by Paul Dame
Like many states during COVID, Vermont was awash in federal money which created spending levels that pushed Democrats to override America’s Most Popular Governor. But now the tide is going out on federal funds, and the Democrats are about to be exposed for the spending levels they pushed onto Vermonters.
Enter gubernatorial hopefuls Mike Pieciak and Sue Minter with a new act in misdirection to rival Houdini. Instead of taking ownership of their mistakes, the entire Treasurer’s task force, and the recent Pieciak/Minter op-ed is a naked attempt to try to pin the blame on someone other than the Democrats who caused it. A growing number of voters realized in 2024 that the Blue Team has severely harmed the state, and Democrats are looking for a fig leaf of some kind to cover themselves from further consequences.
First, let’s look at the origins of this “task-force”. The first meeting does not occur until just days before President Trump was sworn in. If this was such an important issue, why didn’t it start sooner in the fiscal year? Was this task force even part of the 24-25 budget? Or was it something Pieciak created only after he saw the November election results?
The two co-chairs are known Democrats who ran statewide. But four more members participated only in Democratic Presidential Primaries and I couldn’t find records for the other two. Not one member had voted in any such Republican contests. If Pieciak was trying to find a balanced group – he failed miserably. But once you read the report, it’s clear that it was never his intention. National Democrats want to pack the court, Vermont Democrats like to stack the deck with task forces, study committees and selective invites to testify.
Curiously the report’s primary author also owns the consulting firm whose company logo is placed on the front page. Was his firm compensated for this work? If so, was there an open bidding process? There doesn’t appear to be any action recorded in the minutes that indicate any official involvement. How many other task force participants get to advertise their business logo on official state documents, even if they provide their services for free?
Taskforce composition aside, the report reads more like political messaging than objective financial warnings. Just like the DC Democrats, the report constantly fear-mongers using worst-case scenarios and leans heavily on partisan interpretations instead of taking a more neutral approach.
This report is filled with sloppy single-direction assumptions that assume all consequences are negative and there will be zero positive impacts. The report uses phrases like “catastrophic impacts” and “existential threats”, but often without considering different scenarios. Their doom and gloom perspective has an over reliance on studies that come from out of state progressive think tanks that have no connection to Vermont.
We saw the same kind of sloppiness in a recent press release that showed Treasurer Pieciak was projecting in April that tariffs would cost Vermonter $1 billion for the year, and a few weeks later the Vermont Democrats social media accounts were estimating tariffs had raised costs by just $32 Million in the first six months. I take it lightly when partisan hacks are off with wild projections like that. But we all should expect so much more from our State’s Treasurer than to be corrected by the intern running the Facebook account.
If Democrats had listened to Republicans we wouldn’t need the task force. When the State budget ballooned from $6 Billion to $9 Billion Republicans said we have to be careful about our over-reliance on federal money, because it will require either higher taxes to keep federal programs in place once the money is gone – or we will have to start cutting these programs. Neither of these ideas are discussed in the report. Instead of telling Vermonters the simple truth needed to prepare for that change, Pieciak’s attack squad made recommendations that we need MORE new programs, creating half a dozen new “task forces” and “working groups”. This is why Vermont is in such terrible shape. Creating stipend-funded working groups is the only thing Democrats seem to ever do!
Instead of blameshifting to DC, Vermont Republicans know that we have to make our state government do what every good yankee does; be a little more lean and learn to live within our means. That’s the honest answer to the problem that the ideology of half a dozen Democrats aren’t going to tell you. It’s why we need more honest Republicans, like Governor Scott and the legislators he endorsed.
These Vermont Republicans know that if we are in over our heads, it requires us to put aside good and valuable things, not because we don’t like them, but because our taxpayers can’t afford them, at least not until we can grow our economy. Vermonters will either need to hire more Republicans next year to make those spending cuts that hurt in the short term, but help us prosper in the long term – or they can hire more Democrats like Pieciak who keep funding their study buddies and raising taxes to do it.
The author is chairman of the Vermont Republican Party.