We are happy to announce that we have endorsed Jacob Luallen for Johnson City Commission: jacobluallen.com.

The three incumbent Commissioners running for re-election this cycle – Todd Fowler, Aaron Murphy, and Joe Wise – have spent years letting the JCPD run amok while catering to high-end housing developers, the Ballad Health monopoly, and the Chamber of Commerce. The Commissioners have willfully neglected local housing needs, and now nearly half of Johnson City renters are rent-burdened (putting at least 30% of their monthly income directly into a landlord’s pocket). Over one in five renters gives more than 50% of their earnings to a landlord just to have shelter. The people of Johnson City need a change, and Jacob is the candidate to deliver.

A participant in the recent Protect the People’s Voice Campaign, Jacob’s platform is about meeting the needs of the working people of Johnson City: affordable housing, functional public transportation, and increased transparency and accessibility in city government. He is our neighbor, and we know he is the right choice for the people of Johnson City.

But simply saying he’s the right choice will not make it so. If we want Jacob to win, it is up to us to make it happen. We need to get out to knock doors and convince our neighbors that there is an alternative to the landlord’s paradise created by Fowler, Murphy, and Wise. That’s how we won the Protect the People’s Voice Campaign. That’s how we will win again!

To get involved, check out Jacob’s campaign website or Facebook page and sign up for a canvass (or two!)

Source for our data on JC’s dire housing situation: “Preliminary Housing Needs Assessment” for Johnson City, TN, 2022.

At September 2024’s General Body Meeting, Las Vegas DSA passed a Resolution For an Anti-Zionist Las Vegas DSA in both Principle and Practice. The vote passed 90% in favor, 10% opposed.

Read the full resolution below:

Resolution For an Anti-Zionist Las Vegas DSA in both Principle and Practice

Adapted from; Resolution: For an Anti-Zionist DSA San Francisco in both Principle and Practice and Resolution: For an Anti-Zionist Houston DSA in both Principle and Practice

Whereas, and in line with Convention Resolutions #4 and #62 from 2019, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is an anti-imperialist organization;

Whereas, and in line with Convention Resolution #50 from 2019, DSA is an anti-colonialist organization committed to advancing decolonization projects;

Whereas, and in line with Convention Resolutions #41 and #45 from 2017 and Resolutions #4 and #31 from 2021, DSA is an anti-racist organization;

Whereas, and in line with Convention Resolutions #7 and #8 from 2017 and Resolution #35 from 2019, DSA National has publicly declared on numerous occasions in recent years that it “unapologetically stands in solidarity with Palestinian people everywhere;”

Whereas, Zionism – as popularized by Theodore Herzl and explicitly described by him as “something colonial,” meant to be “a wall of Europe against Asia… an outpost of [Western] civilization against [Eastern] barbarism” – is and has always been a racist, imperialist, settler-colonial project that has resulted in the ongoing death, displacement, and dehumanization of Palestinians in Palestine and in diaspora around the world;

Whereas, by Zionism, we refer to the philosophy that took hold and stands today and is a settler-colonial movement, establishing an apartheid state where the Jewish people have more rights than others, and which has resulted in Palestinian dispossession and occupation;

Whereas, Zionism transforms the victims of a millennium of European bigotry into a buffer class it scapegoats first for British, and then for American imperialism, while deliberately and ceaselessly working to identify the safety of international capitalism – a system that eighty years ago murdered two-thirds of European Jews – with the safety of Jewish people worldwide;

Whereas, and antithetical to DSA’s contemporary principles and policies, DSA’s founding merger was heavily predicated on ensuring that DSA would uphold DSOC’s (Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee) position of supporting continued American aid for Israel’s Zionist settler-colonial project, as explicitly noted in our organization’s founding merger documents (e.g., Points of Political Unity) and by Michael Harrington himself in his autobiography;

Whereas, and antithetical to DSA’s contemporary principles and policies, a number of DSA endorsed electeds (e.g., Jamaal Bowman & Nithya Raman) have consistently demonstrated a commitment to Zionism through their public opposition to BDS and/or support for legislation that harms Palestinians everywhere (e.g., public support for and votes in favor of U.S. financial aid to Israeli military, which forcefully advances the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine through systematic tactics of abuse, forcible displacement, and murder of Palestinians; governmental adoption of definitions of antisemitism that conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism, leading to the suppression of speech of Palestinians and those in solidarity with them);

Whereas, DSA’s historic and contemporary association with and enablement of Zionism has jeopardized DSA rank-and-file membership’s confidence in the integrity of DSA’s overall politics, as well as our organization’s working relationships with major Palestinian-led grassroots organizations across North America;

Whereas, DSA membership has overwhelmingly denounced Zionism through its stated principles and convention mandates since 2017 but has struggled to articulate these newfound principles into a more coherent praxis;

Whereas, the resolution “Make DSA an Anti-Zionist Organization in Principle and Praxis” (MSR #12), failed to be heard or deliberated on at the 2023 National Convention, and there is an urgent need to address this on a chapter level;

Therefore, be it resolved, LVDSA denounces the national organization’s Zionist roots and reaffirms its commitment to being an anti-racist, anti-imperialist organization by explicitly committing to being an anti-Zionist chapter– in both principle and praxis;

Be it resolved, LVDSA once again reaffirms our organization’s commitments to Palestinian liberation and the broad, international BDS movement

LVDSA’s endorsed candidates hold true to the following basic commitments:

