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By Paul Bean
Members of the Vermont State Employees Union are not required to pay the employee share of the new Child Care payroll tax.
The VSEA informed their members August 23 by email newsletter they are not required to pay any part of the new state mandated “Child Care Contribution” 0.44% payroll tax implemented by last year’s Act 76.
Vermonters who don’t pay close attention to their state legislature may have been surprised last month (July 2024) to find a slight decrease in their pay – The result of a new payroll tax passed into law last year (Act 76). According to the Joint Fiscal Office, this 0.44 percent tax (0.11 percent for the self-employed) applies to everyone who earns a paycheck and will collect a total of around $100 million per year in new revenue for the legislature to spend.
However this payroll tax does not apply to any of the 6000 VSEA members. “VSEA has been contacted by several members about Act 76 of 2023, which created the Child Care Contribution (CCC) under 32 V.S.A. Chapter 246 that requires Vermont employers to pay a 0.44% payroll tax on their employees’ wages beginning July 1, 2024,” wrote VSEU in their weekly email newsletter, Week in Action. “Employees are not required to pay the CCC, but employers may choose to deduct and withhold up to one-quarter of the contribution from employee wages or not more than 0.11%.” State Employees include anyone that is Non-Management, Corrections, and Supervisory bargaining unit employees.
Their reasoning for not having to pay the tax? “Since state employees are represented by a union, the State cannot simply require bargaining unit employees to pay any portion of the CCC unless there is a mutual agreement between the State and VSEA.”
Throughout the 2023 session, Act 76 was one of the more controversial bills to get through the legislature. Back in May 2023, Governor Phil Scott vetoed the bill because he considered the bill to be yet another unsustainable raise in taxes and fees. “Vermont already has one of the highest tax burdens in the nation,” wrote Governor Scott in his veto letter. “The last thing we should be doing is making it worse. Raising new revenue from taxes and fees should be a last resort, not a first step.”
Proponents of the bill beg the question, what’s the big deal? It’s just a half of a percent tax.
“Fortunately, overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate have made it clear that the Governor’s rhetoric on this issue will not be the last word,” said D. Senate Pro-tem Phil Baruth in May 2023. “This bill will be our number one priority for the veto override session, at which time we will speak loudly, in the only way that matters in the end. We will vote to end the childcare deserts in our state, and we will vote to pay childcare professionals a respectable wage. Vermont’s kids can’t wait any longer.”
House Speaker Jill Krowinski added: “The Governor vetoed a bill that would have cost an individual Vermonter, earning the median wage less than $1.00 dollar per week. That is a truly significant benefit for Vermonters at a minimal cost. This bill, along with base funding invested in the budget vetoed by the Governor, would allow for increases in child care subsidies, which would provide for families to find and afford quality care while guaranteeing higher wages for early childhood educators and staff.”
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Categories: State Government
If you area state employee, you are in Utopia .
Tom,
Not all state employees. Just the one’s in the teacher’s union.
Going back to the farmyard, apparently some pigs are more equal than others. Funny how that works, thankfully Americans love bacon. What’s for breakfast?
Greg, Teachers are paying the tax.
House Speaker Jill Krowinski added: “The Governor vetoed a bill that would have cost an individual Vermonter, earning the median wage less than $1.00 dollar per week. That is a truly significant benefit for Vermonters at a minimal cost.”
Well if that is the case, then everyone including state employees can afford it also.
Foot in mouth disease at its best.
Of course they are ‘exempt’ but they can vote in their own raises can’t they? WOW, I hope everyone of them are voted out this year!
Does this mean that State employees aren’t eligible for childcare assistance ?
no,it means state employees are provided child care expressly paid by you, a non state employee, or private sector worker, damn you capitalists want everything for free, lol.
Too funny…..I think it’s time to increase the bacon consumption in the state of Vermont.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm
The pigs clearly think they are in charge and of course, more equal. Of course, in their infinite wisdom they have made themselves God and knower of all, beneficiary of their vast wisdom over the serfs of Vermont.
If that’s the case then anybody covered any sort of bargaining unit agreement should be exempt from having to pay this wouldn’t they? As with anything that is jam through there’s unintended consequences
Can I apply for reparations for childcare. My kids are adults now but I feel it’s only fair that I get some of my money I responsibly spent on daycare. I didn’t ask for a free handout like so many are right now. I wonder how many politicians are benefitting from this. Many I’m sure. Then they’ll want to change it back when their children don’t need it. These progressives need to be voted out of office. We need common sense legislation instead of the socialistic ideas.
Federal government employees are also exempt. How convenient for them.
Like every bloodsucking leech in Montpelier, their attitude is just “one more little nibble won’t kill you”, conveniently overlooking the thousand other leeches in front of them, and the thousand leeches behind them.
And of course, the state would exempt itself from being victims of state leeches!!!
Godda*n it, Vermont!!! WAKE UP!!!
And why this ????
Are they any better than any other working Vermonter !!
No , state “workers” are NOT better. Few of them do anything really useful, and some are just plain detrimental to a functioning society.
“…what’s the big deal? It’s just a half of a percent tax.” The big deal is, its been 40 years of these nickel and dime increases. It’s a large part of what got us to the tax burden we have now.
