It is, after all, the outfit responsible for the patently false assertion that Vermont is the highest-tax state in the nation.

But the other day, when the Foundation came up with a report about property taxes by county, there it was in the papers and on the teevee: Some outfit says Vermonters pay a lot in taxes.

The “median Chittenden County property tax bill” was $3,809, as the Burlington Free Press accurately reported the Foundation’s finding, making it the 61^st highest in the country. Windham, Addison and Windsor Counties were also in the top hundred.

None of this is exactly wrong. Nor is it exactly right. Mostly, it is meaningless, another way of saying it is not news.

First consider the source. The Free Press described the Tax Foundation as “a nonprofit tax research group based in Washington, D.C.,” which is accurate, but misleading. The Tax Foundation is a 50-year-old, corporate-funded, very conservative advocacy group. It is, or at least was, affiliated with Citizens for a Sound Economy, another very conservative outfit founded with money from the Koch family of Koch Industries, the privately held oil and gas firm regularly at war with environmental regulation and progressive taxes.

To give the Foundation folks credit, their report-based on figures from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey-expressed no value judgment about the counties that ranked high or low on the property tax scale. But there’s little doubt that they hoped for the interpretation they got, especially from Vermont news organizations, which is that being in one of the high-tax counties was a sign of being over-taxed.

Could be. What defines over-taxation is debatable. Less so is that all the high-tax counties on the Foundation’s list are among the most desirable places in America to live: Westchester County, New York; Lake County, Illinois; Bergen County, New Jersey; Fairfield County, Connecticut. All these places have high median incomes and low poverty rates.

As does Chittenden County.Its median household income in 2007 was $57,957, almost $10,000 above the national median. Its poverty rate was 7.2 percent, more than five percent below the nation’s. Addison and Windsor Counties were both richer than most of America, too. Windham’s median income was slightly below the national figure. All four counties, like those wealthy, high-taxing, suburbs in the other states, also rank among the top spots in the country when it comes to health, education, and the various indices that define quality of life.

The lowest tax counties are in Louisiana. They have low per capita incomes and high poverty rates.

Could these taxes be buying something valuable?

Again, debatable, so let’s stick to empirically testable fact, which leads to the conclusion that in real life those property tax payments are less than met the Tax Foundation’s eye.

In Vermont, property owners with incomes under $90,000 can get some of their property tax payments back from the state. The higher their tax, the more likely the rebate, and the higher it will be.

In every state, taxpayers can deduct their property tax payments from taxable income on their federal tax returns, a revenue sharing system in which property owners  effectively get some of their property taxes refunded by the feds. The richer the taxpayer, the greater the subsidy, both because the wealthy taxpayer is in a higher marginal tax bracket, and because he or she probably lives in a more expensive house, paying higher property taxes. A family with $200,000 in taxable income, putting them in the 33 percent marginal tax bracket, and a $10,000 property tax bill ,would cut its federal tax bill by $3,300 thanks to the property tax deduction.

Another possible problem with the Tax Foundation report is that it uses median figures for taxes and income throughout. This is defensible, but perhaps misleading. “Median” does not mean “common” or “typical.”

For instance, one finding of the report, based on median property tax payments and median incomes is that Chittenden County homeowners pay five percent of their incomes in property taxes, more than in all but 58 other counties.

This does not necessarily mean most Chittenden County homeowners pay five percent of their incomes in property taxes.

Or maybe it depends on how the payment is figured. A very helpful Chittenden County realtor who wished to remain unidentified came up with the example of a South Burlington house selling for $259,900. The property tax would be $4,183 a year. On a conventional, 20 percent down, 30-year mortgage, total monthly payments would be $1,497.08.

On the assumption that prudent consumers wouldn’t buy this house unless they earned at least $5,988 a month (four times their payments), or $71,860 a year, their property taxes would be more than five percent of their income.

Except that the property taxes save them  $374 on their federal income taxes, and this family may well get a few hundred dollars rebate from the state, bringing it down to roughly $3,600, or just about five percent.

Is that too much? Well, that’s  up to them, isn’t it? Along with their neighbors and fellow-citizens who, if they thought the taxes too high, could organize, oppose school budgets, defeat incumbent state legislators and the like.

They haven’t.

At least not very much.

Maybe, just maybe, their apparent acceptance of the status quo can be explained by the figures in another report by the same Census Bureau agency, the American Community Survey. This one-the  Median Monthly Housing Costs for Owner-Occupied Housing Units With a Mortgage-figures costs by state, not county, and it’s only for 2007 (the Foundation report used a three-year average).

This Median Monthly cost survey measured the relative costs of mortgages, property taxes, insurance fees, utilities, fuel costs, and, where appropriate, condo fees and mobile home park charges.

The result? Vermont’s a pretty cheap place to own a home. It’s the 22^nd most expensive state, with a median monthly cost of $1,391, almost $100 less than the national median.

Don’t tell Gov. Jim Douglas, but here is evidence that living in Vermont is downright affordable.

Yes, most of the more expensive states are also richer. But not as much richer as they are more expensive, at least for housing. Neighboring New Hampshire, for instance, had a median monthly housing cost of $1,830. That’s more than 30 percent more expensive than Vermont. New Hampshire isn’t 30 percent richer.

Funny how these results didn’t show up in any Tax Foundation report.

Well, not so funny. There are two lessons to be drawn here. One is that tax rate comparisons in general are pretty close to meaningless. The other is that  data from the Tax Foundation should be put in the waste basket, not in the newspaper.-Jon Margolis