Vermont is a wink and a nod away from erecting statues of Lenin and Trotsky next to the Marx Museum of Modern Democrat Socialism. It’s just down and to the Left on Engles Ave. The place is loony with leftism. So this report about energy burden is a real hoot.
And I’m not saying that the researchers aren’t concerned about the problem, just that you could have saved a lot of time and digital trees if they just stated the obvious. What energy burden there is, and it’s increase – and it has increased – is entirely the fault of government meddling. Everything else is mental masturbation.
Democrats have admitted, more than once, that their policies aim to make energy cost more (increasing energy burden), and it is one of the few promises they’ve kept. Driving up energy costs adds inflationary pressure, increasing the cost of everything. This leads to a decline in weekly discretionary and primary income, what you take home, and what is left after paying for energy. Many other issues fuel these fires, but all of them are a product of meddling by busybody progressives and their army of swampy deep-state regulators.
There is a lot of chin-stroking and naval gazing, but the problem of energy burden is easily solved. Get the government out of these marketplaces. The free market can and will repair the damage in due time. But Dems must meddle, and energy, like health care (or health insurance if you think the two are not one politically), are Secular Holy Grails of social engineering, and the Left will not sit on its crooked little hands and let that work itself out.
And the Energy Burden report allows them to grow the government and appear to do something to fix a problem they created.
Total energy spending is the sum of annual costs for three categories: Electricity, Thermal, and Transportation. Energy burden is defined as annual energy spending expressed as a percentage of household income.
They go into town-by-town details, probably to make a social justice case for economic inequality whose solution is socialized energy, ignoring the highly regulated markets and meddling, which is the old cause and not a new solution.
Look at the changes in energy costs under Biden (which were at record lows under Trump).
Average expenditures are up from 19-29%. Electricity costs are up 29+%, Thermal is up 19%, and transportation (motor fuels) are up 22%. All of that is policy-driven. It’s deliberate. But the purpose of this data is not to suggest the government needs to get out of the way. In its conclusion, these “researchers” ask,
How might we help alleviate energy burden for Vermont’s most vulnerable residents? There are a range of programs from utilities and state agencies that lower the upfront cost of technologies with the potential to reduce energy burden, from cold climate heat pumps, to weatherization, to electric vehicles. Vermont’s EEUs lead and partner on a number of these programs and have historically maintained minimum spending requirements for programs that serve income-eligible residents as their primary approach to addressing energy burden.
More meddling. Programs that require the state to reduce incomes to fund those programs that only make the burden of living in Vermont more expensive.
If you’d like to do something meaningful, how about a Democrat governance burden report? Before election day would be nice.
HT | WCAX
