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IN THIS ISSUE:
Vermont Drifts Toward Property-Tax Doom Spiral
Video of the Week: Minnesota: Land of 10,000 Frauds – In the Tank #521
Coverage of Government Spending Fraud Confirms Big Change in Media Landscape
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Vermont Drifts Toward Property-Tax Doom Spiral
The state of Vermont has been raising property taxes rapidly in recent years. The state’s Tax Department is forecasting a 12 percent increase for the upcoming 2027 fiscal year. That makes for a total property tax increase of 41 percent over the past five years.
Rapidly rising costs of K-12 education in the state are the cause of the tax increases, Vermont authorities say.
In a letter to the Vermont House Speaker and Senate Pro Tempore on December 1, Vermont Department of Taxes Commissioner William C. Shouldice IV said that the state’s education system is badly broken and wildly overpriced:
For years the Governor and his team have been the leading voice in a growing consensus across Vermont that our education funding system cannot continue as it is. Vermonters are asked to pay significantly more, year after year, to educate fewer students. As the nation’s top education spender, our state’s considerable investment does not achieve the quality education Vermonters expect.
The letter included a chart illustrating the increase in property taxes for education and simultaneous decline in student enrollment in the state over the past two decades:
Education spending in the state is rising much more rapidly than inflation, television station WCAX-3 reports: “Per-pupil spending is up nearly $1,000 over last year, about a 7% jump.”
Gov. Phil Scott and state legislators want to change the education funding structure and bring costs down by consolidating school districts and reducing staff and overhead over time, but the proposed changes would not take effect until 2029.
The rapid rise of property taxes in Vermont is concentrating more power among the wealthy and within government, Heartland Institute Research Fellow Jack McPherrin told me:
Vermont’s projected 12 percent property tax hike, which brings five-year growth to roughly 41 percent, is far beyond what working families, new buyers, or seniors on fixed incomes can absorb. A typical homeowner already pays more than $3,400 annually—the ninth-highest burden in the nation—and another $400 on top of that compounds the strain. The state is directing more money toward educating fewer students with worsening outcomes, yet households have no practical way to avoid or reduce the escalating costs. For many, these taxes now resemble a second mortgage.
Real reform must include spending restraint, a leaner administrative structure, and accountability for educational performance rather than continued reliance on homeowners as an inexhaustible revenue source. As rising costs push families out, residential property increasingly transitions to institutional landlords, private investment firms, and financial entities that work closely with state regulators and have minimal ties to local communities. Influence over land use and housing policy drifts toward actors aligned with public agencies instead of the people who live in these towns. The consequence is a diminished ownership class and an expanding population forced into long-term tenancy.
Combined with restrictive regulations and persistent supply shortages, these increases are accelerating a national affordability collapse that is turning the United States into a renter society, where young families cannot buy homes and longtime residents struggle to keep the ones they have.
Property taxes are a highly reliable source of revenue, which is why states and localities like them. Property taxes, however, charge people a large annual fee just to own land. Occupying land is not an action; it is a human necessity. In addition, taxes should serve as charges for government services delivered to the individual from whom they are taken, in this case the landholder, and only for those purposes. The rapid increase in property taxes is occurring because of ever-rising education costs, which are not services delivered to those being dunned for them.
The fast education cost increases are caused by the very convenience and reliability of property taxes: states know they can get that money, so they target it to spend on their most vital constituents (meaning those on whose votes and campaign contributions they count). The continual tax increases are not caused by an increase in services to the people taxed.
Elderly people in particular receive little or nothing of value from public education (or more likely, significantly negative value given the woeful condition of the nation’s government-run public schools), and the same is true, of course, of younger, childless homeowners and of lower-income workers who tend to live in neighborhoods with the worst schools.
The value of public education goes mainly to the people the system pays, especially the teachers unions, and to the people those unions pay: politicians who determine school spending. That is the fundamentally corrupt system that drives up property taxes.
Underlying this process is the necessary premise that people will not move out of the state and depress the tax base. The fact that this is exactly what is happening in multiple states, poorly run big cities across the country, and in Vermont itself suggests that the system’s attractions are worth only so much to residents, which accords with common sense.
“[T]he Census Bureau estimates Vermont has reverted to pre-Covid ways: losing more people to other states than it gains,” The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year.
