Op-ed: Private philanthropy is not enough to create economic opportunity

By Bill Schubart
©2025 Telegraph Publishing LLC 

Is what we’re learning about healthcare and the critical role of primary care a metaphor for what we can learn about reducing poverty with equitable economic policies that create opportunity?

Vermont’s current budget is $9.1 billion. For 648,500 Vermonters, that’s $14,400 each. The 2025 U.S. budget was $7.01 trillion. For a population of 348 million, that’s $20,209 per person. Even considering defense and scientific research, aren’t these amounts enough to sustain a decent level of well-being for most of our citizens?

Meanwhile:

• Vermont property taxes are projected to rise by 12%.
• In most urban areas, too many Vermonters can’t afford housing.
• Vermonters experience the highest healthcare-insurance costs in the nation.
• The average U.S. cost of a college degree in the U.S. is $38,270 per year.
• The MIT Livable Wage Index for Burlington, for a family with two working adults and two children is $40.48 an hour or $162,578 required annual pretax income. And Vermont’s minimum wage in 2025 is $14.01, and the federal minimum wage is $7.25.
• A Wall Street portfolio manager, Michael Green, observed recently that $140,000 a year should be the new poverty line.

As Christ said in Matthew 26:11 “The poor you will always have with you.” But his words don’t alleviate our responsibility as citizens to choose leaders who will manage an economy that minimizes poverty, shares resources, regulates greed, and taxes income and assets with a goal of equalizing economic opportunity.

Vermonters take pride in our food and wood banks, our clothing drives, our home-share programs, our temporary shelters, all beacons of our charity. But they’re also billboards of our economic failures. Like the sidewalk addiction detritus and tarp-and-tent clusters, they remind us of our socio-economic failure to support and sustain a middle class – a fundamental element of any democracy.

We might take a lesson from what we’re learning in healthcare. We know that community-based primary care is more accessible, less expensive, and more effective than care provided in an emergency department. Primary care has traditionally been the point of entry when one has nonspecific symptoms or becomes ill, as opposed to the emergency department, the portal for major traumatic injuries or life-threatening symptoms.

The mission of primary care is education, prevention, diagnosis and chronic-disease management. Treatment for non-life-threatening conditions such as trauma-counseling (for adverse childhood experiences), mental-health counseling, addiction-support services, ageing well, and preventive dental care have been shown to be best managed at the local level in a more cost-efficient community setting where access and affordability are paramount. An effective community-based primary care network reduces emergency department admissions where untreated conditions have advanced into more urgent and expensive treatment protocols. Currently primary-care spending is a mere 6.5% of our total annual healthcare expense of $4.9 trillion. Moving our healthcare investments upstream to lower total urgent cost is critical to lowering our overall healthcare costs.

Likewise, were we to take a similar approach, by using economic tools like regulation and taxation to drive and sustain an equitable economy, it would be considerably more cost-efficient than trying to mitigate the human cost and pain of accelerating poverty, mental illness, and addiction.

In these times of massive wealth concentration, it’s often said that philanthropy can do a better job than government, but this is not borne out by the numbers. The Chronicle of Philanthropy is clear that private and foundation donations can never fill the intrinsic obligation of government to ensure the well-being of its citizens. Also, philanthropy runs the inherent risk of exerting non-altruistic influence over nonprofit missions.

Another example: Just as urgent care is considerably more expensive than preventive primary care, the cost to jail one Vermonter for a year is $57,615. For various reasons, which have less to do with rising crime than with a broken judicial system, our prison population has increased by 24% in the last four years. With a current population of 1628, the 2025 budget was $197,457,491. What would $200 million do in the way of prevention — $121,288 per incarceree?

As a friend half-heartedly suggested, couldn’t we just paid convicts and detainees $50,000 a year to stay out of trouble and find purpose in our society? Along similar lines, I asked an earlier Commissioner of Corrections how many of the then-175 female inmates in the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington does the public need to be protected from due to a history of violence. His answer was twelve.

Vermont is making progress at reinvesting expenses in helping incarcerated people prepare for a life after prison. There’s also a phenomenon in corrections literature called “criminal menopause.” The term refers, in part, to the fact that among all males paroled after 48 years of age, statistically under 2 percent will re-offend. Could this alter how we sentence?

When will we learn that investing upstream in prevention, education, and child care is more cost-effective for society and in healthcare than is the staggering cost of remediation at the crisis level?

Perhaps we need to redesign our system of taxation in Vermont and nationally. Some 15 years ago, I co-chaired the Legislative Blue Ribbon Tax Commission. Our charge was to design and suggest a better tax structure for Vermont. We did so and a few of our recommendations were implemented on a largely as-needed basis, but our overall recommendations were never implemented. We did a deep dive on income, sales, services, and asset taxation. I mention this only to say that, having spent three years looking in great detail at our tax code with a team of brilliant and politically diverse co-chairs and aides, I do have some understanding of how it works.

Fifteen years later, I would argue that we need to reverse-engineer our current Vermont and national tax codes with the goal of sustaining an equal-opportunity society. That would mean moving our tax investments upstream to fund prevention, education, and early intervention.

We must also put strict legal and ethical limits on the technocrats investing heavily in state and Congressional lobbying efforts to fend off regulation and taxation to ensure their freedom to profiteer from their innovations at the expense of society.

One key effort where preventive action is needed: social media is an addictive cesspool of social influencers selling lifestyle products, suicide instruction, pedophilia grooming, political divisiveness, and whatever else generates attention, clicks, and sales. And now we have an unwitting explosion of artificial intelligence, which generates fantasy worlds that further distance us from reality. To prevent any regulation, President Trump recently signed an executive order denying states’ rights to regulate AI in any way.

So, why don’t we offset this gathering storm of expanding poverty, soaring healthcare costs, inadequate housing, mental-health crises among disaffected young people, loneliness, and untreated addiction by making the upfront investments that we know will pay off in lower costs down the road?

Isn’t this reinvestment of our resources a better path to lowering taxes for all than simply lowering taxes for the vastly wealthy and leaving the remaining tax burden on a shrinking middle class?

Bill Schubart is an author who lives in Hinesburg.