Will Eberle did an admirable job helping all of us appreciate the humanity of those experiencing homelessness and suffering from substance use disorder or mental illness. His commentary “How to win ‘The Fight for Decker Towers’” on the excellent recent piece in Seven Days challenges us to rethink our systems and claims that “we can fix this”. However, while I appreciate Mr. Eberle’s efforts to channel more resources to help our least fortunate, I’m not sure we can “fix” the problems of poverty and mental illness that have been with humanity since the dawn of time. I do think we can manage these challenges to keep them from overwhelming and degrading our community. Plenty of places are doing much better than we are. Perhaps surprisingly to some, Florida and Texas, for example, have a homelessness rate that is a fraction of Vermont’s.
Mr. Eberle suggests that we simply need to “invest at scale” to create a Vermont without the social ills we now see everywhere. And maybe that is the answer — more social programs to support those in need. But I’m not sure what that means in practical terms. Vermont is already among the most “socialist” of states in terms of public expenditures per capita.How much more do we need to invest to solve our multiple crises? Is it in the tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions? Probably the latter. And where should that money come from? Higher taxes? Vermont is already among the states with the very highest tax burdens in the country. And at this moment Montpelier is in a frenzy trying to keep a lid on the large projected increases in taxes to pay for our education system that continues to cost more and more to educate fewer and fewer students.
There is a proposal, with substantial support, for the very wealthiest Vermonters to pay “their fair share”. I suppose it could work. But there really aren’t that many super-rich, and the top 1% already pay 40% of all income taxes and the top 5% over 60%. We all want people who are homeless housed, people with mental illness cared for, people who have substance use disorder to get treatment and people who are hungry fed. But there are sadly practical limits to public sector answers to these problems, especially when we’re talking about state-level policies in our very small state.