• Publicly support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement;
• Refrain from any and all affiliation with the Israeli government or Zionist lobby groups, such as, but not limited to, AIPAC, J Street, or Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), including participating in political junkets or any event sponsored by these entities;
• Pledge to oppose legislation that harms Palestinians, such as…
  • Any official adoption of a redefinition of antisemitism to include opposition to Israel’s policies or legal system, or support for BDS (e.g., IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism);
  • Legislative and executive efforts to penalize individuals, universities and entities that boycott Israel;
  • Legislative and executive efforts to send any military or economic resources to Israel;
• Pledge to support legislation that supports Palestinian liberation, such as…
  • Legislative and executive efforts to end Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians and promote Palestinians’ rights to return to and live freely on the land (e.g., H.R. 2590), the right to resistance, the right to self-determination (statehood), and Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine;
  • Condemnation of Israeli apartheid and colonial practices (e.g., H.Res. 751);
  • Attempts to end the spending of U.S. tax dollars on Israel and/or sanction Israel until it ceases its practices of apartheid and colonialism;

Be it resolved, potential candidates who cannot commit to the aforementioned basic expectations will be disqualified from endorsement by LVDSA at every level;

Be it resolved, endorsed candidates who do not commit to the aforementioned basic expectations will have their LVDSA endorsements swiftly revoked;

Be it resolved, all LVDSA members who are credibly shown to:

1. Be consistently and publicly opposed to BDS, Palestinian liberation, the right to return and land back, the Palestinian right to self-determination, or
2. Be currently affiliated with the Israeli government or any Zionist lobby group(s), or
3. Have knowingly and intentionally provided material aid to the state of Israel’s Zionist colonialist project

will be considered in substantial disagreement with LVDSA’s principles and policies, and thus, the chapter will initiate the expulsion process in line with Article 10, Section 3 of the LVDSA bylaws;

Be it resolved, members expelled on these grounds may be reconsidered for membership reinstatement once per year provided they write a statement to chapter membership that 1) demonstrates a basic understanding of Palestinian issues and Zionism and 2) apologizes for past anti-solidaristic behaviors with a commitment to putting their new anti-Zionist principles into practice.

Are you interested in becoming the best organizer you can be? Do you want to expand socialism here in Milwaukee, but are unsure of where and how to start? Have you been involved but feel like the project did not go anywhere? If you answered yes to any of these questions, the Milwaukee Socialist Organizer Class is for you! 

This nine week program will focus on holistically teaching you to be an unstoppable organizer who builds socialism, changes hearts and minds, and impacts our city.  You will learn direct action organizing, as defined by Organizing for Social Change: Midwest Academy Manual for Activists, in which we organize actions, campaigns, and tactics to “1) win real, immediate, concrete improvement in people’s lives . . . 2) Give people a sense of their own power . . . 3) Alter the relations of power.” 

Interested individuals will apply (Click here, which is due by 11:59 p.m. on Monday September 23, 2024), be interviewed, and enter the program if selected.  DSA membership is not required to participate, but is encouraged. 

This education program will be a combination of in-person events with virtual events if necessary. Each unit will be roughly a week, with a week break in the middle of the program. Each unit will consist of classroom-style instruction in the unit topic (no more than 2 hours, which will be in-person), field work in organizing (which will be at least 3 hours and consist of having conversations, moving people to action, and building infrastructure for a strong socialist movement involving several types of campaigns), and time for personal reflection. Each participant must commit to the entire program and, unless excused, attend every unit instruction, and field work session.  Missing more than two classes and field work sessions may result in removal from the program.  

This is the sixth time this program has been offered, and it is back by popular demand!  The two instructors have updated and revised the course to make you even more prepared to lead in socialism.  

Additionally, there is a strong chance that this class will be taught in a room that is not wheelchair accessible.  

Time commitment per week: 

Unit instruction: 2 hours 

Organizing work: 3 hours 

Miscellaneous tasks: 1 hour 

Total time per week: 6 hour

Weekly Schedule 

Class will be conducted on Thursday evenings from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. and held in-person at Zao MKE, located at 3219 E Kenwood Blvd, Milwaukee, 53211.  

Field work will be held at regular intervals over the week, with options to organize at several points during the week: 

(tentative schedule, subject to change . . .) 

Saturdays, 9:00 a.m. until 12:00 p.m.

Sundays 12:00 p.m. until 3:00 p.m. 

Mondays 5:30 until 8:30 p.m. 

Program Timeline: 

September 23 at 11:59 p.m.:

Application deadline – apply here

September 26:

Start of nine week program ( class held, 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.), held at Zao MKE, located at 2319 E Kenwood Blvd, Milwaukee, WI 53211

October 3:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

October 10:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

October 17:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

October 24:

Break Week – No Class

October 31:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

November 7:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

November 14: 

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

November 21: 

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

November 22: 

End of class party (tentative) 

November 25:

Completion of program

Units

Each unit helps to answer the question: what is organizing? 

Welcome: what is organizing?

• Get to know participants and instructor
• Define scope of class and intentions 
• Determine goals and desired outcomes 

Organizing is one-on-one Conversations

• Learn the 7 point organizing conversation 
• Practice the conversation and its elements 

Organizing is building the committee and the campaign 

• The importance (or not) of the committee
• Power Mapping the campaign 
• Strategy Chart 

Organizing is holistic productivity 

• Traction versus distraction 
• Time management and its importance
• The Reverse Calendar 
• Overcoming blocks to action

Organizing is a mindset 

• Acknowledging hurdles and setbacks 
• Failure is a great option
• Develop a practice to keep you going

Organizing is raising money and managing it

• Why money is OK 
• How to bring energy and money to your campaign 
• The basics of campaign budgeting and finance 

Organizing is communications

• What does “messaging” mean? 
• The power of media 
• Writing workshop

Organizing is bringing it all together

• You’ve got momentum – now what? 
• Recap of unit themes

Reviews

Here is what previous students have to say about the Milwaukee Socialist Organizer Class: 

“[Before the class] I had no idea about the actual work of organizing.  Now I feel confident that I would be able to become a leader in a campaign setting . . .” 

“I loved the practical application of socialism . . . [and] I loved the far-reaching application of some of the class content.” 

“This is a great way to move into the world of socialism. . . thank you so much for offering this course” 

“This [class] is a great first step for anyone looking to start organizing . . .” 

