Imagine if money were not a problem. We could get the essentials attended to that many of our communities are seeing left undone. Here in Montpelier, like many parts of the country, we are seeing more and more people on the streets or in tents as housing and support services are in shorter supply and more expensive than ever. Seniors too are caught in this web, many of us rattling around in large houses but unable to find appropriate smaller ones in which to transition. For our cities and schools the list of deferred maintenance items is long and getting longer, now impossibly totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars even here in Montpelier. Honestly, in the nearly fifty years we’ve lived in special place, the smallest of state capitals, I’ve never been as worried about the viability of our future as recently.
What happened that we find ourselves in this tough spot? Deferring maintenance and investments is always a costly option in the long term. We’ve known these lessons for years: “a stitch in time… .” But when the bank accounts are empty, we have to look for other options. Too often we hear about cutting the non-essentials—often education and health programs (and rarely road maintenance). As we’ve seen, this only makes things worse. We can squeeze harder for more tax revenue but that too only causes more problems, especially for those on the margins already.
Increasing the taxes the ultra-wealthy pay (and collecting those they do not!) is, thankfully, back on the agenda for many. Not only have taxes for the ultra-wealthy plummeted in the past forty years, but their wealth has increased immensely. Since the early 1980s more than fifty trillion dollars of wealth has trickled UP from the rest of us into the accounts of the 1%. This is due in large part because of how we tax wealth and this group pays about 8-10%, an unfairly low share. I know, “liars figure and figures lie” and there are many ways to look at this issue, AND the wealthy have only gotten more so while the poor have gotten poorer.
How far would even half of that fifty trillion go toward making our communities healthy again? The results would make our heads spin with delight! So let’s not blame “those crooks in the statehouse,” or “all those poor people getting free stuff.” Let’s look at what is really going on and the fact is too many of our tax dollars are simply lining the already well-lined pockets of the ultra-wealthy. Period.
Why, with all of us paying our fair share, the world could look like the one you see in these photographs!
Please pay attention between now and the elections in November not just to what you hear but dig in and find out what is behind what you hear. Yes, it can be confusing and yes, hard to find the truth—and I don’t mean Trump’s “Truth” program—but trust your guts as to what you see and know and believe about your city and neighborhood. And please make a plan to vote that cannot be cannot be derailed by anyone.
Still Learning To See 