The only solution to this prospective property-tax doom spiral is to make schools accountable for their outputs. The obvious way to do that is to send all state support for education directly to parents instead of government-run systems, as states across the country are doing through Education Savings Accounts and state-tax-deductible scholarship granting organizations.
Vermont is awful at school choice. “Vermont only has an index score of 1 in a range from 0 to 100” on the 2025 EdChoice Friedman Index, which measures the amount of education choice in each state, Heartland Institute Senior Policy Analyst Tim Benson writes.
Such school choice programs are essentially a roundabout way of reducing the power of teachers unions, and the effect is likely to be temporary anyway, lasting only until the latter manage to persuade politicians to force unionization on private schools.
Unless and until lawmakers ban public-employee union membership altogether, states will continue to hold all homeowners hostage with what are essentially forever mortgages that keep people under the perpetual threat of being foreclosed on with enforcement by armed state police.
It is another way governments are turning the United States into a nation of renters. That is widely considered a perfectly reasonable thing to do, because it is, of course, “for the children.” Stripping property from economically struggling neighbors “for the children” just happens to benefit powerful public employee unions and the politicians they buy. Nothing to see there.
We used to call that corruption and demand that governments eliminate it. Now policymakers and opinion leaders call it equity and demand more and more of it. Vermont exemplifies that baneful change in attitude, a political transformation that places an awful burden on the state’s working people and retirees.
“Woke” and its pushers continues to be exposed for the ugliness, fraud and tyranny their policies unleash on the rest of us, all over the world. We’ll cover how the architect of Jaguar’s disastrous rebrand has finally been canned, and Rep. Aftyn Behn’s loss to Matt Van Epps in Tennessee reveals her and her party as very sore losers indeed.
We’ll also take a look at the years of widespread fraud inside Minnesota’s social services system, and discuss how Governor Walz not only buried the problem but may be setting the stage for even more abuse through a new program.
And on UNHINGED: Multiple-time violent criminals are being released to attack people again, and other craziness.
The Heartland Institute’s Linnea Lueken, Jim Lakely, and S.T. Karnick will talk about all of this and more on Episode #521 of the In The Tank Podcast.
Join us LIVE every Thursday at 1 p.m. ET on YouTube, Rumble, X, and Facebook.
Coverage of Government Spending Fraud Confirms Big Change in Media Landscape
Accountability for government spending is finally becoming a regular news item, as it would always be if the nation’s corporate media were not in the bag for ever-greater expansions of government spending and centralization of power.
The Government Accountability Office released a preliminary report last Wednesday that found “waste, fraud, and abuse have run rampant through Affordable Care Act marketplace plans, worsening health care plans for Americans, all while enriching big insurance companies,” the House Judiciary Committee noted in a press release.
“The new watchdog investigation finds large-scale systemic failures that allow fake identities, dead people, and massive improper use of Social Security numbers to receive Obamacare subsidies,” the committee stated. “As part of the analysis, GAO even conducted covert operations which even included creating fictitious identities that flooded health insurers with unjustified subsidies. In fact, 100 percent of fake applicants were approved by the ACA Marketplace as recently as late 2024, and 90 percent of fake applicants continue to receive coverage in 2025.”
The GAO found as much as $27 billion in improper payments per year, through abuses such as these reported by the Judiciary Committee:
One Social Security Number (SSN) was used for “71 years” of subsidized coverage.
In 2023, one single SSN was used on applications for over 125 insurance policies totaling over 26,000 days of coverage, the equivalent of 71 years.
66,000 SSNs in 2024 had more than a years’ worth of subsidized coverage.
CMS does not block new applications using the same SSN and relies on a broken document-request process that often never works.
$21 billion in subsidies paid out with no evidence of tax reconciliation in 2023. That is 32 percent of all advanced premium tax credits (APTC) paid to identifiable SSN holders. No reconciliation means no accountability, no verification, and likely billions in improper payments.
Insurers benefited greatly from the fraud, collecting $94 million in taxpayer subsidy money for at least 7,000 people who “were dead before coverage even began, meaning the applications used SSNs of deceased individuals,” the committee’s press release reported.
The revelations of such enormous fraud will certainly affect the public debate over extension of the extremely expensive Biden-era subsidy increases.
“The first step to solving a problem is acknowledging it,” write investigative reporter Ryan Thorpe and Senior Fellow Christopher Rufo, both of the Manhattan Institute, for the journal. “By extension, that means recognizing the problem’s true source. So far, Minnesota’s governing class and its media establishment have failed to take that basic step.”
