by Don Keelan
Soon to be replaced, Vermont’s Lieutenant Governor David Zuckerman spent the past year touring the state, warning us of the book ban crisis. His efforts have been a complete flop, so he has taken up a new role as “the guardian of the poor.”
His recent comments, noted in the Bennington Banner on December 3, 2024, were clear: “Taxes have gone up for working people while wealthy people have gotten tax cuts.” The Bernie want-to-be extols us to believe that wealthy people are not working people. Some statistics, noted below, should provide him with the actual facts about taxes and who is paying them.
The Lieutenant Governor’s traveling around the State to warn us of the crisis of book banning was irrelevant, and except for a few souls who came out to listen, it fell on deaf ears.
As someone who has occupied space in the State House for years, he should have known that affordability, housing, health care, and crime were at the forefront of what most Vermonters were concerned about, but not according to Zuckerman.
Zuckerman has picked up where his mentor, Bernie, has always been. He noted in his piece, “Our federal and state taxes are filled with loopholes and exceptions that only wealthy people can take advantage of.’ He goes on, ‘I believe that taxes should be paid based on ability to pay, without exceptions and loopholes that only lawyers and accountants can figure out to help high-wealth individuals.” Sound familiar from whom the ‘heir apparent’ is quoting?
I gather the Lt. Governor has yet to keep up with what the IRS recently published, as noted in the November 30, 2024, Wall Street Journal: “The top 1% of income-tax filers provided 40.4% of the (federal) income tax revenue in 2022.”
According to the WSJ, this group, which included about 1.5 million filers with adjusted gross incomes above $663,000, accounted for 22 percent of the country’s total earnings. Interestingly, they had an effective tax rate of 26.1 percent.
Even more revealing is that when one goes down the ladder of taxes paid, one discovers that when you arrive at the top 10% of all filers, that cohort accounts for 72% of the tax burden, according to the WSJ piece.
Back to what Zuckerman is trying to convince us: the working class is paying the lion’s share of the country’s tax burden. But that is not so. The WSJ notes that the IRS data points out that the bottom 50% of taxpayers, with income below $50,000 (about 77 million filers), shared about 3% of the total taxes and had a corresponding tax rate of 3.7%.
However, Zuckerman does not want to target only wealthy Vermont taxpayers. He also wants to target second homeowners: “We can require second homeowners (or expensive vacation homes, not hunting camps) to pay more.” I gather that he does not appreciate that the 58,000 VT second homeowners pay substantial real estate taxes while requiring little in municipal or school services.
The Lieutenant Governor needs to address the fact that Vermont and the country do not have a revenue problem but an out-of-control spending frenzy. Zuckerman’s bashing of Governor Phil Scott for doing nothing for years is unfounded. The Governor has consistently demanded that the Legislature, municipalities, and school districts bring spending under control.
The Legislature got a wake-up call on November 5th. With Zuckerman and many of his cohorts out on the street looking for work, the Governor might have a Legislature that has common sense and will listen to what voters are enraged about.
As far as David Zuckerman’s quest to be the next Bernie Sanders, forget it. The Senator is a “one-off,” and thank goodness for that. Vermont does not need any more self-righteous politicians dividing Vermont into classes, wealthy and poor. We need leaders who will bring us together to recognize what is threatening Vermont, and it is not the Zuckerman’s and Sander’s gospel: the wealthy have it, and we want it.
Vermont is fortunate to have second homeowners and a few so-called wealthy residents. The Zuckermans’ vilification of them has been unfortunate, but at least he is gone. However, he may be in your neighborhood looking to see who is banning books.