I recently explained what regressive taxes are and how they have been enacted in Vermont to transfer money from low income retirees and wage earners (and small businesses) to subsidize EV cars, solar panels, heat pumps and other assets for those wealthy enough to afford them. But it is much worse than that — unlike flat income and sales taxes that disproportionately impact low-income residents, these policies triple the damages by transferring the money collected to wealthier recipients, enabling them to save yet more money on fuels. This is a vicious cycle that viciously impoverishes everyday Vermonters.

John Klar

Consider that $35 million is extracted from Vermont electricity customers annually in additional rate surcharges that are used to subsidize EV cars and solar panels — no one will deny this is being done. Already unfair, it gets worse when those using EVs and solar panels no longer pay fuel taxes or electric rates — electric vehicles use little or no gas, and avoid most road as well as fuel taxes; solar panels provide “net-metering” so that their owners get paid for the electricity they produce on the backs of poor rate payers and sell back to utilities.

Meanwhile, many elderly or low-income residents have no choice but to heat with electricity — and higher rates suck even more money out of them and make it unlikely they will ever get off that expensive grid. This is like Marie Antoinette taxing bread to give cake to the rich, then encouraging the rich to eat their cake in front of the poor. Low-income Vermonters get taxed unfairly; the money is diverted to those with greater wealth to acquire hard assets, who then make money on these investments in the future. This year’s “clean heat bill” would have imposed a tax on heating fuels to fund heat pumps, displaying again the same triple whammy — the money extracted from the poorest of taxpayers is channeled to new home construction or heat pump installation; recipients benefit financially in the receipts used for capital improvements, then again in the tax and commodity savings from buying less heating oil or electricity (or paying accompanying taxes) in the future.

Imagine taxing all vegetables but not beef, then giving the receipts to rich people to buy hamburgers and steaks, who could then eat more meat and fewer vegetables, becoming richer and fatter while those starving on lettuce faced higher health insurance rates, housing costs, and heating and commuting expenses. Today’s Antoinettes say “Let us eat lobster!” — and they literally mean letting the wealthiest dine richly off the earnings of the poor, while patting themselves on the back that they have saved the planet, and the poor people too.

In a Senate Committee hearing this year, Senator Mark MacDonald (my current opponent in the General election) tried to enact the heating fuel tax, stating:

So how come opponents get away with saying you can’t do this because you’re going to hurt low income Vermonters? How do they get away with [that]?

The better question is, how do they get away with inflicting these harms in the name of the unwealthy constituents they presume to be serving? Buying renewable energy indulgences so they can drive elitist EV cars and install ugly solar arrays, the “progressives” who have inflicted this “systemic theft” from the poor are being found out by those upon whom they prey. How will those legislators and nonprofits (like VPIRG) explain away or reverse these inconvenient harms, as these truths are gradually being dragged out into the light of analysis? How will they earn trust, or accomplish true environmental stewardship, once their schemings are exposed as both environmentally and fiscally perverse?

They won’t — and maybe the triple whammy is coming for them instead, as triple accountability. Vermont’s bloated bureaucracy has supped at the tables of our poorest citizens, gluttonously devouring their culture, incomes, and liberties while cultishly lording over them in elitist delusion. The self-congratulatory narcissism has grown nauseating to those struggling to survive. Vermonters are struggling to survive progressivism.

Such elitist machinations never end well. But for Vermont’s oppressed retirees and working class, they cannot end soon enough.

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield. © Copyright True North Reports 2022. All rights reserved.