The White House took the opposite approach toward revelations of massive fraud in another federal-state program last week. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that her department will withhold federal funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), popularly known as food stamps, in the 21 states that failed to provide the government with data about who is receiving benefits:
Rollins characterized the situation as Republican states complying and Democrat-run states refusing to cooperate with the documentation order.
“But 21 states including California, New York and Minnesota—the blue states—continue to say ‘no,’ so as of next week we have begun and will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states until they comply and they tell us and allow us to partner with them to root out this fraud and protect the American taxpayer,” Rollins said at last Tuesday’s presidential Cabinet meeting.
Fraud is rampant in the $99.8 billion program. “The Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted in a report released on Tuesday that hundreds of millions of dollars may be stolen from SNAP recipients’ accounts each year through tactics like card skimming or cloning, phishing scams, bot attacks and stolen numbers,” Fox Business reports.
“We found 186,000 dead people, with dead people’s Social Security numbers being used, 500,000 people receiving benefits more than twice,” Rollins told the president at the Cabinet meeting. “We had a couple of people receiving benefits in six states.”
The Agriculture Department has begun moving fraudsters off the taxpayer-funded program, the Fox Business story notes: “Rollins said that about 800,000 of the roughly 42 million Americans participating in SNAP have moved off the program’s rolls since President Donald Trump took office in January.”
The department found that more than a quarter-million benefit claims were phony, and hundreds of thousands of illegal transactions were approved in just the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, the department found. Fox News reported on November 19,
Initial data from the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service show Alabama leading the nation with more than 26,000 stolen SNAP benefit claims. California follows with 25,818 stolen benefit claims, and New York ranks third with 25,210.
Nationwide, more than 226,000 fraudulent SNAP benefit claims and more than 691,000 unauthorized transactions have been approved. Fraudulent transactions are categorized as purchases that SNAP recipients did not authorize, often the result of card skimming, cloning, or other forms of electronic theft.
What’s more, the data shows that fraudulent claims and transactions are more likely to be approved than denied, underscoring gaps in oversight.
The noncompliant states sued Rollins in a communism-friendly California court to force the USDA to keep sending them money without any means of verification that it is being spent appropriately, of course. Roll Call reports,
More than 20 states and the District of Columbia—virtually all of them led by Democratic governors—filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in August to block the USDA action seeking the state data. Judge Maxine M. Chesney granted the states’ request for a preliminary injunction in mid-October.
Rollins’s decision conflicts with that court order and would undoubtedly send the issue on up the chain of appeals. It seems likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold the administration’s decision to require certification that the money is being spent on what the law specifies.
The obvious conclusion regarding the 21 states’ defiance of the Ag Department’s call for transparency, of course, is that the recalcitrant states are hiding fraud and are desperate to keep doing so.
That seems highly likely given that federal taxpayers pay for all of the SNAP benefits to individuals and the states decide who gets to sign up for the program and share some of the admin costs. It is thoroughly in the interests of state governments to sign people up for this “free” program that costs the state’s politicians very little while giving them bragging rights for offering people free food.
That system obviously invites corruption. At least 21 states appear to have accepted that invitation eagerly.
It seems likely that the fraud numbers in those states are significantly higher than those in the states that provided that information. The revelations of fraud totals in the 21 defiant states will undoubtedly be appalling if they end up having to open up their programs to scrutiny or forgo SNAP benefits for everybody.
The GAO, Rollins, and the Trump administration have made this a news story, and further events will keep it relevant when Rollins stops sending checks to the states in rebellion against government accountability. The Minnesota scandal is likewise ripe for follow-up, as are the Obamacare subsidy abuses. So are severalothers across the nation.
The captive legacy press will try to ignore these stories and others like them, and they will attempt to bury the news under a variety of manufactured sensationalism as they did with the absurd claims that President Trump’s willingness to take medical tests proves that he’s unfit for office. We can expect more of the same as the governance scandals of the Obama and Biden administrations, state governments, and the permanent bureaucracy and deep state in Washington, D.C. come to light.
Fortunately, the alternative media are rapidly becoming the dominant media, and corrupt politicians and bureaucrats are increasingly finding that they cannot hide behind the skirts of their cronies in the dying legacy media.
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