Would you like to know how much lower your taxes would be if Brian Dubie gets elected and his tax cut plans are enacted?

Sorry, that information is not yet available, possibly not even to Brian Dubie. So far, though Dubie has been more specific about his tax plans than any other candidate, he has said only that “to help make Vermont more competitive with other states, we must aim to lower the top rates to the middle of the pack, from the current 9% to between 6-7% (which) still does not meet the regional average of 5% as seen in Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.”

(Yes, if you think you read those same words on this site the other day, you’re right; there’s a reason for repeating them. As also noted in the previous post, that’s not what the top rates are in those other states, and information gathered in the last few days shows that Dubie got the facts even wronger than first thought. Back to that below; first, to Dubie being specific)

Or maybe not all that specific, but at least there are numbers attached to his tax plans. He wants to cut the top rate from nine percent to six percent (using common practice, the News Guy spells out single-digit numbers and ‘percent,’ though Dubie’s document did not). Elaborating a bit, Dubie spokesperson Kate Duffy said the idea was to lower the rates of the other brackets by one third, also.

For households in the lowest tax bracket – up to $56,700 –that would drop the tax rate from 3.55 to 2.38 percent of a household’s taxable income, or from $2,012.85 to $1,349.46, a saving of $663.39, or a little more than one percent of its taxable income.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to determine exactly how other taxpayers would be affected because the Dubie campaign has not released more detail. For instance, after a household earns $336,550, its additional income is taxed at 8.95 percent (not nine, as Dubie said, but close, and at another point he did acknowledge that the rate was slightly less than nine percent.).

Cutting 8.95 percent by a third brings it down to six percent. A household with $500,000 in taxable income, then, would see its tax cut by at least $4,821, a slightly smaller percentage of its income than the lower-paid household.

But that assumes a reduction only in the top rate of the wealthy household. If it also pays that lower rate (2.38 rather than 3.55 percent) on its first $56,700, plus lower rates on the other brackets, there could be a “cumulative effect,” in the words of Vermont Tax Department statistician Bill Smith.

“It very much depends on the structure,” Smith said. “If people at the top actually get the benefit of reduced rates for all the lower brackets, then the higher your income, the more your benefit is.”

But that might not be what Dubie intends. If all the rates were cut by a third for all taxpayers, total revenue would drop by a third (or even more). That would amount to more than a billion dollars over the next few years, while Dubie’s plan is to cut taxes by only some $240 million.

Absent more details from the Dubie campaign, voters will have to wonder how much his proposal might save them. The campaign could not provide that information yesterday because it was busy with its 26-hour “marathon” of campaigning from early Tuesday to mid-morning Wednesday. In a statement, Dubie tweaked his Democratic opponents, who were holding their own campaign tour, but mostly during normal business hours. Their schedule, he said, meant they were “apparently blind to the needs of working Vermonters who do not get to be home in time for dinner.”

Dubie, in short, is staying “on message,” which does not include discussing details of his tax proposal. Do not consider that remark a criticism of Dubie. Or more, accurately, a criticism of Dubie as opposed to other candidates. Peter Shumlin, the presumptive Democratic nominee (pending a recount), has provided somewhat more details about his proposal to bring a “single-payer” health care system to Vermont than Dubie has about his tax plan. But only somewhat, and nothing about how Shumlin would finance his health plan without raising taxes, which he has said he will not do.

So it’s not the individual; it’s the age. There was never a political golden age in which campaigns centered solely around detailed public policy debates. But there was a time – and not long ago –when a major party candidate would not dare to propose cutting tax rates by a third, and….and that’s it. There would have been some table of how the plan would impact the various brackets. The campaign would have identified – and made available to reporters – the economist who had helped work out the details.

That was then. This isn’t, and it’s hard to blame the candidates. With few exceptions, reporters (and especially television correspondents) don’t ask about policy details. Maybe the voters don’t care, either.

Now to those inter-state comparisons: Vermont does have a higher top marginal income tax rate than its neighbors, but the gap is much smaller than Dubie claimed. Rhode Island reduced its top rate earlier this year. But to 5.99 percent, almost 20 percent higher than what Dubie claimed. The new law also eliminated some tax preferences (sometimes called ‘loopholes), most of which benefit the highest earners, so reducing the top rate was not totally advantageous for upper-income taxpayers.

