Support the Vermont Economy

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Vermont’s disconnected bureaucracy has been on a spending spree during COVID, while Vermonters and Vermont business have declined. Vermont’s $8.3 billion FY 2023 budget proposes to spend 170 million dollars on “climate response.” This is almost entirely borrowed money, printed by the federal government and still owed by U.S. taxpayers. Vermont’s Progressive legislature has rushed to spend money on yet more bureaucratic dreams, while Vermonters’ dreams are destroyed.

Central to Vermont’s spending efforts are always the mantra that the State is “helping people” and “improving equity,” but whatever good is accomplished by Vermont state programs is eclipsed by waste, overregulation, undermining of economic growth, and increases in inequitable outcomes. Claiming to solve problems “equitably,” that impossible standard is violated repeatedly with unequal and regressive taxation structures – solar panels and net-metering increased electric rates for fixed income Vermonters to fund the fancy solar arrays of the rich – along with their new EV cars that most Vermonters will never be able to afford. Universal school lunches will regressively tax poor people to fund unneeded lunches for the very rich. Universal daycare will disadvantage families who care for their own children by subsidizing those who don’t. And the “homestead exemption” unfairly shifts huge tax burdens onto renters who do not receive those benefits – then the State says it needs to construct extremely expensive “affordable housing” to rescue citizens from the inordinately high rents it has caused.

Vermont’s government is the state’s largest employer; Vermont “boasts” nearly twice as many state and municipal employees per capita as neighboring New Hampshire. Increasingly our government is “running” the economy, and it is not doing so efficiently or productively – our state is being devoured by this cancerous government overgrowth! Meanwhile, the Vermont legislature has demonstrated it is incapable of simply keeping pace with funding commitments for the state’s ballooning pension deficits – that is extremely reckless in times of spiking inflation and economic instability.

Vermonters will benefit from bipartisan fiscal integrity and frugality – the exact opposite of the pattern revealed by Progressive dreamers who are trying to create some new Vermont society with taxpayers’ money, built on unproven “theories” that are unraveling because they are not at all appropriate ventures for any government. Vermont “boasts” nearly the highest per pupil school costs in the entire nation as a function of income, even as more and more students are fleeing the public schools because of declining test scores coupled with increasing moral and political brainwashing. Yet even as our school have lost some 30% of their students, the state has not eliminated a single Superintendent job – paying over $200,000 in annual salary and benefits. Schools close, bureaucracy grows. Farms close, bureaucracy grows. Taxpayer wealth shrinks steadily, but bureaucracy and boondoggle projects grow,

When will Vermont government institute taxation WITH representation? Perhaps when the “renewable energy” fraud that has swept this state is revealed for what it is – profiteering at the expense of equity or environmental health. Solar panels and EV cars both generate huge amounts of pollution (and fossil fuel consumption) in their manufacturing and distribution, which together far outweigh any fraudulently advertised environmental gains. That is just plain science, and it won’t change – manufacturing these costly consumer goods is counterproductive to both energy conservation AND the generation of pollution – how long before those facts are revealed?

Vermont’s government has FAILED its citizenry, so lost in its own delusions of grandeur has it become. Vermonters must insist that government budgets be scoured for waste and reduced; that businesses and Vermonters be nurtured in preference to government bureaucracy; that the state pensions are properly funded regardless of what terms are agreed for their administration. Reducing rather than expanding government regulatory powers over small enterprises will improve economic growth and attract entrepreneurs currently discouraged by Vermont’s oversized government domination. The alternative is decline and collapse.