“I radically grew in my comfort around being upfront and simply being able to approach a complete stranger with a potentially controversial topic.” 

“New organizers and experienced organizers can benefit from this class.” 

“Generally speaking my confidence level just interacting with people about socialism has gone through the roof.  I have been given a phenomenal overview of how to organize and I feel confident that I can find out what works best for me in the future.”  

“It was great to grow as an organizer within the confines of a welcoming community/instructor.” 

“I feel more confident organizing outside of an electoral context.”  

Meet your instructors: 

Alex Brower

Alex Brower is a labor leader, socialist organizer, and the chapter co-chair of the Milwaukee Democratic Socialists of America. Professionally, Alex is the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans, which organizes union retirees.  In his organizing work, Alex has saved jobs from privatization, helped workers win a union voice on the job, defeated a temp agency, organized against a proposed iron-ore mine, helped bring comprehensive sex education to Beloit Public Schools, and won workplace healthcare for many uninsured MPS Substitute Teachers. As an MPS substitute teacher and former Milwaukee Rec. Department instructor, Alex brings a host of experience teaching others. Alex has also been a candidate for Milwaukee City Comptroller and School Board, running both times as a socialist. 

Autumn Pickett

Autumn Pickett is a union organizer and Communications Director for American Federation of Teachers – Wisconsin. She helped win back voting rights for 20,000 students while attending college in Indiana, protect 100’s of custodial and grounds crew jobs from privatization across Wisconsin, sunk Billionaire Howard Schultz’s 2016 presidential run, use organizing tactics that garnered national headlines, and mentor dozens of YDSA chapters across the country that continue to make real wins for working people. She has served on the National Coordinating Committee for YDSA, as Milwaukee DSA’s Education Officer, and currently represents Milwaukee DSA on the statewide Socialists in Office committee. Autumn is excited to bring her years of experience mentoring new socialist organizers over to the Milwaukee Organizer Class for the first time and help build a people powered movement in Cream City alongside each of you.

Any questions? 

Contact Alex Brower at 414-949-8756 or milwaukeedsa@gmail.com 

Apply now!

Apply here, or copy and paste this URL into your web browser: https://forms.gle/7eja5qqaJtxoVqta8 

Note: posts by individual CVDSA members do not necessarily reflect the views of the broader membership or of its leadership and should not be regarded as official statements by the chapter.

All political parties’ policy priorities reflect the material interests of their power bases. A workers’ party, which derives its primary support from labor unions, can say so directly and proudly. Every other type of party has to make up some other reason for why it’s doing whatever it’s doing, which its representatives usually end up believing wholeheartedly.

In Vermont, the big topic on all three major parties’ minds is property tax. This year, the average homeowner received a 13.8% hike on the largest portion of their bill: the homestead education tax, which pays for public schools. Amid widespread outrage, all three parties have agreed that something must be done to protect struggling homeowners.

For Republicans and many Democrats, that means cutting spending. For the Progressives, it above all means designing a more “equitable” tax system. Their apparent instincts about how to do it say a lot about the political and economic makeup of the party.

The Burlington Progressives, whose municipal electeds played no role in boosting the homestead education tax rate, evidently share the statewide party’s concern about placing an excessive burden on the average homeowner. Municipal taxes account for a smaller portion of the average homestead’s overall bill, but naturally, taxpayers are eager for savings at every level.

After her campaign platform’s lengthy “community safety” plank, Progressive Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak’s number-one policy proposal last winter was to “create a more progressive and sustainable municipal property tax system.” Several of the Progressive Burlington City Councilors, who released a video on the same theme this summer, have also pointed to the “regressive” nature of the current property tax regime.

They’re not the first politicians, nationally or locally, to level this criticism. But what does the word “regressive” mean in the context of property tax specifically? There are a few possibilities.

Across the country, advocates for tax fairness have observed that local authorities tend to assess cheap houses at a significantly higher percentage of their market value than expensive houses, and they can cite various studies to back up the claim. Intriguingly, the City of Boston abates the first $100,000 of every home’s assessed value – a big chunk of the total for a modest house, but only a small fraction for a mansion – partly as a means to counteract the unfairness produced by this tendency, which may prove difficult to correct in itself.

In Burlington, many of the complaints about property taxes focus on 2021’s citywide reappraisal in particular, which assessed commercial properties at what seemed to be a pandemic-era low point, thereby shifting more of the responsibility for funding city services onto homeowners. This is “regressive” in a hazy, populist sense in which “business owners and landlords are getting off easy” while “ordinary folks” pick up the slack, but it’s not clear that many commercial properties actually were assessed incorrectly, and the ideal division of the tax burden between homestead property owners and commercial property owners is subjective in any case. Many American cities charge separate rates for residential, commercial, and even industrial properties, but we have no established formula that would allow us to say in mathematical terms whether one tax regime is more progressive than another on that basis.

Elsewhere, critics of the regressive property tax have lamented its flat rate. While the income tax has a bracketed structure, with higher rates for higher earners, a homeowner with a $200,000 house pays the same property tax rate as a homeowner with a $2 million house. Introducing progressive marginal tax rates for more expensive properties would go hand-in-hand with abating the first portion of the property value in that both changes would mirror the structure of the federal income tax, which, thanks to the standard deduction, offers a 0% tax rate on earnings below $14,600.

Finally – and most importantly, it seems – a property tax is said to be regressive in the same way as a sales tax. A sales tax is regressive because, over the course of a year, a high earner pays less in sales tax as a percentage of their annual income than a low earner does. This will hold true even if, as expected, the high earner treats themself to a significantly higher level of consumption than the low earner can.

Under this formulation, there are many examples of regressive taxes – from the payroll tax that funds Social Security to user fees on public goods, such as bus fares – but only one tax can be strictly progressive: the income tax itself. On a trivial, case-by-case basis, even a wealth tax on  multimillionaires would sometimes fail the test.

