The rise could have been due to a massive caffeine buzz....

George and R. Orner: According the Project on Student Debt report: College seniors who graduated in 2010 carried an average of $25,250 in student loan debt. It also says We estimate that two-thirds of college seniors who graduated in 2010 had student loan debt, with an average of $25,250 for those with debt. It appears that even the organization itself uses misleading numbers. The $28,391 for Vermont is the average of those students with debt. George: I agree with you (hard to believe!) We push too many high school students into college instead of other post-high school training or education programs. And some of those in college could benefit from a few years in the real world before they go into higher ed. I also partially agree with your point that college dropouts with debt probably are in worse shape than those who graduate. On the other hand, if the dropouts had stayed in school and accumulated even more debt, their future income may not be enough to offset the added debt. I haven't seen statistics on that.

Lupus Nomen: Senator Sanders is the Senator from Vermont. I have never referred to him as the Senator from Brooklyn and personally do not appreciate the references you refer to. But on this blog we allow posters (and commenters) to make many statements and references that other posters do not agree with.

Tim: Smart regulators is nice in theory, but in the real world it's not so easy. (I would actually prefer wise regulators to smart ones, but that's a different issue.) Would smart regulators, or Senator Sanders' plan, have put Bear Stearns on the too big to fail list? Lehman? I'm not sure about either of those. What about Fannie and Freddie? In the real, messy, complicated world that includes politics, I doubt that they would. If you doubt that, just look at FHA today. It's doing very similar things that Fannie and Freddie were doing. I don't have any easy answers to any of the questions about how to reform the financial structure, but my big fear is that any new regulations could just as easily make things worse as make them better.

Tim: I don't think there's any evidence that the repeal of Glass-Steagall had anything to do with the financial meltdown. (See Charlie Calomiris, for example, at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122428270641246049.html or his recent podcast at Econtalk at http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/10/calomiris_on_th.html) I agree with you that we need to have a system that doesn't require smart regulators. The idea that regulators can ever be so prescient is a pipedream. What we need is, in the words of Arnold Kling, a system that is easy to fix, not one that's hard to break. I don't see a lot of that kind of thinking coming from Washington, unfortunately.

To Tim Diette: Between 1987 and 1997, Vermont's total education spending (according to the US DOE) rose at a compound annual rate 1.4%; the U.S. by 2.5% (adjusted for inflation using CPI-URS). From 1998 to 2006 (latest year DOE reports data) Vermont's spending grew by 3.9% per year compared to 3.1% for the U.S. But the demographics are much different; the U.S. student population was growing more rapidly than Vermont in the first period, and Vermont's student enrollment fell in the post-Act 60 period while in the U.S. it grew, so the more appropriate comparison is inflation-adjusted per pupil spending. For Vermont, real per pupil spending grew by 0% in the 1987 to 1997 period; that is the level of per pupil spending in 1997 was the same as in 1987. That's because the state level funded state aid to education during the recession years of the early 1990s. Any spending increases were borne primarily by local property taxpayers, and local voters were very sensitive to local tax increases, so they held the line on per pupil spending. In the U.S. per pupil spending grew by 1.0% during those years--low, but still more than in Vermont. From 1998 to 2006 Vermont's real per pupil spending (the post-Act 60 years) grew by 5.0% compared to 2.2% for the nation. I think these numbers illustrate the point that when someone else is paying the bill, it's a lot easier to spend more. Milton Friedman put it well: "...You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!..."

To Doug, and also the folks at Green Mountain Daily (http://greenmountaindaily.com/diary/4422/facebook-open-thread): I'm not fearful, and I do appreciate entrepreneurs (at least those who don't feed at the public trough--and I'm not claiming that organic farmers do). Here at Vermonttiger, we like to try to inject some humor into our posts, and that is what I tried to do in this one (unsuccessfully, it appears). My point was that if you look at the NY Times' graphic, Vermont is inundated with dots--more than any other state. It's almost impossible to see the state's borders in the graphic, which to me reinforces people's perceptions about Vermont. They come here and probably expect to see an organic farm (or two) next to every gas station.

Tim: Thanks for the compliment, but Curt Hier wrote this piece.

To Nate Freeman: Vermont ranks 13th in total own source state and local revenues as a percent of personal income. Total own source revenues includes many revenue sources that most people do not think of as taxes, including tuition revenues of state colleges and universities, and income of government-owned enterprises (such as Burlington Electric). Most analysts prefer to use state and local tax revenue as a measure of tax burden. And Alaska, Wyoming and Louisiana are high (#3, #6, and #1) in tax burden measures not because they are low population states but because they have significant mineral resources which they tax. These taxes are exported to the rest of us. Thus, their tax burdens are actually not as high as the statistics show. Vermont does export some of its tax burden to residents other states (primarily through our property tax) but the magnitude is much smaller than those 3 states.