Green Mountain Outlook

South Burlington — “Burlington school plan would raise taxes 10.9 percent,” read the newspaper headline. “Budgeting for equity,” read another.

“A big but not unsupportable number, said taxpayers who attended a budget hearing Wednesday night…. The figure is shocking, but… “I don’t have a problem with it,” [said a mother of three].” And here’s the kicker: “About 30 people attended the meeting, including School Board members and district staff. No one spoke against the proposed… budget.” (Jan. 4).

Imagine that. No one spoke. against. the proposed budget. Where’s the equity in that?

As a Vermont resident, I’ve become accustom to such headlines. I’ve also become more ominous in my outlook of them. Let me explain.

As Vermont property taxes have grown at double and triple and quadruple the rate of household income, most future home buyers can no longer afford both property taxes and the monthly mortgage payments. Something’s got to give. And because property tax payments are fixed through the force of law, what “gives” is a reduction in monthly mortgage payments: Accomplished through the reduction of a homeowner’s asking or sale price.

Remember, a family’s single greatest asset is almost always their accumulated home equity.

This kind of government-directed, sleight of hand homeowner’s “financial repression,” is merely cleverly veiled theft. It won’t appear on any tax bill but it is theft, nonetheless: Theft of one’s accumulated life-savings. And it has the pernicious effect of developing into a negative feedback loop for governments and their communities: As real estate prices decline, overtime and barring commensurate tax rate increases, town and municipal revenues will fall.

Of course this pernicious effect is the child of an even greater pernicious occurrence, that of Act 60/68 and the troubling “budgeting for [social] equity” phenomenon.

Act 60/68 was billed as the great “equalizer.” But Act 60/68 and those calling “to take a moral stand, valuing equity and justice more than the conventional idea that sharing resources is somehow obsolete or a manifestation of class warfare” (“Budgeting for equity,” BFP, Jan. 9), pervert and distort the meanings of “equity” and “freedom” in a free society and in a free-enterprise economy.