But first, everyone, especially those who read Friday’s post before it was corrected at about 10AM, is urged to scroll down to read the special Sunday post explaining what went awry, and why,

Now let’s deal with the forest-trees problem in re: the Democratic primary for governor and perceptions thereof.

Whether some people are so carefully examining the trees that they can’t see the forest, or vice versa, makes no difference. In general, observers have been so carefully scrutinizing the numbers (with five candidates, one could win with less than 30 percent of the vote, etc.) that no one has noted that the contest has taken form.

Not over strategy or tactics, either. Over policy. One of these guys wants to raise taxes.

Somehow, because the “narrative” has been created and set in stone that the five Democrats don’t disagree on much, the emergence of a real disagreement has been all but ignored.

Not that State Sen. Doug Racine of Richmond has come out and proclaimed in so many words, “I want to raise your taxes.” Nowhere on the home page of his campaign web site does the word “taxes” appear.

But he isn’t being cute about it, either. What is prominent on his web site is a link to his November 20 appearance on Vermont Public Radio’s Vermont Edition, where Racine clearly said he thinks the answer to the state’s budget shortfall has to include some new revenue.

That means higher taxes.

On that program, and again in an interview last week, Racine said his policy was modeled on what Gov. Richard Snelling, a Republican, did when the state faced a similar revenue shortage in 1991. Working with a Democratic Legislature, Snelling did cut spending. But to ease the impact of spending cuts, especially on the poor and the ill, Snelling and lawmakers agreed on temporary tax increases.

“(Snelling) went to Vermonters and said, look we’re all in this together, we’re all going to feel a little bit of the pain,” Racine said on the radio, calling for the same “balanced approach” to be used next year, when the state faces a revenue-spending gap of at least $90 million.

Racine said he, too, would cut spending, would “try to find efficiencies in state government, and think about using the rainy day funds.” But some new revenue would probably be necessary, he said.

How much and how it would be raised he has not yet figured out, he said, adding that he and some campaign aides were trying to work out the details of a specific proposal.

The other four Democrats running for governor haven’t absolutely ruled out calling for any new or higher taxes. But neither have they come close to suggesting any such thing. In a recent article on “the state budget problem” on her web site, State Sen. Susan Bartlett of Hyde Park spoke only of the need for cutting the General Fund budget and holding down school costs. Senate President Peter Shumlin of Putney announced his candidacy last month saying, “Vermonters cannot  bear more of a tax burden.”

(Although he said much the same thing earlier this year, but then put together a budget package that included higher taxes for upper-income earners; Racine and Bartlett voted for it).

The other two candidates, Secretary of State Deb Markowitz and former State Sen. Matt Dunne of White River Junction have said little about how they would deal with the impending budget problem.

So Racine is taking a gamble. Most people don’t want to pay higher taxes. As Racine himself said, the Democratic field is strong. Most Democratic voters would be reasonably happy with any of the five. So why wouldn’t most primary voters choose one of the four who doesn’t call for higher taxes, even if they’re advertised as temporary?

(The 1991 tax increases were rescinded in 1993 as scheduled, though the sales tax was later raised back to five cents; it is now six cents).

“Running for office is a gamble,” Racine said. “I’ve run for office before. Maybe it’s a function of my age. I’m telling people what I think.”

But just looking at the politics of the situation, maybe it’s not such a foolish gamble. One way to carve out a plurality victory in a five-person Democratic primary is to appeal to the social welfare liberals – call them the “One Vermont” constituency, after the group that formed last year to fight cuts in programs that help the poor.

These voters are likely to make up a heavy share of the Democratic primary electorate, and if they unite behind one contender, that candidate would probably win the primary.

Traditional political strategy calls for the candidate then quickly to trim back to the center for the general election. But as Racine acknowledged, in this case, that would be close to impossible.

“If you’re out there. It’s really hard to trim back because you’re not trimming, you’re contradicting,” he said. “It would hard for me the day after the primary to say I didn’t mean everything I just said.”

So should he win the primary, the Republicans, presumably led by Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, would undoubtedly – and credibly – assail him as a “tax and spend liberal.”

Not as deadly a label in Vermont as in many other states. But still a potential problem.

On the other hand, before the election – even before the primary — the Legislature, including three of the candidates, is going to have to pass a balanced budget for the state. Voting to cut programs for, say, poor, sick, children, might not be any more politically palatable than voting for a temporary tax hike.