Massachusetts has a lower top rate – 5.3 percent. But Massachusetts, like most states, taxes capital gains as ordinary income. Vermonters can exclude 40 percent of some of their capital gains (again; this preference was eliminated in 2009, partially restored this year), effectively reducing the top rate for many wealthy taxpayers. Massachusetts households earning as much as $100,000 a year pay more in income taxes than do comparable Vermonters.

Maine’s highest tax rate is not five percent but 8.5 percent, and it kicks in at just under $40,000, according to Mike Allen, the director of economic research at Maine’s Department of Revenue Services. That means a Maine household earning as much as $300,000 a year pays substantially more in state income taxes than a Vermont household with the same income. It’s only when the income goes much higher that Vermonters usually pay more.

They rarely come out and say so, but advocates of lower top rates know this. In fact, it’s just what they want – lower rates for the very rich. No, this does not brand them as plutocrats. They are convinced that in order to have a healthy rate of economic growth, a state (town, county, whatever) needs lots of rich folks to provide the investment entrepreneurs need.

Is there any evidence to support this conviction? To be examined, along with some other tax questions, soon (but not, remember, Friday, when there will be no post).

Do Vermonters really pay (as a percentage of income) the highest property taxes in the country, as Brian Dubie says in his economic policy document? Earlier this year, a study by the Tax Foundation concluded that Vermont’s property tax was fourth highest.

It all depends on what’s being counted. The Tax Foundation was counting property taxes paid by “owner-occupied housing.” Information about the study on which Dubie relied, by the Vermont Economy Newsletter, is available only to subscribers. But Art Woolf of Northern Economic Consulting (the newsletter’s publisher) helpfully confirmed via email that its study dealt with all property – residential and otherwise.

Whether the average family will be relieved to find out that its property tax bill is “only” the fourth-highest in the land is questionable.

But not as questionable as the conclusion that it is, in fact, the fourth-highest in the land.

The Tax Foundation study, released earlier this year, found that Vermonters paid $1,869 in property taxes per person in 2008, the seventh highest per capita but fourth as a percentage of per capita income.

But hold on. A subsequent Tax Foundation study revealed that the 2008 figure was  a reduction from the 2007 number ($1,994), a 4.9 percent decrease. Vermont was one of only four states in which total property tax collections per person actually went down in 2008. 

Besides, these statistics, while legitimate (they are taken from U.S. Census numbers) are based on aggregate payments. Researchers add up all the property taxes (or the residential property taxes) paid in Vermont, divide by either population or income, and…Voila! A ranking.

But that ranking does not mean that Mr. and Mrs. Typical Vermonter are paying the fourth, seventh, or fourteenth highest property taxes in the country. In fact, it may not mean anything at all.

The point here is not that there is anything wrong with these studies, or anything dishonest about Dubie’s use of the Vermont Economy Newsletter. The point is that like all economic statistics (but probably even more than other economic statistics) tax data can confuse at least as much as they can clarify, meaning they are easily misunderstood if not misused. The prudent citizen, then, would be well advised to cast a skeptical eye on any candidate’s claims about taxes.

For instance, Dubie proposes lowering Vermont’s top marginal income tax rate “from the current 9% to between 6-7%,” which “still does not meet the regional average of 5% as seen is Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.”

Actually, judging from the tax tables in those states, the highest earners in Maine and Rhode Island would seem to pay more like eight percent of their taxable income in state income taxes.

That still leaves Vermont with a slightly higher top rate. But most Vermonters do not pay higher income taxes than their counterparts in those other three states. According to Rhode Island’s tax tables, for instance, the lowest-earning taxpayers (less than $56,700 in taxable income) pay 3.75 percent of their taxable income in state income taxes. Vermonters earning the same pay 3.55 percent. Even a Rhode Island household with $100,000 in taxable income pays more ($5,157) than its Vermont counterpart ($4,040). In Massachusetts, a household with $80,000 in taxable income pays $4,239 in state income taxes, almost $600 more than it would pay in Vermont.(all these estimated comparisons are for married couples filing joint returns).