Imagine, for instance, a pair of plutocrats, one of whom invests primarily in growth stocks while the other invests primarily in dividend stocks. The former may have a slightly larger net worth than the latter, and if so, they’d pay a slightly bigger wealth tax, even though their friend’s income would be greater on account of the dividends.

Does this “regressive” hypothetical present a problem? Not to me. Obviously, the purpose of the wealth tax is to tax wealth, not income. In a sense, the same is true of the property tax. Targeting a single asset and declining to account for liabilities, it nonetheless remains the closest thing that we have in America today to a wealth tax.

Consider another hypothetical. A 68-year-old Burlingtonian, who owns a house worth $800,000, has retired after a remunerative career. Their overall net worth is $1.5 million, but so far, they haven’t cashed in on any of the unrealized capital gains in their IRA. Thanks to Social Security and interest on savings and bonds, their income in 2023 was $50,000.

Half a mile away, in a crummy apartment, lives a 31-year-old renter who earned $55,000 last year. They own no significant assets, so due to student debt, their net worth is negative.

According to the crude theory of progressive taxation, the renter should have paid more in taxes than the homeowner. By this understanding, the property tax, which prevented that from happening, intruded regressively upon the perfect justice of the income tax.

Yet the fundamental principle of progressive taxation is not necessarily that income matters above all but that an individual’s tax burden should depend upon their “ability to pay.” Once we remember that wealth exists, we realize that we have no way to measure with certain accuracy or confidence that ability for anyone. Neither the City of Burlington nor the State of Vermont knows my net worth or yours; the state knows our income, which functions with imperfect reliability as a proxy for general economic well-being.

We should still strive to achieve tax fairness, but the problem of how to do it is more ambiguous than many of the concept’s proponents let on, and the retiree of relatively high wealth and relatively low income presents an especially ambiguous case. And it’s not an unusual one in Vermont, which has the third-highest median age in the country. In order to grapple honestly with the difficult question of how much the aforementioned retiree should pay in taxes, we have to recognize some kind of difference between them and the no-wealth, low-income worker.

Over the next year or two, we may see various new “equity”-based proposals on the city and state levels to phase out or reduce homestead property tax as a revenue source, with new or increased income taxes replacing it, or to expand income-based property tax adjustments. Such proposals are incomplete if they assess their own progressivity strictly as a comparative measure of how much high-, middle-, and low-income Vermonters would pay as a share of their income under the revised system. Ideally, they would also consider their progressivity in terms of how much high-, middle-, and low-wealth Vermonters would pay as a share of their wealth.

This alternative method of gauging progressivity would not suddenly unmask the progressive income tax as a regressive nightmare. In general, of course, low-wealth people tend also to have lower incomes (and thus pay little in tax), and high-wealth people tend to have higher incomes (and thus pay more). Senior citizens make up only 21% of Vermont’s population, and the truly wealthy ones receive big enough regular payouts from their investments to remain high-income even after retirement, if they ever had a job beyond “investing” in the first place.

Yet an up-close look at each wealth ventile on our hypothetical graph would reveal a huge number of disconcerting outliers and notable microtrends. In the low-wealth groups, we’d find high-salary but nearly assetless young professionals paying a big income tax; in the middle-wealth groups, we’d find ordinary retirees paying extremely little income tax despite the considerable value of their paid-off houses; and in the highest-wealth group, we’d find one-percenters with stock portfolios so enormous that, even with significant investment income and a high tax rate on it to match, the income tax could never amount to anything more than a miniscule sliver of their wealth.

How would we address these subgroups? The solution would not be to discontinue the income tax but to introduce additional taxes to ensure that every middle-wealth Vermonter contributes in a reasonable way to the system and to ensure that all high-wealth Vermonters pay considerably more than an income tax alone can extract. The homestead property tax isn’t the best way to do even a portion of the job, but it has some merits – most of all, the very considerable merit of existing already.

A wealth-based analysis of tax progressivity can only be imagined, since Vermont doesn’t collect precise data on personal wealth. But if such data existed, would anyone want to crunch the numbers? The movement in support of a more strongly income-based tax system transparently includes both blue-collar homeowners for whom the property tax represents a serious expense for which they must economize and bourgeois retirees who’d simply prefer not to pay. Without the political power of the latter, it wouldn’t have come so far. Both groups benefit by keeping silent about the mixed composition of their coalition and presenting their preferred tax policy as a truly straightforward, across-the-board improvement in equity.

In Burlington, where the median home value exceeds $500,000, the rare figure of the working-class homeowner occupies an especially outsized role in local political discourse. This is so the bourgeois homeowner can hide behind them. Most Burlingtonians are renters, and among working-class Burlingtonians specifically, it’d be hard to argue that renters aren’t an overwhelming supermajority. Homeownership is especially rare in the wards that tend to vote for Progressives, but you wouldn’t know it from the party’s rhetoric or policy focus.

I’ve gone to a few meetings and events organized by the Burlington Progressives and have observed the demographic character of the party’s active supporters and internal committee members, most of whom belong to a generation where homeownership wasn’t necessarily an outlandish dream for a family of relatively modest means. I don’t think it would be unfair to assume that this plugged-in group of longtime partisans plays a larger role than the average Progressive voter in determining the party’s political outlook. Logically, the average Progressive voter wouldn’t care at all about property taxes because the average Progressive voter doesn’t pay property taxes, except indirectly as a portion of their rent. For them, the rent is what matters.

As a transplant, I found the Progs’ fixation on the injustice of property tax especially striking upon arriving in Vermont from New York City, where every left-of-center politician has set a laser focus – rhetorically, at least – on the problem of high rents. Among all the meetings that I attended as a socialist activist in North Brooklyn or as a journalist covering the Democratic Party in a part of town that would soon elect three DSA-endorsed public officials, I never once encountered a proposal to lower homeowners’ property taxes as a means to make the city more affordable. The idea would’ve seemed comical. Now I hear about it all the time, and it’s driven me crazy enough to write this essay.

