government. So it should come as no surprise that we spend a significant amount of money, about 5 to 6 percent of the state’s gross state product, on public education. Read more

“[B]usiness is run for the benefit of its owners, its shareholders, its customers and its employees. It’s not run for the benefit of the country.”  That’s according to venture capitalist and Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Bill Frezza in an NPR interview on Tuesday. Read more