There is at least one other problem with these state-by-state tax rankings. The “scores” are often very close. Sometimes taxpayers in the fourth, fifth, or seventh ranked states don’t pay much more than the folks in the states ranked twelfth, eighteenth, or twentieth.

Two years ago, a reporter (OK: full disclosure: this reporter in another guise) estimated how much a typical Vermont family would save in taxes if it moved to Delaware, ranked right in the middle, tax- obligation wise, in a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

The conclusion, tilting the evidence Delaware’s way for every estimate and every assumption, was that they might save as much as $700 a year, though probably less, and none at all if they moved into one of the school districts with higher property tax rates (which are, not surprisingly, the districts with the highest-rated schools).

Seven hundred bucks ain’t chicken feed. But our hypothetical new Delawareans would probably pay that much and more were they to buy or rent a house comparable to the one they left in Vermont. Not to mention that they’d be in Delaware, a nice place but a lot hotter, flatter, and more crowded, which many a Vermonter would probably find it worth $700 to avoid.

What all this boils down to is that these state-by-state tax comparisons are close to meaningless, especially when they consider only taxes, not other economic data.

If tax minimization is one’s goal, one should consider moving to Alabama. Taxes are much lower than they are in Vermont. But so are salaries, by almost $10,000 per household. Vermont is 19^th from the top in median household income; Alabama is fifth from the bottom.

In general, the lowest-tax states are also the lowest-income states. There are states where the taxes are somewhat lower than Vermont’s and the median income as high or higher. But in most of them, houses are much more expensive than in Vermont, and of course, the pace of life is more hectic.

The big (if partial) exception is New Hampshire which is prosperous, and which has neither a general income nor general sales tax. Property taxes are quite high in some localities, but on balance, a Vermonter moving to New Hampshire would have smaller tax bills and a higher income.

Well, a higher income if he or she moved to southern New Hampshire, which is not small-town and rural like most of Vermont, but urban, suburban, and effectively (though not officially) part of the Boston metropolitan area. Southern New Hampshire is where one finds most of the people and most of the prosperity. That’s also where one finds expensive houses and higher property tax rates.

Dubie and others often use New Hampshire as “proof” that lower taxes lead to faster economic growth. New Hampshire does have lower taxes than Vermont, and, in most recent years (though not all) faster economic growth. But New Hampshire’s proximity to Boston has a lot to do with its growth, and many states with lower taxes – Delaware, for one, these days — grow much more slowly than Vermont.

As it happens, there is an obvious refutation of the ‘low taxes equals high growth’ argument: the United States of America, where a 1981 tax cut was followed by 16 months of economic decline (which reversed itself only after a tax increase in 1982); where a small income tax hike for upper-income earners was followed by years of non-inflationary economic growth; where tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 were followed by several years of economic torpor and then the worst collapse since the Great Depression.

Only a fool would argue (a few have) that the tax increases caused the economic growth which followed them. But only a bigger fool could argue that lower taxes always lead to a faster-growing economy. It isn’t that taxes don’t matter. They do because everything matters. But because everything matters, taxes are only one of many things that matter.

If Brian Dubie has his way, taxes are going to matter a lot in this campaign. By framing the issue as he has – tax cuts for everyone but an emphasis on lowering the top marginal rate for the top earners – he has both put the Democrats on the defensive and left himself open to the charge that he’s favoring the rich.

All of which makes it worthwhile to examine the details, such as they are, of his tax proposal, a task for Wednesday.

NOTE: The News Guy is taking the day off Thursday, so there will be no post on Friday.

“As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.” Was the gleeful taunt of Democrats after those were the only two states to vote against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.

Now the question is: as Vermont went (and New Hampshire, too, this time), will so go Maine?

Vermont went first in April, becoming the first state to legalize same-sex marriage by legislation unaffected by court order. New Hampshire and Maine followed weeks later, but Maine is one of those states that empower the general public to overturn legislation by referendum.

A vote to overturn this law is on the ballot ten days from now. It’s Question 1, and it’s close. The last poll, by Public Policy Polling (PPP) of Raleigh, N.C., released Wednesday morning, showed 48 percent of Maine voters in favor of overturning the law, 48 percent opposed.

