Death and Taxes

Blue State's have problems, small Blue States have bigger problems, and the solution appears to be beyond whomever is left living in them.

You can’t escape death, but avoiding taxes is something human beings do instinctively, especially those who insist that paying them is some sort of patriotic duty. Personally, I go to great lengths to ensure that I have reported all my income. Doing this makes you a natural target for certain political factions who may or may not currently be in power. I also look for all the legal deductions, credits, and other “outs” that lower taxable income. I also agree that taxation is theft, and these pages are full of remarks about lowering or eliminating them, with a recent focus on the property tax problem.

You can, by the way, avoid taxes completely by not earning enough income, or enough to trigger a threshold, and engage in commerce in places without any sales taxes. But that’s about the best you are going to do short of death, which is still a taxable event in many parts of the country.

The other way to avoid taxes is to make enough money to invest in things, including accountants and lawyers to work the system, which is entirely the system’s fault. Democrats, usually rich ones, like to whine about how the rich don’t pay their fair share while adding loopholes in the tax code or ignoring the ones there that allow revenue deep individuals and corporations to pay less, some of which might end up in a campaign coffer or two to ensure the rhetoric is the only change anyone will ever believe in.

If you have not seen the clip of why rich people buy ugly artwork, it is an interesting look at how the uber wealthy manage assets that help them avoid getting screwed over by mostly progressive thieves who use tax code to rob other people to pay for their priorities.

But there are other, easier ways to avoid taxes, especially in jurisdictions where profligate spending by partisan progressives necessitates a more vigorous frisking of the fiscal elite. California and New York, for example, are making headlines as state and local debt and deficits pile up, and they look for ways to fill the gaps.

It is worth reminding everyone that the budget problem is always a spending problem, which almost everyone now knows is a waste, fraud, and abuse problem. Democrats, in particular, can’t balance their local or state budget because the fraud serves their purposes. If it served Republicans, there would be a police-state-like intervention to stop it so they could spend that money in ways that assisted their party.

As it turns out, the fraud is a feature, not a bug, and the further left you go, the worse it appears to get. Rather than root it out in the interest of balancing the budget through fiscal responsibility and thoughtful management, or (God forbid) consolidating or reducing the government workforce to reduce overhead, they raise taxes.

There are no examples of this not being the impulse, and New Hampshire’s gift that keeps on giving on all of these points is Vermont. Our Democrats are like there’s, and they have found themselves where Democrat majorities, regardless of Republican minorities, end up. They have all this spending and have spent one-time money to legislate infrastructure that no one seems able to part with. Not roads or bridges (those get worse as budgets get larger), but departments and programs.

This is duplicated in the same way that local police, fire, and actual infrastructure must suffer at the enormous expense of schools that can’t teach a kid to read or do math. You can actually teach a kid a lot more for a third to a quarter of the cost of a local public school, but the school has more juice. More cultural and political power, so everyone cowers. Anyone who pushes back is accused of hating teachers or kids when both could thrive through education by other means.

In our current context, THE cost of being the government comes first, siphoning off resources from everything without regard to waste, fraud, or abuse. When anyone complains, the thieves blame the system (which they created to sustain their political power) and blame rich people or corporations, whom they must then pat down again for additional revenue.

Vermont is struggling and on the precipice of a full-blown tax revolt, which might be why they banned militias a few years back. Unlike New York and California, which are working on ever-higher taxes or tax rates to try to delay the inevitable “we ran out of other people’s money” problem, Vermont does have the tax base to abuse. A proposed tax hike on “the rich” can’t find enough of them to make much of a dent.

In all of Vermont, 2,625 households filed income tax returns in the $500,000–$999,999 bracket. Another 1,047 households filed returns showing income above $1 million. Combined: roughly 3,672 households statewide — out of approximately 329,000 total Vermont filers — would be subject to the new rate. That is just over 1% of all Vermont income tax filers.

Governor Scott, who attended a press conference earlier this week where Compass Vermont was present, made exactly this point when asked about the proposal: there simply aren’t enough Vermonters with that level of income to generate the revenue supporters are counting on. His broader concern — that high earners will relocate to lower-tax states — is a separate and genuinely contested question. But on the raw arithmetic, he has a point.

The article points out that most of the real money lives outside the state and vacations in Vermont. The state gets property tax revenue on second homes and vacation property, sales tax revenues while they are in-state, but can’t touch their income. And as Gov. Scott reminds them, if you bilk those who remain, they will leave. Join the ranks of those whose property might be taxable but whose incomes are out of reach.

Businesses will likewise flee any ratcheted fleecing, across the border to New Hampshire, where the wealthy are just as likely to move. No income tax, no tax on interest or dividends, and business taxes have been lowered in successive years. There is no sales or income tax, but for rooms and meals, and the Republicans lowered that, too.

Vermont’s options include an aggressive effort to lower costs, reduce spending, or poison the well next door, and they’ve been trying. NH Dems have been defending loopholes in election law that have allowed out-of-state votes to count for decades. Republicans and AGs have been impotent in efforts to defend changes that reduce the validity of actual Granite State votes. The courts have been no help, but were we to succeed and that effort continues, Democrats would likely lose a meaningful number of seats and might never hold a majority in the State House, State Senate, the Executive Council, or the Governor’s office. We’d also go back to sending Republicans to Congress.

Not just Vermont, but Maine and Massachusetts would continue to shed jobs, investment capital, GDP, and opportunity to New Hampshire, so the fight to end out-of-staters claiming domicile for voting purposes has to succeed, or working-class people and the wealthy investors who create jobs will have no safe place left to go in the Northeast.

The moment Democrats get either a veto-proof majority in the legislature or a majority and the governor’s office, they will fast-track us into becoming Vermont, and by fast, I mean, one two-year term. They don’t have any other choice, which is why we cannot allow that to happen.

Even the RINOs who too often help Democrats do damage have to see how bad that is for the Granite State. Or maybe not. They tend to be as stupid as the Democrats who, in places like Vermont, New York, and California, are discovering what it looks like when you run out of other people’s money.

The people they promised would benefit from their rule, the ones they would protect, get left with three problems. They are left paying the bill, can’t afford to leave, and don’t seem to understand how it happened.