 Welcome to the fifth episode of season one of Statehouse Headliners. I'm your host Guy Page. Thanks again to Zach Zorn and Orca Media for their great production assistance. You can see Statehouse Headliners online at the Vermont Daily Chronicle website and Facebook page. And you can get a free subscription to our daily column by emailing pagecommunicationsforvermontatgmail.com. So, last week, a retired Vermont lawyer read my February 26th Headliners column about proposal five, enshrining abortion as a constitutional right. He briskly replied, and I quote, The proposed constitutional amendment is very dangerous. It is offered as a means of perpetuating unrestrained abortion. But the left knows its purpose is much more broad. It would allow for taxation and taking a property to quote unquote equalize treatment of people. This is a cover for Marxism. This may involve only the Vermont Constitution, but it's actually implementation of the Sanders-Leftist strategy, Think Globally, Act Locally. Well, that was an eye-opener. So I reread section one, Purpose of Proposition Five. You can read it too on the Vermont Legislature's website. And I'll read it to you now and you can decide if he's got a point or not. Here's what it says. Chapter one, Article one of the Vermont Constitution, declares that all persons are born equally free and independent and have certain natural, inherent, and unalienable rights. Chapter one, Article seven states that government is or ought to be instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people. And then it goes on to say, the core value reflected in Article seven is that all people should be afforded all the benefits and protections bestowed by the government and that the government should not confer special advantages upon the privileged. This amendment would reassert the principles of equality and personal liberty reflected in Articles one and seven and ensure that government does not, this is the important part, does not create or perpetuate the legal, social, or economic inferiority of any class of people. Now, since Vermont joined the United States in 1791 and our Constitution was ratified in, well, I'm very sorry, since Vermont joined the United States in 1791 and our Constitution ratified in 1793 has enshrined equality for all under the law, equality under the law, including laws promoting economic opportunity and forbidding discrimination. But does our Constitution guarantee economic equality so that no one should earn or own less than anyone else? Not so much. In fact, not at all. But that's just what Prop Five seems to do. Let's pare down that last sentence to the part about economic equality. This amendment would reassert that government does not perpetuate the economic inferiority of any class of people. Hmm. A Proposition Five government would see income inequality for whatever reason, for whatever group of people, as unconstitutional. The only question remaining would be that to eliminate income inequality to what lengths should government go? So there are several bills now before the Vermont legislature that would presumably get a boost if Prop Five gets into the Vermont Constitution. These bills cover many aspects of life in Vermont. For example, housing. To enrich the property transfer tax fund that supports low-income housing, H168 would tax not just sales of properties, but sales of property-owning businesses. So there would be a property transfer tax, not only on, say, if we sell an apartment house, but if we have a business that owns apartment houses, well, that would be part of the property transfer tax too, as I read H168. On the area of campaign finance, this is something that has not gotten very much exposure at all in the media, but it's pretty important. S-47, Senate Bill 47, would eliminate business corporations as eligible to contribute to Vermont political campaigns. If you're a sole proprietor of a small business, that would be okay, but corporations, they are not listed among those eligible. Crime. This is something small, maybe even a good idea, but it's an example of attempting to address income inequality in the area of crime. H184 would let low-income people perform community service in lieu of paying civil fines, like traffic tickets. So if you got a fine for, oh, who knows what, and you didn't have much money, then you could work that off in some sort of community service. In the area of ethnic groups, H178 would exempt Indian tribe property from property taxes. You can certainly see a lot of pros and cons on that. People who believe that from the get-go, Indians have had their property seized from them, who can argue with that, right, that at the very least perhaps now we should start to be redressing that by relieving tribal property taxes. Others would say, well, that creates an added burden on the other property taxpayers. So health care, H152, would income sensitize health insurance premiums. So if a health insurance company is issuing a premium, part of it, the question will be, how much money do you make and the less money you make, the less you would pay for a premium. The state's program Medicaid already has something like that, but the private insurers, I do not believe have that, and this would push that forward. The minimum wage. Well, we all know that S23 guarantees an eventual $15 an hour. That has moved through the Senate, is now in the House. There is a similar bill, however, H137, would require equivalent earnings of $15 an hour for salaried, non-hourly workers. So it anticipates the problem, well, what if you're not being paid by the hour? Say if you have a salary, well, this law would say, got to make sure that they make at least $15 an hour. Income taxes. By taxing income over $500,000, H136 would increase the Vermont-earned income credit, which is very popular among low-income renters. So that would be a tax on high-earners, people making more than half a million dollars, and more of that money would be going to support the earned income credit, which, as you may know, is geared towards people who do not earn a lot of money, but they are needing to pay Vermont's high rental costs, and if they pay a large percentage of their money in rent, then the earned income credit helps them with that. So these bills may have merit, but if eradicating economic equality, economic inequality, I'm sorry, if eradicating economic inequality is made a constitutional responsibility of state government, good or bad, for better or for worse, bills like this will be very hard to stop. And that's all I have now for this episode. Guy Page, State House Headliners. You can reach me again by emailing pagecommunications4vt at gmail.com or by going to the Vermont Daily Chronicle website or Facebook page.