Of course, left-wing politicians in different places have to adapt to different realities. But the difference between the rates of homeownership in Burlington and New York City isn’t as dramatic as you might think: here, 38% of homes are owner-occupied, and down there, 33% are.

Deprioritizing property tax reform could help the Burlington Progressives form a more vibrant and meaningful connection with both young people and the city’s working-class majority. It might also benefit their municipal electeds’ political fortunes for the simple reason that municipalities have very little power to change the tax system, which means that a mayor or city councilor’s promise of action is very likely to yield disappointment.

State law determines what sorts of taxes cities in Vermont may collect and how those taxes work. Without action in Montpelier, Burlington can’t set different tax rates for different types of properties (e.g., second homes), create progressive tax brackets for expensive properties, or introduce a preset abatement.

Unfortunately, it’s not clear that anyone outside of a few policy wonks has any interest in any of those reforms anyway. The central demand of the “low- and moderate-income homeowners” in Burlington is to modify the municipal property tax for the purpose of duplicating the income-sensitized structure of the homestead education tax. The State of Vermont’s Education Fund derives its revenue through a complex mathematical formula that sets a property tax rate for each town based on the local school district’s spending per “equalized” pupil, but only one third of homeowners pay that rate, while households earning below $128,000 receive a sliding deduction, capped at $5,600. On the municipal level, only households earning below $47,000 receive a deduction, capped at $2,400, which the state refunds to the municipality.

On its own, the City of Burlington could theoretically mimic the education tax’s more expansive deduction in a jury-rigged, back-end fashion by offering a sliding rebate on municipal taxes for homeowners who would submit their income tax returns to City Hall as proof of their low or moderate earnings. Calculating their refunds and mailing out their checks would probably amount to a pretty costly administrative burden, but the bigger foreseeable obstacle is that, in order to maintain revenue neutrality, the city would have to convince residents to authorize a big increase on the statutory municipal property tax rate, which would become the effective rate only for high earners. A hard-to-understand promise of progressive redistribution on the basis of income – in which a lot of the biggest checks, however, probably would go out to comfortably retired Joan Shannon voters in the southern Hill Section – might not sway a majority of voters.

Another problem of sorts is that, even with income sensitivity, homeowners still hate the homestead education tax, still say it’s regressive, and still want it abolished. On the state level, this is a Progressive priority, and in 2022, a legislative committee authored a report that put forward a blueprint for funding public schools via income tax.

Unlike mayors and city councilors, state legislators have real power to change Vermont’s tax system. The current proposals are a little disappointing.

Right now, Vermont’s tax system funds public education through local property tax bills whose payments subsequently mingle in a statewide Education Fund that redistributes them to the school districts, and its rather clever design ensures that a property-rich town and a property-poor town will always pay the same education property tax rate as long as both towns’ school districts decide to spend the same amount of money per “equalized” pupil. The purpose of the system is to allow property-poor towns to spend more on education than they otherwise could afford to, and one of the results is that, in the towns where the houses are expensive, homeowners pay a lot more property tax than they would in a purely local tax system, where a property-rich town could have a nice school even with a pretty low tax rate.

This creates a lot of anger about education property taxes among the Vermonters with the loudest collective political voice of all: upper-middle-class homeowners. They represent one more big reason why getting rid of education property taxes has become a popular idea, despite its radicalism of a sort (currently, every American state uses property tax as a major revenue source for education). According to Vermont Public, the proposed method for doing so – replacing the homestead education tax with a new income tax based on the same fundamental structure, where income-rich towns and income-poor towns would pay identical rates for identical per-equalized-pupil spending – would offer “modest decreases” in taxation for most Vermonters who earn between $90,000 and $175,000. It would make up the difference progressively, with “significant increases” for Vermonters earning more than $250,000, but on its own terms, reducing the tax burden of the former group is a bad idea.

I’m not sure that “modest decreases” would pacify them anyway. With the homestead education tax abolished, their anger would likely shift to the perceived problem of excessive spending. One of the major critiques of Vermont’s system for funding education observes that it discourages cost containment because, for each local district, which sets its own budget, the full benefit of each dollar spent stays local while the cost of each dollar spent is to some degree distributed throughout the state. This incentive structure doesn’t seem like a big problem as long as you’re in favor of generous school budgets, but the system ends up producing a total education expenditure derived from the clumsy interplay between 122 self-interested school districts and a mathematical formula that hardly anyone really understands, and in the end, the figure feels pretty random. Evidently, it can generate a lot of outrage.

The best way to undo the byzantine structure of Vermont’s education funding system would be to get rid of local budgetary decision-making altogether and to allow the legislature simply to set an education budget on the state level, sending an identical per-equalized-pupil distribution to every school in Vermont while prohibiting rich towns from supplementing this funding for their own schools through any local mechanism. This would create a clear, simple process for determining whether we as a society want to spend more or less on education than we currently do, but there’s no visible push on the state level to adopt a system of this kind.

Instead, we have a big, longstanding debate about whether to continue to fund schools through an education property tax tied to local spending or to introduce an education income tax tied to local spending. The income-based tax would have benefits in terms of progressivity by the standard measure – which, for all its limitations, should probably remain the standard measure – but it’s worth noting that the income-sensitized property tax is not wildly regressive, either.

2022’s Act 175 report contains a graph showing the amount of education property tax currently paid as a percentage of income for low earners, middle earners, and high earners. By fits and starts, the line goes up until it hits the 18th ventile (Vermonters who make $141,000 to $171,000), where it begins to descend and then drops precipitously for households with more than $233,000 in income. The same graph would look better with an income-based tax.

It would be very difficult to correct the education property tax’s tendency to go relatively easy on the highest earners. We could make the tax system as a whole more progressive by replacing the education property tax, as proposed, or by reducing its share within rich people’s overall tax burden without reducing or abolishing the tax itself. The latter could be achieved simply by upping the normal income tax at the highest levels. Think of it this way: a left-wing government’s ideal tax system would for various purposes include secondary and tertiary taxes of imperfect progressivity (New York City’s failed congestion pricing, for example) – it doesn’t matter much unless the sum total of all the taxes is insufficiently progressive.