Well, except the union only represent those they deem worthy, or necessary. And seeing how everyone’s taxes go towards state employee salaries AND benefits they can as well benefit from paying their fair share of taxes. As a former state employee at the state hospital I would say do away with the union altogether as they’re biased as to who they represent.
It’s easy. Don’t cover them.
Seems to me creating tax exemptions or (any exemptions) for a selected class/group (government employees) is a violation of civil rights. Exemptions are not equal protection under the law – it is selecting and targetting a certain class to pay a levy while others who work for the lawmaking or law enforcement body do not have to pay the levy – which is, in of itself, discrimination. Any lawyer worth their salt and in need of billable hours should challenge the validity of exempting government employees or certain unions from tax levies of any kind.
I agree. How do taxes become something that is levied by unions. Taxes are decided at the legislative level, not unions. Unions do not get to dictate or bargain for which state and local taxes it’s members pay. This is a tax regardless of what it is being used for. I believe these sorts of discriminatory tax laws will increase overtime. The shocking part is that I work for a nonprofit that seeks to reduce loneliness and depression in young people and veterans, an out of state organization, and it was required to pay this fee. While state union employees who will benefit and utilize this service are exempt. In theory, these exempt state and federal government union employees should be exempt from receiving free children care.
Please stop asking questions!!!!!! you aren’t supposed to notice these things, please go back to sleep…..watch some Taylor Swift or Kardashians….or football, please go back to sleep!
Thieves have much better luck when the household is asleep, that’s why they come at night, not during the day.
Nothing to see here, nothing to see…
Sorry Neil, my snooze button broke. As they love to say, no one is above the law – except those who write the laws and their comrads-in-arms working diligently to destroy us by lawfare warfare theft and constant demoralization. The day of reckoning is coming – I simply point out why it will end badly for them…they can repent and rebuke their wicked ways or face the ultimate consequences…aka judgement. It is free will – their choice. I hear there are over 400,000 sealed indictments piled up now…interesting.
As VSEA employees realize the privileged (and immoral) benefits of their station, other government-affiliated employees, like the VTNEA (Teacher’s Union), tenured college professionals, the Vermont Principals and Superintendent’s Associations, Vermont Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, and myriad other tax subsidized employment unions, will insist on receiving equal benefits as compensation for their approval of the privilege. And the ultimate golden parachute for this cohort will be their guaranteed benefit retirement programs that ensure the continuation of these privileges into eternity.
Vermont is an existential Petrie dish, a representation of the struggle between totalitarian communism and individual liberty and free enterprise. And the die is cast. Individual freedom has been eliminated. There is, short of complete social anarchy, no turning back. This state-controlled cohort demonstrates the epitome of a tyranny by the majority. Fifty-one percent of Vermonters will rob the other forty-nine percent of everything they have until they confiscate all of whatever private property still exists today. Our Orwellian Animal Farm has come to fruition.
“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Well said Jay. The crony capitalism you described is called stakeholder capitalism, which benefits the stakeholders that are transforming the political, social and economic drivers to fulfill the Sustainability agenda. Sustainability is the new tyranny of the 21st century, which can only be realized through coercion and totalitarian controls akin to Stalinism and Maoism.
Crony capitalism is the first cousin and also brother and sister of socialism/marxism/communism. Incest is a bad thing, in life, in business and most certainly in government.
I think ‘stakeholder capitalism’ is a misnomer, Christine… an obfuscation, a diversion. We are all ‘stakeholders’ in our own destiny.
“The great virtue of a free-market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”
“Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”
“When workers get higher wages and better working conditions through the free market, when they get raises by firms competing with one another for the best workers, by workers competing with one another for the best jobs, those higher wages are at nobody’s expense. They can only come from higher productivity, greater capital investment, more widely diffused skills. The whole pie is bigger – there’s more for the worker, but there’s also more for the employer, the investor, the consumer, and even the tax collector. That’s the way the free-market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people. That’s the secret of the enormous improvements in the conditions of the working person over the past two centuries.”
“A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”
Yes. I read Milton Friedman quotes almost every day. His are some of the most articulate and easy to understand characterizations of what free markets are and what they do, best explaining how our Founders recognized that this Constitutional Republic (i.e., The American Experiment) is the most effective and fair system contrived by human society to date in providing liberty, freedom, and prosperity to the greatest number of people. But only, as Ben Franklin warned, ‘if we can keep it’.
Did the projected $100 million per year in new revenue include State employees or is this just another minor budgeting error by our brilliant legislators?
We should have the education department and leadership perhaps read animal farm, compare and contrast how Vermont has become dominated by self-serving marxist pigs!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm
Oh yes, we are more equal than you serfs. What wicked webs we weave.
Hate to bring up this pesky constitution thing again but equal protection clause anyone?
Sinecure job holders once again reaping benefits while raping responsible hard workers paychecks.
This policy makes ZERO sense.
“Their reasoning for not having to pay the tax? “Since state employees are represented by a union, the State cannot simply require bargaining unit employees to pay any portion of the CCC unless there is a mutual agreement between the State and VSEA.”
This is BS. This is a tax that should not even be in existence, much less allowing union state workers not have to pay!