In one way, it was close in Vermont, too, with just enough members of the House voting to override Gov. Jim Douglas’s veto. But just enough was 100 out of 150 House members, after an easy override vote in the Senate. Just judging by the Legislative margin, Vermont’s approved of gay marriage wasn’t close at all.

But Maine is not Vermont, and vice versa. For starters, Vermont’s constitution doesn’t bother with referendums, or referenda, as the fancy folks say. During the marriage debate – as during the civil unions dispute of 2000 – some opponents argued that “the people” should have the power to overturn the new laws, or at least to register their views in an advisory, officially non-binding, vote.

What’s happening in Maine right now shows why that may be a bad idea.

Not that the referendum campaign has torn Maine apart. At least viewed from afar (really, reporters should go on site for stories about political campaigns, but in this case a trip proved impractical), the campaign seems to be taking place with at least a minimal amount of civility, and a local onlooker agrees. Intense it may be, but, in the words of Portland Press-Herald columnist Bill Nemitz, it “hasn’t turned all that nasty.”

Still, there are reasons the Founding Fathers set up a system of representative, rather than direct, democracy. It wasn’t just that government by plebiscite could lead, in James Madison’s words, to a “tyranny of the majority.” It was also that it provided an incentive for political combatants to accentuate the visceral – if not the primitive – and downplay the rational and the civil.

Some of which is happening in Maine, in part because the folks there may in fact have been influenced by what happened here.

One reason this year’s marriage debate aroused less passion than Civil Unions did in 2000 was that, for most Vermonters, the impact of Civil Unions was…well, it wasn’t.

A phenomenon (or absence of phenomenon) most notably reported not by a gay activist, but by Tom Torti, executive director of the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce, who noted that after Civil Unions took effect, “the sun rose, people went off to work, businesses continued to locate here, tourism continued to flourish and…the doomsday scenarios that were pronounced failed to materialize.”

Hence the political pickle in which gay marriage opponents find themselves. They can count on a hard core of supporters who simply believe, for religious or other reasons, that homosexuality is wrong, or at least that it should not be endorsed by society. But that’s probably not a majority in any state in New England or elsewhere in the Northeast. To win, then, the opponents (in Maine, that means the proponents of a “yes” vote in the referendum) have to convince middle-of-the-road voters that legalizing same sex marriage won’t just legalize same sex marriage, but will bring about other, undesirable, consequences.

They tried that in Vermont, arguing, for instance, that clergymen might face “hate speech charges” if they read certain parts of the Bible in church, or that society would “lose all legal rational for limiting the size of families.”

None of that worked because none of it was true, and legislators, who had both the time and the ability to sift through the facts, could figure out it wasn’t true.

Voters are not legislators. They have jobs to go to, kids to raise, bills to pay. Nor are they trained to parse the fine print of legislation. So they can be easier to persuade, convince, or worry.

As the Maine campaign heads for its finish, gay marriage opponents are increasingly concentrating on their argument that the law will be “pushed onto Maine students” because the schools will “teach homosexual marriage.”

The law passed by the Legislature says nothing about schools or curriculum.

But in several states, with or without legal same sex marriage, schools are increasingly treating homosexuality as “part of the social norm,” as one anti-gay marriage writer put it, and Scott Fish, the spokesman for Stand for Marriage, Maine, said legalizing gay marriage would only hasten that trend.

Conceding that “homosexual marriage is being discussed in Maine schools to some degree already, usually in family life education courses,” Fish said that “common sense says that if it is legalized the discussion will broaden.”

Furthermore, he said parents can now make sure their children “opt out” of these classes, an option they might not have if gay marriage became legal. But several prominent lawyers, including two former Maine attorneys general, issued a memorandum insisting that legalizing gay marriage would have no effect on the curriculum, or on parental “opt out” rights.

Even if they’re right, the school allegations could be politically helpful to proponents of the referendum. Even if parents aren’t sure that the “Yes on Question 1” side is right on the facts, they might vote ‘yes’ if they’re not entirely convinced to the contrary.

As with all close elections, this one might depend on turnout, and here the pro- gay marriage “vote no” faction may have the advantage. It has more money, and at least as much enthusiasm. It also has the support of what might be considered the state’s establishment – most office-holders, educators, business executives, newspapers.

Then again, that’s not always an advantage.