Rob Roper – Granite Grok

Clean Heat Standard Will Hurt Poor Vermonters on LIHEAP Heating Assistance

The Equity Advisory Group (EAG) to the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) heard testimony on July 9th from Richard Giddings of the Department of Children and Families about how the Clean Heat Standard law would impact low-income Vermonters who receive home heating assistance in the winter. The news was not good for LIHEAP (Low Income Heating Assistance … Read more

What “Paying Just a Little More” Really Means

Vermonters who don’t pay close attention to politics may have been surprised this month (July 2024) to find their paychecks a little lighter than expected, the result of a new payroll tax passed into law last year (Act 76).

Equity Advisory Committee Members Souring on Clean Heat Standard

Members of the Equity Advisory Group (EAG), which is assisting the Public Utilities Commission in developing “fair and just” rules to govern the Clean Heat Standard (CHS) carbon tax on heating oil, propane, natural gas, and kerosene, made some surprising—and welcome—remarks during their June 11 meeting.

Who’s Banning Books Now?

The legislature passed just this year S.220 – An act relating to Vermont’s public libraries. The ostensible need for the law was summed up by the WCAX headline, “Vermont Senate advances bill to discourage book banning.” This was, in great part, a reaction by our legislators to parents around the country objecting to highly sexualized materials … Read more

Night Cap: Expert Gives Masterclass In Why The Thing They Came To Advocate Won’t Work

When you’re getting big bucks to hold a public meeting and nobody from the public shows up, what do you do? Get one of your employees to play the role of “good citizen.” This is what happened at the first legally mandated public outreach forum that was supposed to inform the public about the Clean … Read more

Who Wins “Biggest Dunce” Award for the Biennium?

This is the 150^th Behind the Lines post since I started this page eighteen months ago at the beginning of the 2023-2024 legislative biennium. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed, shared, and grown the audience over the past year and a half, and welcome to many new subscribers who have joined in the last few weeks!

How Does New Hampshire Spend Half the Money for Better Results?

This question was posed to me the other day by a friend (I will paraphrase and omit the profanities): “How is it that New Hampshire, a state roughly the same geographic size of Vermont with about twice the population spends half the amount of taxpayer money that we do?”

A Truckload of Manure

The rhetoric surrounding the passage of the Clean Heat Carbon Tax (Act 18) was full of talk about “social justice,” a “just transition,” “engaging traditionally marginalized communities,” and “moving at the speed of trust.” Yeah, well, shocker, that was a truckload of manure!

Howard Dean vs. Phil Scott? Yes, Please!

Howard Dean made news the other day when he reminded Vermonters he was still alive. The dude is bumping up against the actuarial tables at 76, after all, and anyone born the last year Dean held public office is now of legal age to drink, which would come in handy if the increasingly radicalized Leftist activist returned to power.

Supermajority Votes for Even Higher Health Insurance Costs

Ask people why Vermont is unaffordable, and health insurance is one of the main pillars of our unaffordability crisis, along with education property taxes, the cost of housing, and energy prices. These highly regulated by our legislature plans go up every year by amounts far in excess of inflation. For 2024 alone, the Green Mountain … Read more

Clean Heat Mess Gets Even Messier – We’re taxing the poor so that the rich can benefit.”

The last time we checked in on the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) as they come up with rule recommendations regarding the Clean Heat Standard (CHS) for the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), they couldn’t decide who should own a financially valuable Clean Heat Credit created by a Clean Heat Measure (installing a heat pump, weatherizing a … Read more

Woman Palestinian flag jihad pixaby

Night Cap: The New Klan with a Nazi Twist

Watching enormous crowds of Americans shouting blatantly racist chants in support of an agenda that is unapologetically genocidal, and backed by internationally recognized terrorist organizations – met with at best indifference and at worst the active support of our elite institutions of government, news media, education, and entertainment — I can’t help but think, this … Read more

A Modest Proposal for the Homeless Hotel Debacle

It seems like we are enduring a constant kerfuffle over whether or not to extend the now-ended federally funded COVID-emergency “hotels for homeless” program with state tax dollars. Lots of them. Twenty million here, thirty million there….

More Independent Schools and More Choice Are the Property Tax Solution

Vermont taxpayers are desperate for relief, especially in regard to funding public education. The only way to provide that relief is to return spending levels on Pre-K to 12^th to something resembling normal pre-Covid levels.

Cartoon hit with taxes

Democrat Supermajority Has No Interest in Solving the Property Tax Mess They Made

Democrats in the State House were parading around this week with a banner insisting, “If you make a mess, you clean it up!” Yeah! Big talk! They think this should apply to oil companies regarding climate change (another story I’ll get to soon), but apply that message to themselves regarding the colossal property tax tsunami of a mess they’ve made for us. Well, not so much.

The Clean Heat Standard is too complicated to implement

The Clean Heat Standard (CHS), the “Rube Goldberg” carbon tax on home heating fuels, became law almost a year ago over the veto of Governor Scott. The Democrat/Progressive supermajority that passed the CHS did so without providing – or even considering in any significant detail – how it would work or what it would cost. … Read more

EV charging electric vehicle

Lessons From the Eclipse – Electrifying Everything is Dangerously Asinine.

The total solar eclipse this week was totally cool, for sure. How lucky we Vermonters were that we could just walk outside, take in this once in a generation natural phenomenon, then pop back into our houses to resume whatever it was we were doing twenty minutes earlier. Not so for the estimated 160,000 tourists … Read more

Light bulb filament original Photo by Alessandro Bianchi on Unsplash

Left Wing Logic: Nothing in Vermont Is Affordable, Why Should Energy Be?

Most people would say, if you’re in a hole, stop digging. Not Peter Sterling, the executive director for Renewable Energy Vermont, who testified before the House Environment & Energy Committee last week, posing the loopy logic that legislators shouldn’t worry about passing policies that drive up the cost of electricity because the cost of everything else is unaffordable too. What’s worse than the argument itself is that the lawmakers are apparently buying into it!

Another Dumb Constitutional Amendment….

The Democrat/Progressive Supermajority in Montpelier isn’t just oblivious to reality. They are actively hostile to it. One has to conclude that they are purposefully attempting to destroy our state economy because nobody could actually be this stupid by sheer accident.

Democrats say, “Read My Lips: Yes! New taxes!” Republicans say, GET REAL!

Literally, and I quote, on the floor of the House following a vote to make Vermont the state with the highest corporate taxes in the nation, Progressive Democrat Brian Cina of Burlington took up the microphone and told Vermonters, “Read my lips: Yes! New taxes!” Cina’s — what should we call it?