Despite research that contradicts the claim that people move to other states when taxes are increased, stories of tax flight persist. It seems that every purveyor of the tax flight legend knows someone—or at least knows someone who knows someone—who left Vermont to settle in Florida because Florida has no personal income tax. Read more

A story by the Associated Press last month carries a warning for Vermont. It describes cuts to education that many states are preparing to make after federal stimulus money runs out.

We’re in a similar boat here. We used funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to avoid making harmful cuts during the recession. Read more

Public Assets Institute has said for years that there’s no economic evidence for the idea that the wealthy are leaving Vermont because of high taxes—or that higher taxes would send them off in droves, to the detriment of the state’s finances. Read more

As the only state in the union that does not require lawmakers to balance its budget, Vermont caught the interest of the New York Times this Sunday. In the piece, Public Assets Institute senior analyst Jack Hoffman comments on the governor’s use of deficit spending in the serious recession 20 years ago, which helped get the economy back on its feet while maintaining essential state services. Read more

Gov. Peter Shumlin has been clear in saying he doesn’t want to raise broad-based taxes, and for the most part Democratic leaders in the Legislature have supported him. But in light of some of the bills passed by the Vermont House recently, it’s understandable if a lot of people are confused. Read more

In his budget address in January, Gov. Peter Shumlin urged the Legislature to increase the state’s reserves as soon as the economy improves and Vermont can start saving again. He’s on the right track. This recent recession has shown that Vermont’s rainy day funds are not adequate to respond to a serious economic collapse. Read more

Vermont cannot continue to cut its way out of its budget problems. The Legislature needs to include new revenue as part of a balanced approach to balancing the budget. One obvious place to look is in the federal income tax savings Congress recently extended to the top 5 percent of Vermont taxpayers. Read more

January 26, 2011

My name is Jack Hoffman. I’m a policy analyst for Public Assets Institute, a non-profit, non-partisan organization in Montpelier that focuses on state fiscal policy. Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the report of the Blue Ribbon Tax Structure Commission. Read more

Governor Shumlin has rightly focused on two major structural problems that must be addressed if Vermont is going to develop a sustainable fiscal policy: the rising costs of health care and corrections. His commitment to a single-payer health care system is an important first step to both cost reductions and needed reforms. Read more

Vermont’s tax structure has had serious problems for a long time that have made the impact of the recession on Vermonters worse than it needed to be. Sales tax revenue has not kept pace with economic growth for decades. And while Vermont’s effective income tax rate—the taxes that Vermonters actually pay—puts the state in the middle of the pack nationally, our rates appear high because, as the commission has noted, those rates apply after people have taken Vermont’s generous deductions and exemptions. Read more