MONTPELIER, Vt. — Technically, Vermont could play fast and loose in this season of fevered budget-chopping: it happens to be the only state with no budget-balancing requirement.

But Vermont, it turns out, is a fiscal goody two-shoes.

This spring, the Democratic-controlled Legislature toiled to close a projected $176 million gap in its $4.6 billion budget for the coming 2012 fiscal year with a combination of spending cuts and scattered tax increases. Gov. Peter Shumlin, a newly elected Democrat, said Vermont was so innately frugal that it had no use for a balanced-budget law.

“Vermont has more common sense than the 49 other states,” Mr. Shumlin said in a recent interview. “We pay our bills, live within our means and hold firm to the tradition of not spending more than we take in.”

But not everyone here is pleased about the thriftiness, especially when it means cutting services. State Representative Paul N. Poirier, an independent, said his colleagues should have raised taxes on the wealthy instead of cutting programs for the elderly, mentally ill and developmentally disabled.