Well, Nobody’s Perfect
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.
