How progressives rob working-class Vermonters

The Green Mountain State is a textbook case of how progressives employ social justice causes to drain the wallets and dreams of citizens.

Ken Lund

The Green Mountain State is a textbook case of how progressives employ social justice causes to drain the wallets and dreams of citizens. A growing populist backlash against a land use scheme that will steal wealth from property owners without any compensation is just the tip of the Marxist iceberg that is sinking the once-Republican state. Vermont’s progressives have been impoverishing middle-income and working-class Vermonters for decades.

Vermont’s current battle over Act 181 concerns a substantial regulatory taking of property values by imposing costly, onerous bureaucratic burdens on rural property owners seeking to develop a single lot or even just install a road to access their property. Property owners in wealthy suburban Vermont will not lose a penny: low-income Vermonters and retirees hoping to one day tap into their land for subsistence income during retirement or illness will be throttled. The city mice steal from the country mice.

Yet Act 181 is just another straw in a mountainous burden that has been steadily piled onto Vermonters’ backs. Let us survey prior progressive initiatives that regressively transfer wealth from the poor to the rich in the humble Green Mountain State.

• Six years ago, I wrote here about Vermont’s engorged education bureaucracy, and how Vermont had the highest student-to-teacher ratio in the nation. It still boasts that honor. On April 7, 2026, Vermont’s Senate Committee on Education announced that in the fall of 2022, Vermont also had the highest staff-to-student ratio in the nation, at 4.4 to 1. In 2025, Vermont spent an average of $28,818 per K-12 student, the third-highest in the country and the highest percentage of taxpayer income spent. The state has steadily lost public school students even as it has increased education hiring.

• Environmental regulations impose $300 million in compliance costs on Rutland, Vermont, businesses with no compensation.

• Vermont charges electricity customers a surcharge to finance rooftop solar panel arrays. Renters, low-income Vermonters, and retirees on fixed incomes pay more for electricity to subsidize wealthier homeowners’ capital improvements. The Vermont Department of Public Utilities estimated that “this cost shift falls heaviest on lower-income Vermonters who cannot afford the up-front costs of purchasing a net-metering system.”

• Under its “clean heat standards,” Vermont attempted to implement a complex scheme wherein fuel dealers would be charged fees if they did not support alternative heating systems or weatherization efforts. Higher fuel prices imposed on all Vermonters for heating oil would be used to divert funds to incentives (subsidies) for residents wealthy enough to afford electric heat pumps. This scheme failed because Vermonters caught wind of this classic regressive wealth transfer, once again from the poor to the rich. Proponents admitted this was the case, but argued that it was justified because “utility regulators ultimately calculated that the program would cost residents a total of about $956 million in its first 10 years of operation and provide societal benefits of $1.5 billion.” Presumably, “societal benefits” translates to business earnings for heat-pump sellers and installers, plus monetized “net-zero” climate-change salvation.

• The largest employer in Vermont is the state government. Vermont state employees consistently receive higher annual raises than citizens, including during the pandemic.

• Vermont imposes the fifth-highest property tax burden in the nation, suffers the highest healthcare costs of all fifty states, and ranks fifth for grocery costs. It ranks 18th for median income.

This partial list does not examine the myriad boondoggles displayed by the Green Mountain State, including investments in electric buses and healthcare schemes that never worked. The state squandered taxpayer money to investigate implementation of a sales tax on groceries (patently regressive), and its carbon tax efforts are essentially sin taxes based on use (regressive again). Progressives call Vermont police racist without evidence, support illegal immigration, advocate for decriminalization, decarceration, and cash-free bail, and attack the state’s dairy farmers as climate change culprits. This sociopolitical assault on working-class Vermonters and their proud history and culture is a relentless progressive wealth drain: the economy slows while bureaucracy grows. Real wealth for native Vermonters is eroded while bad actors and state workers are rewarded.

Vermont’s residents are canaries in the woke social justice coal mine. The state’s disconnected progressives lack understanding of basic economics. Their appeals on behalf of the poor and downtrodden are used to enrich the wealthy while state employees skim off the fat for lucrative salaries, employee benefits, and pensions.

This is Mamdani 101, and it has been chiseling at Vermonters’ pockets for many years now.

(Originally published at American Thinker.)