A sales tax on household services in Vermont could generate up to $195 million in revenue. That’s according to testimony given by phone by Michael Mazerov, Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities, at the March 16 meeting of the Blue Ribbon Tax Structure Commission in Montpelier. Read more

Montpelier should be trying to make the education tax system simpler and fairer.  But Republican Gov. Jim Douglas is proposing changes that would make the system more complicated and less fair: He’d increase taxes on middle-income Vermonters and lower them on wealthier ones. Read more

Challenges for Change—the new government efficiency plan passed by the Legislature just before the Town Meeting Day recess—is getting off to a bad start. The Education Design Team, which has a little more than two weeks to come up with plans for pretty sweeping changes affecting how schools are run, held its first meeting on Monday behind closed doors. Read more

A new report challenges the conventional wisdom that states can stimulate their local economies by cutting taxes. “The Zero-Sum Game,” from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C., explains that the effects of broad tax cuts are generally cancelled out by the reduction in state spending and layoffs of public employees that typically result from tax cuts. Read more

On Town Meeting Day, voters in many Vermont communities are confronting school tax increases that are bigger than the increase in overall school spending or the increase in per pupil spending. One explanation from critics of Vermont’s education funding system is: Well, that’s Act 60 for you. Read more

Voters in Oregon bucked conventional wisdom last month and chose to raise taxes rather than accept deeper and more damaging cuts to the state budget. The Legislature had approved the package of tax increases on corporations and on households with personal income of $250,000 or more ($125,000 for individuals). Read more

Ever hear of the con game pulled on bartenders in busy pubs? A guy strikes up a conversation with a bartender at one end of the bar and says he can make a $100 bill disappear and reappear. He asks the bartender to take $100 bill out of the cash register. Read more

In his State of the State Address in January 2008, Gov. Jim Douglas made a persuasive argument for changing Vermont’s policy of excluding 40 percent of capital gains from state income taxes:

“Today, I am proposing to close another tax loophole—one that penalizes working Vermonters. Read more

There are two parts to Vermont’s current budget problems. One, which the governor accurately described in his budget address today, is the temporary problem of declining revenue brought on by the recession. We need a balanced approach to address this temporary problem. Read more

From 1992 to 2009, the amount Vermonters spent on health care shot up. In the early 1990s, health care spending was roughly 10 percent of the state’s economy. Last year it was over 17 percent.

When you plot those figures on a chart, you see a steeply rising line. Read more