I want to pass along some information about a public forum happening next Monday night. It’s right after the Washington County Committee meeting, so if you are a member, or even if you aren’t, you should come for both.
Public Forum: “Should Vermont raise taxes–but only on its wealthiest citizens– and use the revenue to fund health care, housing, education, and other essential public services for all Vermonters?”
When: Monday, May 22nd, at 7pm.
Where: Barre’s Aldrich Library, Milne Community Room, following the monthly meeting of the Washington County Democratic Party
The details:
The speaker and discussion leader will be John Berkowitz, director of Vermonters for a Fair Economy and Environmental Protection (VFEEP). VFEEP recently ran a series of full-page ads in the Times Argus and other daily papers titled “Invest in Vermont”, which called for fairer tax and budget priorities.
Specifically, the ads called on the Governor and legislature to take back some of the large tax cuts given to America’s and Vermont’s wealthiest taxpayers by President Bush and Congress during the past five years, and to provide more adequate funding for health care, housing, education, transportation, and other public services.
VFEEP is seeking to build a broad grass-roots coalition of human service, religious, labor, low-income, environmental, and other organizations, called the Vermont Fairness Alliance, to promote these policies.
North Carolina and New Jersey passed a “Millionaire’s Tax” in recent years, which helped them increase funding for health care, housing, education, transportation, and other important public services and programs, while at the same time easing some of the burden of property taxes.
California voted in a referendum in 2004 to increase taxes only on the richest citizens, in order to help fund expansion of community mental health services. Another referendum is scheduled for June, ’06, which would raise taxes on Californians with annual income over $200,000 in order to fund a voluntary, universal preschool program for all the state’s children.
Each of these states has an active coalition, such as the New Jersey Fairness Alliance, consisting of organizations from the low-income, health care, elder care, education, religious, business, labor, non-profit, environmental, civic, and other sectors of the community.
Vermont is facing a $100 million deficit in Medicaid funding next year, plus chronic underfunding of public service programs and pension/retirement commitments. With the Bush Administration and Congress giving huge tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and reducing domestic spending to all the states, it is time for Vermont to ask its best-off citizens to give back some of their windfall tax cuts to help maintain or even increase funding for our essential public services.
For more details about this campaign, with photos and articles of our Tax Day ’05 Statehouse press conference, and the text of our full-page newspaper ads, go to our website at vfeep.org.