But that’s for later. For now, the Democratic race has a structure. It even has an issue. And an obvious question for the other four candidates: Without any new revenue at all, exactly (and that means exactly, with numbers) how would you balance the budget?

This special supplemental Sunday post is intended primarily for those who read Friday’s post before 10:05 AM, when the right numbers were inserted and the wrong ones deleted.

The wrong numbers did not negate the basic point of the post, which is that Vermont’s tax structure is relatively progressive, but only in comparison with most other states. Considering that the poorest Vermonters pay a slightly higher (or, by some interpretations, the same) percentage of their income in state and local taxes as the richest Vermonters, the system here can hardly be called progressive.

But neither is it as regressive as it seemed to those of you who read the post before it was corrected.

Usually, a simple correction suffices. But this site insists on maximum feasible transparency from others, and so must insist on it for itself.

For that reason, despite the risk that no doubt a few readers will decide that I am a complete doofus to whom no attention should ever again be paid, (and because it’s kind of funny), here, briefly, is how, via a combination of naïveté about the ways of computers and inexcusable carelessness, the wrong numbers got into the post.

The subject was the Who Pays report issued by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a politically liberal research group in Washington. The first 13 pages of the study were about the overall, national situation. I read them.

But just reading the Vermont info on the screen would not suffice. To make sure I got it right, I should read them on paper. I needed to print out the pages about Vermont.

The first of which, reported the Table of Contents, was Page 106.

So I clicked ‘print,’ and then told the computer only to print pages 106 and 107.

Which it did.

According to it.

Its operator, raised in the pre-cyber age, sort of knew but was not really aware that computers don’t always count pages the same way the actual printed document counts them and reports them in its table of contents.

But out of the printer came these two pages. They looked great. Charts. Graphs, Statistics. All dutifully copied and used.

And they were a very accurate description of the relative tax obligations of the members of various income brackets in the state of…Tennessee.

Page 100 in the original, but 106 according to the computer world, where Vermont was on 110. (Utah was between them).

Nice place, Tennessee. I’ve had some fun there. Like Vermont, it has mountains, rivers, and lots of country folk who drink beer.

But it’s poorer, politically more conservative, and its tax structure is far more inequitable. The poorest Tennesseans pay almost four times as much of their income in state and local taxes than do the richest.

That’s one reason I should have noticed that I had the wrong state. The numbers were just too drastic for Vermont.

But there was another reason. Up at the top of the printout, in fairly large, dark letters, there was this word: “Tennessee.”

Hard to miss.

Unless, of course, you’re not looking, having, after all, ordered the computer to print out page 106, which is Vermont.

The next morning, walking into the little home office, my eye went right to the printout still sitting on the little stand on which I perch documents from which I’m working. The eye saw the word and transmitted it to the brain, or what remains thereof.

Whereupon I said….(well, you figure it out).

A few minutes later came an email from a careful reader who noted that the numbers were wrong. I fixed them.

That’s my story and I’m sticking with it, and let this be a lesson to you.

Never believe a computer.

Oh, and when you’re copying numbers from a document? Read it. Especially up at the top.

Waddaya know! Sometimes there’s at least a little truth to the myth.

Turns out all those folks who proclaimed, explained, or complained that Vermont had a progressive tax structure were right all along.

Sort of.

For those who don’t keep up with the jargon, a progressive tax system is not one that keeps making progress. It’s one in which the more a taxpayer earns, the more he or she pays.

Not just in dollars, but as a percentage of his or her income.

So here’s how we know that Vermont’s taxes are, by that definition, progressive:

In 2007, (sort of, explanation below) the richest Vermonters, households earning $412,000 a year or more (and averaging $1,250,000 per annum), paid 8.4 percent of their income in state and local taxes, according to a new study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Except that they didn’t really pay that much. Because like all taxpayers, but more so, they can deduct most state and local tax payments from their federal taxable income. Factor in that “offset,” and they paid only 7.5 percent of their income in state and local taxes.

And yes, (here’s that promised explanation) the study did take into account this year’s small increase in the taxes paid by the richest Vermonters, retroactively tweaking it back into the 2007 figures.

And the poorest Vermonters? Those who earned less than $18,000 in 2007, with an average of $11,200?

They paid 8.2 percent of their income in state and local taxes.

No federal offset, either, These guys don’t itemize.

Neither do many taxpayers in the next higher bracket, those earning between $18,000 and $34,000. They pay 8.1 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes. The middle fifth ($34,000 to $54,000) pay 9.4percent. Taxpayers in the fourth quintile ($54,000 to $85,000) pay 9.2 percent (after the offset).

