Vermont needs a growth plan that adds up

This commentary is by Matt Swenson, the founder of Omnidex Solutions, an independent research and strategic analysis company. He lives in Vermont.

Vermont voters sent a split message Tuesday. They gave Gov. Phil Scott a record sixth two-year term over Amanda Janoo, then handed Democrats a supermajority in the Legislature, enough to override his vetoes. Molly Gray took back the lieutenant governor’s office from John Rodgers by more than 20 points.

That means the next two years won’t be decided in the governor’s office. They’ll be decided in the Statehouse, where the votes now exist to pass almost anything. So before the session starts, here’s one test for every idea that comes through Montpelier: Does it add up?

A new resident needs more than a house. They need a doctor, a way to earn a living, and roads, schools and services that can handle one more family. This campaign, I heard plenty about what Vermont should become and a lot less about who will pay for it.

Janoo proposed universal primary care costing more than $300 million a year, paid for largely by taxing upper-income Vermonters. She lost, but not by much, and with a supermajority the idea could come back. A tax increase doesn’t make a doctor appear. Scott’s answer runs the other way: Build housing, bring in people and spread the costs across more taxpayers. That sounds reasonable until you ask what those new people cost in doctors, teachers and roads. 

People who want Vermont to copy Norway or Sweden should look closer. Neither is socialist. 

Norway pays its bills largely with oil and gas, more than half of its goods exports in 2025. Sweden ranks among the freest economies in the world, ahead of the United States, with strong property rights, open trade and clean government books. Both run big welfare states, but they fund them with heavy taxes that hit everyone, not just the rich, including 25% sales taxes. And both built wealth first and spread it second. That’s the lesson Vermont should learn.

Sweden wasn’t always a paradise, either. My grandfather was an indentured servant there as a child, in conditions he described as horrible, until he made it to America at 14. Wealth gets built first, and decent treatment of workers has to be fought for.

Vermont’s answer to its labor shortage too often looks closer to indentured service. Farms and ski resorts lean on foreign workers whose visas tie them to one employer, often in housing that employer controls. Complain, and you risk your job, your roof and your right to stay. It surfaced this fall when investigations into worker housing at a Newbury farm became a campaign issue. The problems were reportedly fixed after state inspectors flagged them, but it shouldn’t have been a campaign talking point. It should be a law: housing standards enforced by regular inspection for every farmworker, not by a worker risking everything to report.

Vermont has a history of the kind of work worth fighting for. In the 1840s, Robbins & Lawrence in Windsor built rifles with interchangeable parts and helped launch American mass production. That know-how became Springfield’s Precision Valley. Gunmaking teaches real skills: machining, tolerances, quality control. 

Montpelier treats the industry like an embarrassment. During the 2018 gun debate, Century Arms warned that the magazine limit could kill the company, which then employed more than 100 people in Georgia. Democrats have run the House since 2004, and now they hold a supermajority. That much one-party comfort breeds a Legislature more interested in ideology than in whether anyone can find good work here. 

So why does growth always have to mean more people? Scott has set up an artificial intelligence economic task force. Good. Put it to work helping small businesses do more with less and training people for jobs that pay. Springfield, Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, St. Johnsbury and the Northeast Kingdom need employers, not promises. Why couldn’t Springfield’s old mills build robotics, or host a data center cooled by the river? The Connecticut River Valley has the bones for it. These ideas deserve the same hard numbers I’m asking of everyone else, but they’re worth running.

Fixing the next budget isn’t enough. Vermont also needs to think about where all this is headed.

Osho, the Indian spiritual teacher once known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, argued that capitalism had to create the wealth first, and that society could then move toward anarchism. 

That’s where my own outlook starts: embracing AI and technology to create real abundance, while protecting fundamental rights and keeping power out of the hands of governments and corporations. When machines can produce, diagnose and administer at a fraction of today’s cost, the fight over scarce resources loses its grip. People can run their own lives and cooperate freely, built on real abundance instead of the false promise of plenty that always ends in scarcity and waiting lists.

Vermont has always done things its own way, so it should build sovereign AI here, organized co-op style, the way we’ve done with creameries and power. Governments and corporations already have too much control over AI. Vermonters should own a piece of it.

Scott has two more years. Democrats have the votes. Neither side has an excuse now. Vermont doesn’t have to choose between taxing its way to a better future and waiting on new residents to save us. We need investment, productive businesses, services that work and the nerve to give people more control over their own lives.

That’s a growth plan worth talking about. Abundance, not permission.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont needs a growth plan that adds up.