Renewable technologies will not save the world. Indeed, if humans converted all power to renewables overnight we would wipe out nearly all natural resources and fossil fuels, and the planet, in the same blow — solar panels are made with coal in China, while mining and polluting on a grand scale.

So-called “carbon taxes” are extraordinarily regressive taxes — they burden low income citizens with a disproportionate share of the cost of programs that benefit more wealthy taxpayers. In ironic doublespeak, Vermont’s so-called progressives have implemented an array of tax, electric rate, and regulatory burdens on low-income Vermonters and small businesses that benefit wealthy nonresidents and mega-corporations. I will prove this incontrovertibly in this article.

Let us begin by defining this term “regressive tax”:

A regressive tax is one that imposes a harsher burden on lower-income households than on households with higher incomes. In lower-income families, a larger proportion of their income pays for shelter, food, and transportation. Any tax decreases their ability to afford these basics.

As I have been explaining for years, Vermont’s progressive legislators have foisted a slew of such measures onto the backs of retirees, wage earners, and small businesses – always invoking climate emergencies and other histrionic earth-ending claims, to use Orwellian fear to avoid scrutiny of where the money goes. The money flows from those least able to afford these huge (unproven) initiatives to individuals who can afford EV cars, solar panels, or heat pumps in the form of subsidies; and to huge corporations who manufacture these products at great profit.

Vermonters pay $35 million each year in extra electricity rates to fund solar panels and EV cars — while many retirees heat with electricity and can’t afford new gadgets (many can’t afford food or medications either.) Tax dollars are similarly diverted through the Global Warming Solutions Act, and the Vermont legislature even paid a commission to study how to tax groceries. Expansion of “universal meals” taps taxes from the poor to provide a literal “free lunch” to those owning million-dollar mansions; and Vermonters escaped by just one vote a “clean heat” tax that would have increased fuel oil prices to subsidize heat pumps for all those new arrivals from down south building brand new (efficient) homes.

In the progressive echo chamber, it is clear that the irony of their hypocrisy is utterly lost — Senator Mark MacDonald told Vermonters who don’t want a fuel tax to “get a blanket, for Christ’s sake!” The gig is up for these deluded world-savers now: high gas and fuel prices, and efforts to ban (or regressively tax) oil burners and gas stoves, are causing working-class and retired Vermonters (and their children who can no longer dream of affording to live in their native state) to become “woke” to this scam.

Here is a very revealing exchange between four Democrat Senators this year, who contemplated this very issue in Committee. Contemplating the tax policy issues surrounding the tax they sought to impose on heating fuels (without a critical opposition voice — or ear — in the room, beginning at 56 seconds) these progressives discussed their rationale for making poor people pay for rich people’s new toys:

Mark MacDonald (MM): ”Who’s gonna be screwed the most if we don’t do anything?

Brian Campion: “That’s a great way to think about it.”

MM: “If we do nothing, who are the people, which members of our community are gonna be in a worse position?”

Dick McCormack: “The world’s population.”

Chris Bray: “But more locally I’d say, low income Vermonters.”

MM: “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…. (inaudible)? They’re getting screwed now.”

Chris Bray: “It’s very hard to imagine a system that we don’t have saving you money on your fuel.”

Vermonters, I am an opponent of this upside-down taxation, and this is how I “get away with it”: it is not saving the poor to help those able to afford it to buy expensive technologies. This is elitist delusionalism. Renewable technologies will not save the world. Indeed, if humans converted all power to renewables overnight we would wipe out nearly all natural resources and fossil fuels, and the planet, in the same blow — solar panels are made with coal in China, while mining and polluting on a grand scale. EV cars and heat pumps also rely upon mined resources and energy for their manufacturing production.

But even if these technologies did offer the promised salvation, at what cost and length will cultish believers go to make the poor pay the tab for the rich while pretending they are rescuing the impoverished? This is surreal. The gift of the Biden-fueled inflation impacting fuels, food, and fertilizers is that this RICO-like elitist disconnect is crashing down like Hunter Biden coming off a crack cocaine binge. Vermonters are taking a look at how it is we “opponents” can very credibly oppose their rescue via higher and higher taxes – and accountability awaits at the November polls.

Perhaps we need some new voices in that echo chamber, to explain basic tax policy to our senators and math. Perhaps that is also too hard for these gentlemen to imagine.

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