Earlier this year, Fair Share Vermont advocated for H.828, a somewhat gimmicky proposal to add a 3% marginal “surcharge” on individual income over $500,000. Logically, it would make a lot more sense to add new income tax brackets at normal increments than to tax every dollar between $229,550 and $499,999 at the same rate and then insert a bump at $500,000, but the political experts must’ve determined that people making $400,000 are essentially sympathetic while people making $600,000 aren’t. Still, it didn’t pass, although it came pretty close.

Fair Share Vermont also pushed for H.827, a more radical bill that would’ve applied a tax on unrealized capital gains for taxpayers worth more than $10 million. This proposal, which presidential candidate Kamala Harris now claims to support on the federal level, represented an important recognition that wealth – not just income – matters, yet it restricted its scope to what people seem to regard as the most income-like portion of an individual’s wealth: the net appreciation of their assets over the course of a year, a sort of on-paper income that would be taxed as real income.

Politically, this move had two potential benefits: a lot of people don’t know what unrealized capital gains are, so it might be hard to stir up popular outrage over an effort to tax them; and a tax that looks a lot like an income tax might be conceptually less frightening to those in the know than a tax on net assets, since we’ve already acclimated ourselves to income tax. But it had a big practical downside (or would have if it had passed): the tax’s volatility.

In a year where the stock market goes down, a tax on unrealized gains would collect virtually no revenue at all, whereas a tax on net assets would remain relatively stable. The latter might also hit a more expansive range of assets: it’d be reasonable to ask Vermont’s lone billionaire to include a rough estimate of the market value of his Picasso in a calculation of his overall wealth, but his accountant genuinely might not know how much its price has changed from one year to the next. Once more, the perceived political advantages of a somewhat stupider tax didn’t get it across the finish line.

Proposals of this general sort, however, remain the real key to improving Vermont’s tax system. Crucially, they are not revenue-neutral. They bring in money.

Social democracy costs a lot of money – Denmark collects almost twice as much tax per dollar of GDP than the United States does – and a left-wing fiscal politics should begin with an understanding that almost no one in the United States is overtaxed in absolute terms. A middle-class American is overtaxed in a relative sense: they should be paying somewhat more, while a wealthy American should be paying much, much more. But the movement for property tax reform in Vermont promotes the notion that a vast swath of homeowners pay too many actual dollars in tax and that we need to find a way to make them pay fewer while maintaining revenue at its existing level.

This won’t get us anywhere. While we can’t ask people to pay for government services that don’t yet exist in our country or our state, we can ask them – moderate-income homeowners included – to pay more to shore up our existing underfunded public sector, where improvements would help generate an appetite for new social programs.

This isn’t to say that every property tax reform idea is bad. Some are very good, although the good ones (like transitioning to a land-value tax) tend to get less attention than the mixed-at-best ones, which appear to derive a lot of their political momentum from a popular misunderstanding of how property tax works. Most homeowners believe that if the value of their house has gone up, so too has their property tax burden. In reality, public services cost whatever they cost, and unless a home has risen in value proportionally more than the average property, its owner’s share of that cost stays the same.

Partly for that reason, dramatic mismatches between a homeowner’s property tax bill and their ability to pay are fairly infrequent. Property value inflation in an in-demand city (or in a state with a housing shortage) may place an outrageous price tag on a middle-sized, middle-quality house, but the city asks the middle-class owner of that house to cover roughly the same middling percentage of its spending as it did when its owner deemed the house affordable to buy. Over the years, however, the cost of public services has gone up, and the owner may blame an unfair property tax burden for a bill that, to them, no longer feels appropriate.

The homeowner imagines that someone else is getting a free ride, and of course they’re right in a way. There’s no persuasive philosophical justification for taxing the value of property but not taxing the value of stocks or bonds. It’s not a coincidence that real estate is the only form of personal wealth whose ownership isn’t concentrated almost exclusively among the investor class and also the only form of personal wealth whose ownership comes with a tax.

But if we created a true wealth tax tomorrow, we’d probably want to keep the property tax, too, because, for ease of collection, the wealth tax would likely begin at a very high net worth, while the property tax would ensure that we continue to capture a portion of the wealth at lower levels. And until then, the abolition of the property tax – or even just of the homestead education portion – would seem to dim the prospects for enacting a wealth tax, since the argument against both is basically the same: “Hey, just because I have a valuable asset, that doesn’t mean I have cash lying around to pay a tax on it.” We can’t afford to make that argument victorious.

Moreover, after replacing the property tax – or the lion’s share of it, anyway – with a second income tax, we might have a harder time raising the normal income tax thereafter. Immediately, Vermonters would begin paying the highest total income tax rate in the country. At some point, assetless earners would begin to contend that, by placing too large a burden on income and almost none on property, we’re advantaging current homeowners and taxing away the next generation’s ability to build wealth of its own.

It wouldn’t be a disaster if the legislature did it anyway. It sounds insane to say so after writing thousands of words on the topic, but I don’t especially care one way or the other. Whether we fund schools through property tax or income tax ultimately has very little to do with the core economic injustices in our state. Right now, a Vermont household earning $40,000 annually, if it pays the education property tax, contributes $800; although details remain uncertain, a bracketed education income tax would likely bring that figure down to about $680, and while the same unimpressive savings could be achieved in a hundred other ways, the household in question wouldn’t say no to $120. What troubles me is the Progressives’ excessive focus on this battle.

It shows whom they’re talking to, and in those conversations, the cruder arguments against the education property tax end up trickling down into an equal hostility against property tax on the municipal level, where there’s no realistic plan to replace it with a municipal income tax. Instead, we’ll just have to give in to cheapskate homeowners and defund our city.

