With Vermont’s annual budget shrinking like CNN’s viewership, the native population is fleeing the state for more affordable regions like the Carolinas or Sudan. The subsequent drop in tax revenue has many in Montpelier racing to figure out how to shore up the shortfall.
The avant-garde senator from Windsor County, Becca White (Windsor D-3), who came out as the first openly atheist, queer, non-trinary, demi-trans-hetero-progressive in Vermont, believes she/it has a bill that will inject capital back into the public coffers faster than a meth addict on a moped.
“It’s time we taxed whiteness,” said Senator White unironically. With nearly every other aspect of Vermont life being taxed, from fuel to Ford trucks to fun, legislators were running out of ideas on what to tax next.
“We thought about taxing children, but nobody is having them anymore,” said White’s colleague from Windsor, Esme Cole, herself a mother of two cats and a ferret named Sonya.
White’s only black colleague, Joe Major, when asked if he would support a Vermont tax on whiteness, said calmly “Fo’ sho'”, before being driven away by his bulletproof Cybertruck.
Vermont is currently struggling to find funding for its public school system, much of which is funded through property taxes. However, a tax revolt is underway in many of the counties, over feeling disenchanted, disenfranchised, and disillusioned by the direction the Democrat supermajority has led the state. Despite rising property tax bills, Vermont’s students have consistently fallen in national scholastic standardized test ranking. The state is currently wondering where it will find funding amidst a shrinking population and tax base.
Sitting at a round table with other highly educated and highly high liberal women, the ideas began to slowly seep out like sap in early April.
“What about taxing food? Everyone eats food!” blurted an excited Elizabeth Burrows (Windsor D-1) as she scoured the bottom of the bag of Annie’s Organic White Cheddar Popcorn for its last bit of delicious crumbs.
“We already do that,” responded several at the table.
“Hey, White, do you have any ideas?” one asked the senator from Hartford as she checked through her social media looking for ideas.
“White, Whi-i-i-i-te…?”
Then it happened, like lightning striking Moby Dick sunbathing on an ice floe.
“Whiteness…that’s it!” yelled out the effusive lawmaker from White River Junction. “We’ll tax whiteness! Good god do you realize how much money that will bring in?”
Looking around the table at the panorama of white faces, white privilege, and white identity crisis, the bill practically wrote itself, which in fact it did later that evening with the help of ChatGPT.
With Vermont still the whitest state in the union boasting some 93 percent of its residents as stone-cold honkies (97 percent when adjusted for inflation) the legislators believe it will make Vermont one of the wealthiest states in the nation. A measly 3 percent tax on whiteness and all incomes associated with whiteness figures to nearly quadruple the current state tax revenue.
The women immediately went shopping for ways to spend the money they’d raised via the power of the political pen, while also voting to give themselves raises for a job well done.
When their counterparts on the other side of the aisle caught wind of the latest progressive tax idea, they countered with some of their own proposed taxes in a bill aptly named Progressive Tax Ideas. Among the suggestions are taxes on:
Once the bills reach committee, this session of Congress is expected to heat up just in time for summer, with another tax on air conditioners sure to follow.