The ITEP study divides the top 20 percent into three brackets, including that top one percent who earn $412,000 or more. The 15 percent earning between $85,000 and $168,000 pay 8.2 percent and the next higher four percent ($168,000 to $412,000) pay 7.5 percent, after the offset in both cases.

Whereupon one hears a voice calling from the trees, saying….

This by you is progressive?

Well, everything is relative.

Compared with Florida, for instance, Vermont is a progressive’s paradise. Down there, the poorest 20 percent of taxpayers fork over 13.5 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes; the richest one percent a mere 2.6 percent.

Not that having a more progressive tax system than Florida’s is much of an accomplishment. According to ITEP’s analysis, Florida’s is one of the ten least progressive structure’s in the county.

Vermont’s, on the other hand, is one of the four most progressive, along with Delaware, New York, and the District of Columbia, because, says ITEP, “it has a highly progressive income tax and low sales and excise taxes.”

In addition, Vermont has a refundable Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), meaning low income residents don’t pay income taxes; they get money from the state as a partial offset to their sales and property tax payments. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia “allow an earned-income tax credit patterned after the federal credit.,” the study reported.

Still, as is evident in those figures above, more progressive isn’t very progressive. If a typical household earning a quarter of a million bucks pays 7.5 percent of it in state and local taxes while the family earning 60 grand pays 9.2 percent, not many economists would call that a progressive system.

The explanation, according to ITEP, is that all state tax systems are regressive. It’s just that most of them are more regressive than Vermont’s.

“Nearly every state and local tax system takes a much greater share of income from middle- and low-income families than from the wealthy,” according to ITEP.

The main reason for Vermont’s regressivity appears to be the property tax. The lowest earners pay 3.8 percent of their incomes in property taxes. The next two quintiles pay 3.9 percent, and the fourth pays 4.2 percent. The wealthiest bracket pays only 2.3 percent of its income in property taxes.

The sales tax is also regressive, with the poorest paying 5.3 percent of their incomes, the richest only 0.6 percent. But according to the report, Vermont relies less on sales taxes than do most other states.

A few caveats. ITEP is clearly on the left side of the political spectrum. It begins its analysis with the assumption that the wealthiest families “should pay at a tax rate at least equal to what low-and-middle-income families pay,” a “basic test of tax fairness” that “virtually every state fails.”

It’s possible that everyone does not share that assumption.

Besides, statistical analyses always include some “noise,” which renders their conclusions at least potentially debatable. This one, for instance, “is limited to non-elderly families…because state tax systems often treat elderly families very differently from other families.” Because Vermont has a high percentage of elderly families, including them could alter the results, although probably not by much.

Then there is the question of whether to count “in-kind” payments to the poor, such as Medicaid and food stamps. In an account of the study as it pertains to Vermont, the Denpubs publication company in nearby upstate New York contacted Martin Harris, identifying him as a “long-time Vermont tax policy critic” (but not as a long-time ultra-conservative activist, not to mention someone who now seems to live in Tennessee), who said “a Vermont family of four (with income) below $27,000, gets $668 per month in food stamps,” raising “real disposable (income) to over $34,000.”

Actually, it’s impossible to know how much a family would get in food stamps. There are too many variables, including how much it would pay for rent and heating, that go into that calculation. At the Department of Children and Families, a very helpful benefits programs assistant administrator named Meg Houston said that a family of three with $15,000 in income (after several deductions) would get $151 a month in food stamps.

Before the deductions, that family probably earns just about $17,000 in gross income, of which it pays, on average,  $1,394 in state and local taxes. If the food stamps raise its “real” income to 18,812, its state and local taxes would add up to about 7.4 percent of its income. just a touch lower than the percentage paid by the wealthiest taxpayers.

Besides, as Jeff McLynch of ITEP noted, the organization’s statistical method is consistent with the Census Bureau’s and other federal agencies, which distinguish between cash and in-kind income.

That Denpubs account was on line. It does not appear to have been in any Vermont newspaper. Neither did anything else on the report except an editorial in the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus. As far as ITEP’s public affairs official Ed Meyers could find, no other Vermont news organization mentioned the report, which was released November 18 (though there was an item in the Progressive Party’s Prog Blog).

This in a state where news organizations rarely fail to give big play to less responsible studies that proclaim, inaccurately, that Vermont taxes are the highest in the nation.

Editorial judgment by ideology?

Just asking.