A common knock against the property tax in general, for example, is that it strains the average retiree’s ability to “age in place,” but this can be viewed as a bug or – particularly within a politics that aims to reconceptualize housing as a public utility, not a private asset – as a feature. Disincentivizing empty-nesters from continuing to live in big, energy-eating, single-family houses, instead of passing them on to the families with children who actually need space, makes sense, but unfortunately, Vermont doesn’t currently offer a lot of opportunities for easy downsizing.

That’s because, for decades, homeowners have used their political power to prevent the development of multifamily housing. We need to change that. In the meantime, retired homeowners can continue to count on the Vermont Property Tax Credit to ease their burden. I wouldn’t support expanding the municipal deduction – $47,000 sounds like a low ceiling until you remember that Vermont’s smaller tax credit for renters expires at $23,900 in individual income in Chittenden County (or at $34,100 for a family of four) and even less elsewhere, and somehow our politicians never talk about it – but I could make peace with the state’s current program with just a couple changes.

First, very expensive houses should be fully ineligible, regardless of their owners’ incomes. We don’t owe anyone the ability to live in a mansion; if they can’t afford the property tax, they should cash in and move somewhere normal. Second, if the program genuinely intends to prevent forced sales and tax lien foreclosures (that is, if it intends to prevent displacement, not simply to give away public dollars to homeowners), we should defer the deducted tax until the home’s sale instead of forgiving it. We have to take seriously the need to raise revenue if we’re going to build a different kind of society.

Instead, thanks to a liberal susceptibility to contrived middle-class sob stories, the Progs are playing a part in driving a Reaganite taxpayer revolt by helping to convince homeowners that they’re all getting ripped off. Of the six elected Progressives serving the City of Burlington, four are homeowners themselves, and that probably makes a difference. They may still love income-based taxation, but on the municipal level, the property tax is what we have, and if we can’t embrace it, we can’t do much.

It’s true that the municipal tax rate in Burlington is already higher than in rural towns. I’d like to see it go higher still, but there are limits. Half an hour south, Vermonters in Charlotte pay little in municipal property tax because they live in a rich, quiet suburb that doesn’t need a police department, but most of them work in Burlington, earning large incomes that they wouldn’t have if not for the particular economic opportunities afforded by a city, which can’t operate without an expensive municipal workforce. Using this reasoning, we must demand injections of state-level funding for urban services – most of all, public transit, which, at a high level, always requires broader support. The whole state benefits when its cities prosper.

But we can’t wait around for the state to save us. Regular Burlington homeowners have to be willing to pay for a functional city, and their leaders have to tell them that it’s their responsibility to do so. A sentimental leftism with a fuzzy class analysis – under which we’re all innocents and victims beside the billionaires and big corporations – becomes a major obstacle in this task. Without a change of perspective, things will get worse, and there are bad signs already.

For instance, in June, facing a major budgetary deficit, Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak declined to use the full authorized amount of a new public safety tax increase, sparing homeowners from paying the rate that they themselves, in a reactionary fit of panic about crime that temporarily overrode their usual stinginess, had approved at Town Meeting Day. Revenue from the public safety tax can’t directly pay for anything other than police and fire, but because that revenue covers only a fraction of those departments’ budgets, a boost could’ve defrayed a portion of the general fund transfer that pays for the rest, freeing up those dollars for other parts of city government, which, as it is, had to leave 17 positions unfilled.

Ultimately, the bare-bones staffing at City Hall – which inevitably affects the quality of public services, which most of all affects the quality of life of Burlingtonians who can’t afford to buy houses – isn’t Mulvaney-Stanak’s fault, but instead of presenting this year’s austerity as an unfortunate necessity that we must work to reverse, she framed the FY25 budget as a “right-sizing” of city government. This is just normal fiscal conservatism, and that’s where we’re headed.

On tonight’s episode of RPM, we’ll talk about how the “border crisis” is manufactured under capitalism and break down some of the dangerous presidential election year framing we see from both Republicans and Democrats.  

You’ll hear from Yvette Borja, abolitionist and Laura E. Gomez Teaching Fellow at UCLA Law. Yvette lived and organized in Tucson for 6 years and will tell us what it’s really like on the ground in Southern Arizona along the border and why there are no single issue voters. We’ll also hear from Luisa and Tristan, members of the DSA IC International Migration Working Group, about that working group’s new webinar series, revitalizing migration organizing efforts during a presidential election year and so much more.  

To listen to Radio Chachimbona: https://www.radiocachimbona.com/

And you can follow Yvette on Instagram @RadioChachimbona

You can read DSA statement on Migration and International Solidarity Between Working People here: https://www.dsausa.org/statements/statement-on-migration-and-international-solidarity-between-working-people/

And visit dsaic.org/MigrantRights to register for upcoming webinars. 

SV DSA is holding a picnic for our August Chapter Meeting! If you are a Member or just want to learn more about DSA, come join us for a delicious summer picnic!
We will be voting on an anti-zionist resolution and discussing upcoming events including a Black August Brake Light Clinic and canvassing for our endorsed candidates!
Date: Saturday, August 24th
Time: 1:00pm – 3:00pm
Place: Sylvan Park, 600 Sylvan Ave

The post Silicon Valley DSA August Chapter Meeting appeared first on Silicon Valley DSA.

Submission from a member of Cleveland DSA

An “hourly rate of pay” is such a universal practice that it might even seem strange to question it. Even a salaried worker’s pay is usually derived from an hourly rate, which is theoretically superfluous. It cannot have always been this way; it’s only within the last few years or so that reliable timekeeping devices became truly widespread. So where did the arbitrary standard of hourly pay originate?

