Vermont: The Cost of Joining the Gentry Class
4th June 2012
The Vermont anomaly, if you will, is more than just the readiness of mostly-urban newcomers to buy into a rural/small-town state, their advantage based on above-average levels of wealth, past achievement, political skills, and business acumen. The pre-existing Green Mountain State taxation, regulatory, and general business climate, as shown in numerous state rankings and analyses, is exactly the motivating set of governmental and grass-roots forces typically responsible for the out-migration of just such folks from (perhaps more normal) states like California, Illinois, Maryland, or New Jersey. In those places, the same factors that are a draw in Vermont have been causally linked to just the opposite phenomenon: upper-middle-class exodus patterns.
“Burdensome tax and regulatory policies will be of relative advantage to the rich and powerful, who can employ specialists to work through the maze of rules that impose traps for unwary members of the middle class.”