Vermont, the ratchet of prosperity, the community of isolation, and the isolation of community
/I recently spent a few weeks in Vermont during what they hilariously call “stick” season, the one between “leaf-peeping” and “ski” seasons (because the leaves have already fallen off but the snow hasn’t fallen yet), and the experience made a surprisingly profound impression on me, much like my bizarre trip to Galveston, Texas.
Vermont is a wonderful state, and I spent two memorable summers at Middlebury College’s Language School, so I have unlimited built-in good will for Vermont and Vermonters. But over the course of the trip I developed a kind of unease which I think is familiar to people who’ve read H.P. Lovecraft and his descriptions of the virtues of Yankee life.
Vermont is a very rich state
I think a lot of people intuitively understand that New England is one of the richest sections of the country, and therefore the world, mainly because it has been settled by capitalists for so long. There are lots of ways of measuring this, but they all tell the same story.
Besides the blip around Spring, 2020, Vermont has had an unemployment rate below 3% since 2018.
In 2023, Vermont’s GDP per capita income (in constant 2017 dollars, which is to say, actual per capita income is thousands of 2023 dollars more than this) ranked 23rd in the country, at $57,521.
If you prefer to judge the wealth of a society by how it treats its people, Vermont has performed better than the national average on NAEP standardized tests since they began administering them in 2002. Vermont also extended public health insurance to low-income adults under the Affordable Care Act in 2014. In 2020 it ranked seventh among US states for life expectancy at birth, at 78.8 years, placing it between Estonia and the Czech Republic among the social democracies and obviously well above the US average.
Besides the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont also is home to one of the finest liberal arts colleges in the country, in Middlebury, and a number of even smaller private colleges founded by various religious sects over the years.
This is a rich state. This is a virtuous state. But it’s also a state filled with people who behave like they are absolutely terrified.
New England newspapers are a national treasure
The first thing I do when I visit any place is grab the first newspaper I see, and keep grabbing until I leave. Over the course of my trip I managed to snag 5 weekly papers from 2 different publishing groups across several Vermont valleys. This is a bit of a callback to my conversation with Ted Fleischaker, publisher of a Portland, Maine, independent newspaper on a 2021 episode of the Manifesto.
There is something glorious about New Englanders that makes them simply mad for newspapers, but even Ted couldn’t compete with these things: 40-page tabloids with news, gossip, police blotters, classifieds, notices, and of course obituaries.
But as I read page after page of this loving-crafted, high-quality local reporting, a kind of unease crept up on me. What are they all so scared of? Don’t they know they’ve already won?
The Terror of taxes
What alerted me that something was wrong was a bizarre story in the Stowe Reporter about a fight over short-term rental registration fees. I don’t believe the article is pay-walled and I’d encourage you to read it for yourself before continuing here.
The core of the dispute was not, as it is in many communities, whether Stowe should regulate short-term rentals marketed through the lawless online marketplaces. That fight had been settled. The fight was whether the fee levied on short-term rental providers would raise too much money. At this point it’s necessary to quote at length:
“The selectboard last week wrestled for nearly an hour over how much to charge, to make sure the fees cover the extra cost the town will incur enforcing its short-term rental ordinance without fleecing owners just for the sake of bringing in extra cash…
“…Based on the idea that there are roughly 1,000 short-term rentals in Stowe, that fee would bring in $50,000 in revenue, which would cover the annual software cost of $40,000 and an extra $10,000 in staff time for the first year…
“…Board member Ethan Carlson said it would be better to err on charging more now and, in a future year, decide to cut back if necessary, instead of setting a fee that is too low and having to increase it later and having to face ‘a room full of people who are very upset.’
“He felt the estimate of $10,000 a year to cover the town’s administrative costs for running a registry was too low. But board chair Billy Adams said fees are rarely intended to cover the entire cost of doing business — for instance, fees for zoning permits, liquor licenses and dog registrations don’t fetch enough revenue to cover their respective administrative costs, he said…
“..Adams also worried about upsetting property owners who are already upset about paying high taxes to both the town and the state education fund. Adams, the lone no vote in adopting the $100 fee, instead suggested a fee of $40.