The answer lies in the advent of the modern factory system. If you were to time travel to any era before the rise of mass industry (which was, at risk of offending any sticklers for historical precision, roughly around the 17th century), asking anyone what they were paid for each hour they worked would likely yield a rather perplexed response. Let’s say you were to go to a 15th century blacksmith and say “I want to pay you to make horseshoes for me for one hour. What would you charge me?” They would likely respond, “What are you talking about? Just buy the horseshoes! They’re 15 shillings a piece.” (I don’t know how much a horseshoe costs or what a shilling was worth)

Being the persistent time-traveler that you are, let’s say you pressed the issue and insisted on paying this blacksmith for an hour of their work. The metalworker might actually become indignant and snap back with “Just buy the damn horseshoes, you weirdo! Why do you need to know when I’m working on them? Why do you want to control my time? Who do you think you are, a king? And what do you think I am, your slave?”

Ye olde blacksmith is right, if you think about it. Being paid “by the piece” makes far more sense than setting an arbitrary timeframe that determines compensation for a generalized concept of “work” or “labor”. Wouldn’t it make more sense for a barista to be paid by how many drinks they make and sell, or for an assembly line worker to be paid by the number of parts they complete? It could actually allow for more accurate and fair compensation, in theory.

Therein lies the rub; or partially, at least. By paying per hour of work rather than pieces or parts delivered, business owners can avoid paying workers more when they produce more. Instead, they keep the extra value generated as profit. Karl Marx would have described this practice as one of the many ways that capitalists ensure a “higher rate of relative surplus value” for themselves, or, more generally, a higher rate of profit relative to their competitors.

So how did this blatantly exploitative method of compensation become the norm? One could argue that it was partially born out of practical necessity, although that logic disregards the power imbalance between capitalists and workers. “Paying per piece”, or paying a worker for what they produced, was the universal norm until factories expanded the scope and accelerated the rate of production. Before machines and assembly lines, complex manufacturing and fabrication was carried out by small workshops of “artisans” with years of training and practice specializing in a specific trade or handicraft. These workshops or guilds earned an income by selling their wares, with the younger apprentices paying a fee for training and access to the guild’s equipment.

This all changed when the factory system came into play. Suddenly, manufacturing, fabrication, and the processing of raw materials could be aided by machines which required little or no training to operate. The concept of an “unskilled” worker is a myth, of course; the workers who ran these machines were required to develop the skill to do so. But the fact that a new employee could be taught the basics of operating a metal press in a matter of minutes dramatically undercut the value of the years of training and practice that would have been required to perform the same task by hand. Consequently, it allowed for a massive increase in productivity.

In the factory system, the number of workers involved jumped from the handful of artisans in a workshop to dozens or even hundreds of workers on a factory floor. And with so many individual employees, a new problem arose: how was the factory owner supposed to keep track of what each of these workers were producing in order to compensate them according to the traditional “pay-per-part” standard? There were so many workers, each producing at different rates, that a whole team of accountants would be required to calculate their payment if it were based on the amount each of the factory workers produced.

“Pay an entire staff just to be able to pay another staff? But that would cut into profits!” griped the capitalists, “To hell with that! Let’s just pay them all the same wages by the day.” And so it was. Factory workers were paid a set amount per day, regardless of how productive they were. This led to a windfall of new authority that capitalists could wield over workers. “So how long is a full day?” a worker may ask. “Why, 16 hours, of course,” smiled the quick-thinking factory owner, wanting to maximize the amount of time his machines were operational. “And not a second less, or you won’t get paid.”

In a pre-union era, workers were in no position to argue or protest. The capitalists were quick to point out that employees were “free” to seek work in a different factory; nevermind that other factories were obliged to adopt the same exploitative, cost-cutting practice in order to stay competitive in the market. Moreover, the artisanal guild system of production was quickly driven out of business by the exploitative and highly profitable practices of the factories. Managerial overreach and abuse grew more and more commonplace, and the workers’ options shrank just as quickly. So they began to band together and form a resistance.

Workers’ rebellions had occurred sporadically throughout history; european miners fought back against tyrannical mine owners during the renaissance, disgruntled sailors have mutinied against abusive ship captains for millenia, etc. The organization of industrial era factory workers into early unions, however, is the origin of the modern workers’ movement as we understand it today. Their trials and tribulations are dramatic and heroic, and their efforts deserve study and admiration. But let’s keep our focus on the origin of hourly pay.

Along with generally abusive and corrupt managerial practices, some of the primary grievances of these early factory workers were unfair compensation and strict time requirements. Factory employees were routinely docked pay for “slacking” or not technically completing “a full day” of work, in spite of toiling in the factory for hours upon hours. On top of that, factory owners were known to slow down clocks, lie about compensation, withhold pay, and myriad other petty tyrannies.

So an obvious early target for these disgruntled factory workers was the clock. “Look,” they argued, “If I’m scheduled to work for 16 hours and I have to leave 15 minutes before the shift ends because I lost a half finger in the hydraulic lathe, you should still have to pay me for the time I worked.” The factory owners resisted but eventually caved to social, economic, and political pressure brought on by strikes, demonstrations, coordinated work stoppages, etc. So thanks to the diligence of these militant worker organizations, capitalists were forced to pay by the hour instead of the day, a dramatic improvement from the far-more-easily-abused day rate standard.

But today, we haven’t progressed any further. Sure, unions have won many more material improvements for workers, all of which are achievements that are to be lauded. Yet “pay-by-production” versus “pay-by-hour” isn’t really part of the mainstream labor rights conversation outside of the handful of nerds who read books by David Graeber and the like. Workers today produce far more than they are actually compensated for, and the fact that they’re paid by the hour instead of the day gives them little comfort or protection.

If we truly want to shift how we think about work and compensation, if we truly want to chip away at the foundations of capitalism’s means of working class exploitation, this should be one of our prime targets. And needless to say, moving from hourly pay to a more ethical system of compensation based on production would not end the exploitation of labor, just as raising the minimum wage wouldn’t end it either. But reframing the argument in this manner forces capitalists to engage in debate on our terms and not the other way around. At the very least, it gives us a more honest and accurate understanding of the economic injustices wrought by our economic system.

The post Why do we get paid by the hour? appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.