Federal shutdown explainer
Public Assets Institute What’s at stake in a government shutdown and funding fight? Thousands of Vermonters risk layoffs and furlough and the impacts of the shutdown extend to the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in appropriations for housing, agriculture, transportation, and more. Dig into the charts and analysis on the website.
Federal impacts
We’re continuing to update our federal tracker. There’s new information about the reconciliation bill’s impact on funding for immigration enforcement through Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The bill directs nearly $75 billion in new funding to ICE and nearly $65 billion in new funding to CBP over and above their regular annual appropriations.
Briefing and Q&A: Updates on federal policy impacts & public education in Vermont
Join us for an interactive briefing and Q&A on these two pressing issues on Wednesday, October 29th at noon or 7pm. Please register for your preferred time to access the appropriate zoom link. We’ll record the conversation and send it out to those who register for either time slot.
Education reform
We’ve been collecting questions from Vermonters about Act 73, the new education reform bill, and will be publishing answers to as many questions as we can. Be sure to take a look at our updated education reform hub which now includes a new side-by-side analysis of the changes included in Act 73. Let us know if you have questions—we’ll do our best to answer them during our online Q&A session on October 29th at noon or 7pm.
Our latest blog, The property tax is the problem, digs into questions posed by town leaders in Windham who wrote into VT Digger last month wondering why some of their neighbors faced nearly four-fold increase in their property tax bills after a town-wide reappraisal this year.
We’re also monitoring the progress of the Redistricting Task Force. Members of the task force have been open about the challenges in accessing comprehensive and reliable data from the Vermont Agency of Education. Policy decisions are stronger when they are grounded in sound, reliable, and relevant data. Reasonable people can—and do—disagree about how to respond to the data, but policymakers build and maintain trust with Vermonters when we start from a data-driven understanding about the problem we are trying to solve. With that in mind, we’re tracking the status of the requests made by the task force, especially since federal data on education will be limited after mass layoffs at the National Center for Education Statistics.
In the news: Progressive taxation and federal impacts
Anika spoke with Pete Hirschfeld of Vermont Public about the Vermont estate tax earlier this month and Katrina spoke with WCAX’s Calvin Cutler about the impact of the federal shut down on Vermonters. Over on our social media, we recently published an updated chart on the impact of the expansion of the Child Tax Credit in Vermont.
Latest jobs reports
Except for a sharp rise during the early part of the Covid pandemic, Vermont household income has mostly stagnated. After adjusting for inflation, it fell slightly last year. Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs are a smaller share of private sector jobs.
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