In July 1995, Vermont’s state auditor wrote a letter to the speaker of the House, copying the Senate leader and the governor. The auditor, Ed Flanagan, could not have been more clear about the likely consequences of a proposal to shortchange the teachers’ pension fund by some $7 million. ‘It is not fiscally prudent for us to promise today what others will have to pay for tomorrow,’ Flanagan wrote to Mike Obuchowski, the former House leader. ‘This type of generational inequity is both unfair and fiscally unsound.’