So…Vermont has a “bad” business climate, huh?

The latest unemployment figures released by the Department of Labor seem to suggest otherwise.

At just 4.9%, we’ve finally dipped below the 5% mark.

Vermont had the fourth-lowest unemployment among the states in February. The national rate remained at 8.3 percent.

And, in more myth-busting news, the number of government jobs here has dropped by 1,400 over the past year, while private industry has added 4,700.

Earth to Governor Shumlin: time to drop the rest of the Douglas meme and consider nudging-up revenues with a nickel-search in the fat pockets of those for whom the recession is long over.

It looks like the fat-trimming has gone just about far enough.

About Sue Prent

Artist/Writer/Activist living in St. Albans, Vermont with my husband since 1983. I was born in Chicago; moved to Montreal in 1969; lived there and in Berlin, W. Germany until we finally settled in St. Albans.

4 thoughts on “So…Vermont has a “bad” business climate, huh?

  1. It means people in VT aren’t desperate enough to take any ol’ low-paying crap job, which means employers can’t get away with the kind of exploitation they prefer.

    It’s one thing to get rid of those pesky unions, but you really want people one lousy minimum wage paycheck away from a cardboard box in a parking lot to ensure the kind of “flexible” labor market that sends your profits soaring.  

  2. …because of the quality of life.  I saw in the mid-eighties out on the country hill in Hardwick where I lived the Reaganomics folks moving up here and building houses because Vermont is beautiful and peaceable (they were “getting away from crime”)  A little tax increase should be proposed like a carrot–your extra help maintains the quality of life you moved here for in the first place.  All of us who live here pay more for clothes and other items we could buy heap cheap at the Discount Warehouses in New Jersey.  Do we move to Newark because of this?  I think, instead of wealthy folks evacuating Vermont, more well-off folks will be moving up here.  It is the teenagers on the poor family farms, and other poorer young folks who have been evacuating Vermont.  We can turn this around and maintain the quality of Vermont with a little extra help from those who have moved here from the urban shitholes.  I mean, come on!–are they going to move back to NY, NJ, Connecticut?  California? (a bankrupt state)  And remember, that carrot is a native Vermont all-natural and organic carrot.

  3. 10 Limbaugh-echo chamber types decided that picking on the “Librul” Vermonter was a good idea.  My riposte:

    1. Less than 5% unemployment

    2. Top 5 education

    3. A greater % of Vermonters fight and die in your stupid wars than any state in the South.

    They assumed everyone was a government employee.  I wish I had had that government employment stat!

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