This commentary is by Matt Swenson, the founder of Omnidex Solutions, who lives in Vermont.
Vermont is debating property tax relief again. The plan is straightforward enough: Use state funds to soften increases driven by education spending, ease the pressure on homeowners, and move forward. That offers something in the short term. But it doesn’t change anything underneath. The structure is where the problem lives, and the structure isn’t being touched.
Start with the number nobody in Montpelier wants to say out loud. Vermont’s student enrollment has been falling for years. The schools, the buildings, the staffing levels, the administrative overhead — all of it was sized for a population that no longer exists here at that scale. Run a system built for more students than you have, and the cost per pupil rises. It has to. Moving money between accounts to flatten the tax bill doesn’t shrink the system. It merely postpones the day of reckoning.
Buying down the tax rate is exactly that kind of postponement. It’s a pressure valve. It suggests to homeowners that the situation is being managed when it’s really deferring a structural conversation that gets harder the longer it waits. Enrollment isn’t coming back. The buildings still need heat. The administrators still draw salaries. And next year the same conversation starts again.
Housing policy has the same problem. Grants, subsidies, development incentives — Vermont deploys these tools as if housing is a supply problem that the right program can fix. But housing demand doesn’t appear because units get built. It follows jobs. It follows opportunity. Without a real economic foundation to support it, subsidized development treats a symptom while the disease is ignored.
What has evolved here over the past two decades is a class structure that Vermont’s political culture isn’t built to discuss honestly. At the top: an imported ownership and professional class — remote workers, retirees, second-home buyers — whose financial position lets them absorb costs that would be catastrophic for most working families. At the bottom: a growing population dependent on subsidized housing and state services to keep afloat.
What has disappeared is the middle. The tradespeople, the small business owners, the multigenerational working families who built Vermont’s towns and sustained its civic life. They haven’t left dramatically. They’ve been priced out gradually, quietly — in a way that shows up in empty storefronts, consolidated schools, and communities that look increasingly like managed decline wearing the aesthetic of a destination.
Vermont’s labor market tells a related story. Workforce shortages in certain sectors have been addressed through expanding labor supply rather than through the wage and condition improvements a genuinely tight market would otherwise force. When workers have limited options and limited mobility, the bargaining dynamic shifts away from the worker. The people who absorb that shift most directly are working-class Vermonters already competing in those same markets.
This isn’t a judgment on individuals seeking stability. It’s an observation about who pays the economic cost when policy substitutes supply expansion for the harder work of building an economy that compensates its existing workforce fairly.
Health care makes all of this concrete. Vermont can’t recruit and retain the specialized medical professionals it needs. Oral surgeons. Surgical specialists. People whose training takes a decade and whose skills give them real choices about where to practice. Those choices respond to costs. When taxes rise and housing is expensive, and the economic environment looks stronger somewhere else, some of those professionals leave. Not dramatically. But enough, over time, to deepen shortages already straining the system.
What undermines Vermont’s policymaking most consistently is the habit of treating connected problems as separate ones. Education spending gets debated in one room. Housing in another. Health care workforce shortages go to a task force.
Meanwhile, these challenges feed each other. A heavier tax burden makes it harder to attract the professionals the health care system needs. Workforce shortages raise costs for everyone. Housing incentives can’t compensate for an economy that isn’t generating enough reasons for capable people to stay. Temporary fixes can’t substitute for the structural rethinking Vermont has been deferring for a long time.
Vermont isn’t finished. The quality of life here is genuinely exceptional — the landscape, the communities, the particular character of a small place where individuals still matter. That draws people, and it’s real.
But it isn’t a substitute for economic competitiveness. Treating it as one is a strategy for gradual decline that happens to be aesthetically pleasant on the way down.
The path forward isn’t complicated to describe. Get serious about the education cost structure — actual reduction that matches the population Vermont has now, not another study. Align housing policy with job creation. Retain the high-skilled professionals in health care who have options and are watching how the state treats them. And find policymakers willing to say clearly that buying down taxes buys time, not a future.
The real question is what Vermont does with whatever time it buys. Because sooner or later, the bill will fall due.
