There having been no post Friday, and there being several loose ends to tie, let’s tie them.

A couple of corrections. Whoever read the April 6 Post (A Few Final (One Hopes) Musings on This Marriage Business) before 10:30 AM or so saw a reference to the Founding Fathers creating our system of government tin the late 1770s.

Yeah, that’s when the Revolution started, so technical accuracy may be claimable. But the Constitution was written in the late 1780s; there’s accuracy that need not be claimed, being unassailable.

Until corrected (when both errors were noted that morning) the same post made the National Organization for Marriage ten years older than it is. It was founded in 2007, not 1997.

(We will return to the subject of this organization shortly)

The next day’s post (We Can Afford It) prompted a helpful but challenging comment from policy analyst Doug Hoffer,. The challenge was to the conclusion that whether a $75,000-a-year household pays more in state and local taxes in Vermont than it would in most other states “probably depends on how big it is, where it lives, and other variables.”

“There’s no need to guess,” he said, pointing to a Joint Fiscal Office Study showing that at both $40,000 and $80,743, Vermonters pay less than households in eight selected states, more than their counterparts in only three.

True, and interesting. But that JFO study dealt with only twelve states. The other eleven were chosen because they were deemed comparable, not out of a hat, but there are still 38 other states not included in the analysis.

Also, as Hoffer acknowledged, the study doesn’t deal with property taxes, Vermont’s or anywhere else’s. Considering the “income sensitivity” provision (apparently unique to Vermont) of the statewide school income tax, putting the   property tax comparisons into the analysis would in all likelihood still leave the typical lower or middle-income Vermonter paying less than folks in other states.

(To see the whole comment, just scroll all the way down to the end of the last post on this page [A Day to Remember] and click “older entries.” It’s the very next post. Click on “1 comment” at the bottom of it).

But isn’t it time Vermonters (and everyone else) stopped comparing tax liabilities? It’s simplistic if not dishonest. We plan to return to this subject in greater detail in a later post, but just for starters: in most of the states in which a person is likely to pay less in taxes than he/she pays here, he/she is also likely to earn less income. Paying a smaller percentage of a smaller total can easily leave him/her with….less money to spend

Back for a moment to the April 6 post, which inspired a comment from a reader who identified him/her self only as “Bokweb,” but who may be a lawyer, or who at least seems familiar with the law.  The post, he said, got the law wrong.(To read the whole comment, follow the same procedure explained above).

Specifically, Bokweb says it was an error to conclude that the Mormon Church probably “endanger(ed) its tax exempt status” when it set up a political organization to lobby against gay marriage in Hawaii in 1995.

That organization, like its successor, the above-mentioned NOM, was “established as a 501(c)(4) ‘community welfare’ organization under the Internal Revenue Code. A 501(c)(4) can make legislative lobbying its principal activity,” Bokweb wrote, and  ”a church, as a 501(c)(3) organization, may also engage in a certain amount of legislative lobbying – including paying a 501(c)(4) like NOM to lobby on its behalf – with the limits defined as an ‘insubstantial’ percentage of annual expenses.”

At this point, I’m not going to do the reporting required to confirm Bokweb’s interpretation. He seems to know what he’s talking about. Whether what actually happened in 1995 (or in 2007 when NOM was created) met the test of an “insubstantial” percentage of expenses is another question.

Then there remains the broader political question of how deeply should religious organizations insert themselves into the political debate even if they scrupulously obey the law.

That’s easy: as deeply as they choose. If enough people find a church’s political activity distasteful, they will react against it. The church’s political activity will then become politically counter productive.

When will voters react negatively to a church’s political activity? We may be about to find out. NOM has produced an anti-gay marriage commercial, so far only on the Internet via You-tube. It shows people claiming to be “a California doctor,” and “a Massachusetts parent” worrying that gay marriage will “change the way I live.”

But everyone in the commercial was an actor. Somebody got a tape of an audition and posted that tape on You-tube, though it has apparently been expunged from the system. (Here’s the link by which it was available the other day, but the ad seems to be gone).

In response, an organization called Californians Against Hate has prepared ads with the tag line, “The Mormons are Coming,” a la the Longfellow poem about Paul Revere, on the assumption that there will be a backlash against the church’s political actions.

Fred Karger of the California group said both sides were preparing to fight it out in all the Northeastern states, including Vermont, where the fight seemed to be over and done with last week when the Legislature overrode Gov. Jim Douglas’s veto of the bill legalizing same-sex marriage.

Maybe. And maybe not.

Tags: gay marriage, Taxes

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 12:06 am and is filed under Blog Info, Politics & Elections, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.