Emery for Vermont: People over profits

Building community, not oligarchy

Basic needs

Every Vermonter deserves food, water, housing, healthcare, paid family leave, and paid time off. In the richest country in the history of the world, no one should go hungry, be forced to sleep outside in the winter, or be forced to choose between their job and their or their baby’s health.

Tax Reform

Rich Vermonters pay less in total taxes as a share of their income than middle-income Vermonters. As the wealth inequality crisis continues, they are reaping the benefits from the Trump tax cuts while regular Vermonters cannot afford basic needs. We should make them pay their fair share. Less than 1% of the world’s population owns more than 50% of the world’s wealth. The tax burden should be on them, not us. Wealthy assets should not be exempt from taxation, including their stock portfolios and excess property.

Housing

As of 2022, 18% of all housing stock in Vermont is either vacant or seasonal/vacation homes. Meanwhile, regular Vermonters cannot afford homes. We should dramatically raise taxes on second and vacant homes to either force owners to sell or use the proceeds to fix the housing crisis. We have the lowest household density in the country, indicating an unmet demand for apartments, tiny homes, and multi-dwelling units.

Climate Change

The climate crisis has only just begun. Floods devastate our towns. Droughts damage crops. Summers keep getting hotter. All while the oil and gas we use to heat our homes and run our cars get more expensive. A green economy is a matter of survival. To face what is coming, we must build climate resilience from the ground up. Up from each community, to the state, to our whole region.

Economic Reform

The economy is not built for us. Vermonters work more than ever while our paychecks cover less and less. We should build an economy that supports everyone's basic needs. Until then, the oligarchs will continue to find new ways to get richer at our expense. We need robust consumer protection for medical debt, transaction fees, student loans, car loans, overdraft charges, buy now/pay later, data privacy, and more. Trickle-down economics is a proven failure. It is time to move past it.

Political Reform

End Citizens United. Take money out of politics. Reform our ancient legislative procedure to be more efficient. The legislature's antiquated and slow procedures waste their time and taxpayer money. Simple fixes like allowing click votes would stop wasting chamber time and let us get on with making regular Vermonters' lives better. And there’s no need to spend over a quarter million dollars a year voting on non-binding resolutions.

My name is Emery Mattheis, and I am running to be a State Representative of Randolph, Roxbury, Granville, Braintree, and Brookfield. I’m running because Vermonters deserve the basic human rights of healthy food, clean water, safe shelter, universal health care, and paid vacation and parental leave. We can guarantee Vermont these rights by protecting people over profits and by taxing wealth over work.

I grew up in Indiana in a small, one-factory town. For over a century, our community’s economy depended on this factory. When it was caught illegally polluting the river–instead of taking ownership of their actions–they moved overseas. Our town never recovered. I moved away before high school to another rural town in western North Carolina. I remained there for college and became a painter and drywaller, a profession I still do today.

My wife and I moved to Vermont in 2017 for me to attend Vermont Law School. In 2019, we decided Randolph would be our home. We bought a vacant house and began fixing it up, and in 2020 I began working for the Town of Randolph. I was then elected Town Clerk and Treasurer. Filling the role taught me so much about our community and the challenges we face. This year I was elected to the Randolph Selectboard. What I have heard most often from residents can be boiled down to one phrase: “Things aren’t getting easier.”

My wife and I have two kids. We both work full time, and we share one car. We live frugally, but taxes and expenses increase faster each year. I fear we are moving into more difficult times, both nationally and locally. But I disagree with the hands-off approach.

We must rework our fiscal, political, and educational systems from the ground up. Tangible solutions are possible: taxing second homes, modernizing our legislative process, and engaging our youth in a Civic Service Corps. These are a small selection of what we should implement. By choosing community over oligarchy we can reestablish what our society is meant for. Communities in decline don’t get better by not investing in them – no more than houses do. They need planning, maintenance, and investment. We need to gain resilience against our world’s economic and environmental instability and move past blaming ourselves for the hardships ahead. It is not our fault that most of us are living on the knife’s edge. We can do better together.