Vermont's per capita income has tracked 5–8 points below New Hampshire for 50 years — a gap that didn't exist before Act 250. A synthetic control analysis using federal income data puts the cumulative floor at $43 billion in foregone person
Vermont's education spending has climbed to $2.2 billion while K-12 enrollment fell by 25,000 students since 2005. Property taxes spiked 18.5% in one year. Now Act 73's mandatory consolidation is effectively dead, replaced by H.955 — a volu
The Laffer Curve describes how tax rates and government revenue interact, suggesting there’s a tipping point where higher taxes can reduce total collections. While the concept is widely accepted, where that tipping point actually sits remai
A stalled proposal to increase taxes on second homes has resurfaced in Montpelier, this time as amendment language tied to active legislation. Lawmakers are now weighing whether to move forward with a tax structure originally linked to Act
Act 73 promised a new education funding system—but only after Vermont created larger school districts. That never happened. Instead, after years of work and hundreds of thousands in public spending, lawmakers are advancing a different model
Sanders and Khanna want a 5% annual wealth tax on billionaires, citing Musk as the poster child. But Musk's companies directly employ roughly 160,000 people — about half of Vermont's entire workforce — and the $42 billion headline tax would
Most Vermont parents have never heard of the Trump Account, but every U.S. citizen baby born between 2025 and 2028 qualifies for a free $1,000 federal contribution that grows in an S&P 500 index fund until age 18. Here's how the program wor
Vermont's climate flips the environmental math on AI data centers. Closed-loop cooling, buried construction, and six months of free cooling from winter air eliminate the water use and noise that drive data center fights elsewhere. Waste hea
A Vermont Senate bill would ban AI data centers over 100 megawatts until 2030 while the Public Utility Commission studies regulation. But Vermont currently has no facility near that threshold, drawing pushback from Sen. Scott Beck, who call
Vermont expanded its office footprint during the remote work era, even as vacancy increased and thousands of employees worked from home. Now, new leases are being added to support a return to office—raising questions about how the state man
The claim that remote workers are more productive gets repeated so often it's treated as settled science. It isn't. The peer-reviewed research is split, the methodology behind the most-cited studies matters enormously, and the standards ser
Vermont state employees received compensation packages that included payment for the burden of physical attendance — commute costs, rigid hours, required presence. That burden vanished overnight in March 2020 by emergency order, not by nego