“‘One could say this is a little bit of double taxation or triple taxation,’ he said. ‘I think it’s reasonable to start out in a conservative place, until we get more information, and then move out from there.’”
After reading the article a few times, a lot of things started to settle into place. These are people who think every individual government activity — even activities they enthusiastically support, like regulating short-term rentals — should be financed by individual government agency assessments that exactly mirror that agency’s cost of doing business.
Why are hospitals organizing golf tournaments?
This creates situations that are genuinely absurd, to a non-Vermonter. Every issue of the Stowe Reporter and the Mountain Times (Killington) included two or three stories about local organizations holding pumpkin carving competitions, Halloween costume competitions, whatever. But then I found out about the golfing hospital. I will quote here only briefly:
“Sixty-eight golfers enjoyed sunshine, a light breeze, and perfect course conditions at the Copley Country Club for Copley Hospital’s 37th annual golf scramble on July 13. Thanks to 22 sponsors and the players, the event netted more than $26,000 for Copley’s Emergency Department.
“‘At the end of the day, we announced the five teams with the lowest net scores and distributed prizes, but the big winner was Copley Hospital,’ Emily McKenna, the hospital’s executive director of development, marketing and community relations, said. ‘We are close to reaching the $75,000 goal to purchase bedside monitors for the emergency department. The Gravel Grinder on Saturday, Oct. 5, should put us over. I am so appreciative of our generous community and their continued support of Copley.’”
Let me put my cards on the table here: I do not think hospitals should be organizing golf tournaments to raise money to buy bedside monitors for their emergency departments.
The curious case of the public schools
The main issue rocking the state of Vermont during my visit was not fees on short-term rentals, or hospital golf tournaments, or pumpkin-carving fun runs, or when the resorts would start producing artificial snow (although there were a lot of conversations about artificial snow).
The main issue was property taxes, particularly “school” property taxes. This is not a post about school financing, it’s about Vermonters, so I will explain the system as I gleaned it purely from my newspapers.
Each community sets its own budget for public schools, presumably through interminable town hall meetings like the one depicted in Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” (where the speaker is depicted opposing the construction of a replacement school for the one destroyed by fire). The Vermont legislature then determines what the property tax rates in that community should be in order to raise enough money to pay for that budget. Parts of the budget (like capital improvements) are paid for by the state and I believe there’s also a burden-shifting adjustment between wealthier and poorer communities.
This creates a strange gap, between the people who set the budget (the town hall) and the ones who calculate how to pay for it (the legislature).
Into that strange gap stepped a lobbying group with a novel theory: Vermont’s schools are too good.
The “you’ve had it too good for too long” theory of government efficiency
As mentioned above, Vermont’s schools are outstanding, and everyone knows it and likes it. They like sending their kids to nearby schools (especially when it snows and the highways are impassable), they like seeing them thrive, they like seeing them graduate, and they like seeing them go on to bigger and better things. So how do you convince them to cut their school budgets, and the property taxes assessed by the legislature to pay for it?
Obviously, no one believes this. The authors of the report don’t believe it, the legislature doesn’t believe it, the parents don’t believe it, and the second-homeowners (who don’t send their kids to Vermont schools) don’t believe it. But if enough people pretend to believe it, they can lower their property taxes by $400 million, which is a powerful incentive to pretend to believe something.
Isolated communities and the ratchet of prosperity
I’ve gone out of my way to be as generous as possible both because I love Vermont and because I think there are both obvious and true explanations for this behavior. The zealots and slave traders who settled New England believe they carved out their little islands of European civilization through frugality and virtue, and they did carve out little islands of European civilization, so who’s to say they were wrong?
Since I have a lot of rich readers, I am fully aware they’re nodding their heads right now: that’s the way to run a society. The lowest possible property taxes to pay for a few things like volunteer fire fighters and expired textbooks, and then a few charity events every year when the hospital needs a new defibrilator or runs out of stethoscopes.
But as an outsider, it looks like cringing terror, and I wish Vermonters would realize they’ve already won. The only people coming to take away what they have won are the people promising austerity for generations to come in order to save a few thousand dollars in taxes on their ski chalets.
