Krowinski and Baruth leaving a disaster in their wake.

by Rob Roper

Both Vermont’s Senate President Pro-Tem Philip Baruth (D/P-Chittenden) and Speaker of the House Jill Krowinski (D-Burlington), the top leaders in the state legislature, announced that they will be retiring after sixteen and fourteen years respectively. And, not to put too fine a point on it, they, and more importantly the entire clown car they’ve been driving that is their party, used that time to pretty well wreck Vermont.

Though it didn’t begin with them, their leaving should, if common sense prevails in November, mark the end of our experiment with Democratic Socialism. It has failed catastrophically. For the past thirty years or so, our Leftist ideologues have been comically bad at governing. Comically, that is, if it weren’t so tragic and happening to us. Let’s look at the agenda and their record…

Three decades of progressive Democratic Socialist policies have left Vermonters not with “equity,” opportunity, and prosperity, but rather with the highest property taxes in the nation that we can’t afford, the most expensive health insurance premiums in the country and declining quality of care, a housing affordability crisis, energy costs roughly 30 percent higher than the national average, a shrinking population and labor supply driven by an exodus of young workers, the country’s fastest rising homeless population, a public education system that has dropped from a top five performer to near the bottom of the pack despite now spending more per pupil than every other state but one, and an overall economy that is the worst in the United States, raking ranks 51st for economic momentum. Epic, epic fail.

This failure is the result of a mindset that is not based in reality — and is, in fact, openly hostile towards reality — but wishful thinking. Clap really hard if you believe in fairies and things like defunding the police will reduce crime.

For an emblematic example, look at their big policy push for electric busses as part of an agenda to save the planet. Green Mountain Transit blew $8 million dollars for five electric busses that reality says don’t work in temperatures below 40 degrees and you can’t bring them inside a garage to charge because their batteries might spontaneously combust. (Four other electric school busses in Williston did just that, wasting $2 million, and what was the ghg emissions tally for that fire?) So, for half the year these things are too big to even be useful as doorstops, and now GMT is running a $2 million deficit and has to cut back on services so even more people will be back to driving their internal combustion engine cars than before. Sorry, but with minds like this on the case, both the planet and Vermonters are screwed. You can laugh or you can cry, so we might as well laugh. It’s kind of hilarious.

They say they want to save the homeless. Before Covid Vermont spent around $35 million a year on programs to provide housing for the homeless and there were estimated 1100 unhoused people in our state. Then the Democratic Socialists in Montpelier got big federal bucks to SOLVE the problem. We spent $153 million in 2021and $146 million in 2022… nearly half a billion by 2025. The result: we now have somewhere between 3500 and 4500 homeless people in Vermont! Are you seeing the pattern here? The more money we give them, the worse they make the problem we need solved.

Nowhere is this more evident than with public education. Thirty years ago, before the Democratic Socialists crammed Act 60 down our throats cuz “equity,” Vermont’s per pupil spending was in the middle of the pack and our student scores were in the top five or even top three in the nation. Today, we spend more money than every other state but one – over $30,000 per child — and our test scores are dropping faster than every other state but NONE. Our students are now performing worse than the kids in Mississippi in math and reading. We can’t keep doing this.

And then there’s healthcare. What do you get after living for two decades under the rule of a political class who believes that healthcare is a human right and should be free for all? Not affordable access to a doctor! You get the highest health insurance premiums in the nation BY FAR, some of the highest prescription drug prices, a shortage of primary care physicians, and rural hospitals going bankrupt. It’s an absolute disaster. At the beginning of this legislative session, Senator Alison Clarkson (D-Windsor) piped up in a legislative briefing, “At the risk of asking the dumbest question of the day, and having been around when our healthcare costs were $2 billion a year and not $10 [billion], why in the hell do we have the highest healthcare costs in the country?” The answer is YOU! You and all the all the progressive touchy feely healthcare policies put in place going back to Howard Dean.

Let’s not forget childcare. We used to have many hundreds of small, in-home childcare businesses dotted across the landscape serving families in convenient locations for reasonable prices. Then the Democrats decided to help improve the quality and accessibility by passing a slew of regulations on those on the in-home caregivers and subsidizing public school-oriented centers. What happened? Huge swaths of the in-home providers went out of business, the centers are inconveniently located and overly expensive, so we now have a massive crisis of childcare accessibility and affordability. Plus, of course, a new $100 million a year payroll tax they say is necessary to supposedly fix the problem that they created in the first place. And did I mention despite this “investment” in “high quality” pre-k student outcomes are dropping like a rock?

I could go on with these examples, from the housing crisis, to why with one of the most stunning, romantic landscapes in the world we’ve managed the lowest birthrate in the nation, and despite everything the Democratic Socialists do to “attract young people” to Vermont they are leaving in droves, and, oh yeah, the fiasco that is the so-called “safe injection site” where they’ve wasted two million dollars and two years and counting not helping anyone with addiction, but this post is getting long.

Now that the legislative session is over and the campaign season has begun, Vermonters have a choice to make between now and November: do we want to continue down this path of giving more and more money to people who have a demonstrable record of wasting it on fantasies that only result in making problems worse to the point where no one can afford to live here? Or not that.

Those on the Left and those on the Right for the most part want the same things: affordable housing, access to a doctor, good schools for our children, opportunities for a career, and a clean, safe environment in which to live, play, and thrive. But the Left has proven that its policies don’t deliver those things. Quite the opposite. It’s time to give the other side a chance to show that they can do better. Vermont can’t do any worse.

Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 25 years of experience in Vermont politics including three years service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free market think tank.