Does Republican gubernatorial candidate Randy Brock want to eliminate income sensitivity in the statewide property tax?
Gov. Peter Shumlin and the Democratic Party would certainly like you to think so. During Wednesday’s gubernatorial debate on WPTZ, Shumlin said that Brock recently told Vermont Public Radio that he wanted to end the program that lets taxpayers who earn less than $87,000 a year pay property taxes based on their income, rather than their property wealth.
He said Brock’s plan would “raise property taxes” on families earning $30,000 to $50,000 a year.
Then Shumlin looked dead into the camera and uttered the sharpest line of the night: “All I can say to Vermonters is, watch out. If you’re a middle-class Vermonter, what you just heard is that Randy is willing to reduce income sensitivity on property taxes — the one thing that’s making property taxes affordable …”
At which point Brock interjected, “Now, Governor, that’s not what I said at all. I said that we should review our entire tax code so that things that look like income taxes ought to be called income taxes.”
“Well, now you sound like Mitt Romney,” Shumlin shot back. “Specifically, how you gonna do that?”
Link to debate video — exchange starts around minute 37:40
The next morning, Dems doubled down with a press release titled “Brock Denies His Own Statements During Gubernatorial Debate.” The release included a link to an October 1 VPR story that Shumlin cited in the debate as the source of his “Brock wants to kill income sensitivity” claim.
In this case, what the story reported and what Brock claims his position is are two different things.
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“Brock says it would be inappropriate to identify any programs before the overall review has taken place.”
But it WOULD be appropriate to decide how to ‘tax” Vermonters to pay for a single payer system years before anyone knows how the system would work and what it would pay for?
Yup. And we have already been told the outlines of how it would work. According to Shumlin, all Vermonters will be covered, and private insurance will be eliminated. So let’s have the cost estimate. There’s absolutely no reason to assume it will be any less or much less than what we collectively pay for private insurance premiums now, especially considering that we will be adding tens of thousands of currently-uninsured Vermonters to the system, and that new people can move here and wait six months and get into the system. The cost of health care will not go down just because you change who the payor is, because the payment system is not the driver of health care costs; health care usage is.
And why do you put the word tax in quotation marks? There is no real dispute that if we go to an universal, publicly-funded, single payer system, there will be a price that all Vermonters will have to pay. That’s called a tax. Maybe some will pay more than others, but it’s still a tax. (Just like the Obamacare non-insurance penalty is called a tax by the US Supreme Court.) I’m not opposed to the idea of single payer. But there’s no reason to try to make it more palatable to the electorate by using misleading language. Supporters of universal, publicly-funded, single-payer healthcare need to KNOW the truth about such a system, and TELL the truth about such a system. Tell the truth and either Vermonters will support it or not. So far, Shumlin is choosing to be coy, even though he has made it clear he wants Vermont to adopt an universal, government-funded, single-payer system, and that he will settle for nithing less.
“There’s absolutely no reason to assume it will be any less or much less
than what we collectively pay for private insurance premiums now,
especially considering that we will be adding tens of thousands of
currently-uninsured Vermonters to the system, and that new people can
move here and wait six months and get into the system.”
There are, in fact, lots of reasons to think the two systems will differ as to costs. First, one clear advantage of a single-payer system is administrative simplicity: one set of forms to one payer. Experience in other countries shows that the armies of administrative assistants hired by providers and payers is no longer needed. Perhaps, this advantage will be offset by bringing in new patients, though many of these new patients will have been receiving care despite their lack of insurance. Some will pay for that care on their own. Some will try to do so and go bankrupt. Others will just become a cost to the system, paid for by those who ARE insured (in the form of higher rates) and by donations to non-profit institutions. The current system’s financial threads are not as easy to unravel as your casual remark implies.
Equally important, it is still not clear exactly what care will be covered by the system. Obviously, the answer to this question will have a big impact on costs.
The point of my previous post was simple. Until the implications of this complex, highly interwoven system are well-defined, cost estimates are likely to be wildly inaccurate: nay, useless. Anyone familiar with economic estimates knows that economic statisticians are unable not only to predict future numbers accurately, but even to correctly describe the recent past, which is why economic numbers are constantly being revised. Adding the kinds of uncertainties mentioned briefly above makes this exercise completely useless.
I put “tax” in quotes because premiums for Medicare Part B are just that: insurance premiums, not a tax. Yes, of course, the system will be paid for, but taxes are only one of several ways to achieve that end.
As long as Vermonters have all the available data — including the best estimates of cost AND the intended method of paying those costs — before making the actual decision to move to the new system, I fail to see the problem.
Obviously, however, just as Mr. Brock fears that his opponents will misconstrue his plans by using partial data and suggestions not ready for public consumption, there’s political hay to be made by those opposed to ANY attempt to change the system in fearmongering over costs and tax mechanisms which may or may not be proposed.
Good grief, it’s pretty simple. Brock is proposing to review everything in the tax code, one being potentially eliminate income sensitivity for trust funders so they can no long sit in the Mansions off Spear St and less property tax then the guy down in the New North End who lives in a simple ranch house.
Shumlin appears to be against it, supporting giving millionaires tax breaks.