For someone who’s never thrown his hat into the ring before now, Doug Hoffer, the Democratic nominee for state auditor, has come out swinging like a seasoned pro against… Brian Dubie?

 

That’s right. Hoffer hasn’t been elected auditor yet, but he’s already fact-checking the GOP gubernatorial candidate’s numbers and challenging his claim that Vermont’s income tax rate is higher than Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Hoffer called Dubie’s statement “terribly misleading”  and incorrect.

“It is disingenuous to talk about Vermont’s ‘income tax’ for the simple reason that Vermont does not have one income tax,” Hoffer wrote, in a press statement. “It has a progressive tax system so residents pay at very different rates depending on their income. I am certain Mr. Dubie knows this so it makes me wonder why he would use such language.”

Hoffer suggests that Mr. Dubie was referring to the “top marginal rate” which, he says, applies to less than 1 percent of all tax filers. Moreover, he says, because of differences between state tax systems, “the actual taxes paid by residents of different states is not at all what Mr. Dubie would have us believe.”

Hoffer offers the following numbers, which were put together by the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office in 2007:

 

 

Single homeowner  > 65

Single renter

Married homeowner   (2 kids)

Married homeowner   (2 kids)

Married homeowner   (3 kids)

Married homeowner   (2 kids)

Income

$19,429

$24,500

$80,743

$109,320

$357,934

$1,066,309

State
Maine

$385

$833

$3,004

$5,217

$23,417

$79,591
Massachusetts

$855

$852

$3,073

$5,261

$18,030

$56,023
Vermont

$358

$589

$1,406

$3,494

$20,872

$72,760
Source: Tax Study Vol. 2, Joint Fiscal Office 2007

“The discourse on economic development and tax policy are too important to be based on misinformation,” Hoffer concludes. “Sadly, that has been the case for much of the last eight years. It’s unfortunate that Mr. Dubie is picking up where Jim Douglas left off.  We deserve better.”

This article appears in Sep 1-7, 2010.

Staff Writer Ken Picard is a senior staff writer at Seven Days. A Long Island, N.Y., native who moved to Vermont from Missoula, Mont., he was hired in 2002 as Seven Days’ first staff writer, to help create a news department. Ken has since won numerous regional and national awards for his features, profiles and investigative stories and had his work picked up by international news outlets. He was the first journalist to shine a light on the thousands of undocumented workers in Vermont’s dairy...

34 replies on “Auditor Candidate Hoffer Calls Out Brian Dubie’s Tax Claims”

  1. “Why does this matter?”For the third time, he said he didn’t send out a press release about this. If he did, then he lied. Do you think it doesn’t matter when a candidate for office lies, especially about a press release wherein he calls other people “liars”?

  2. “Why does this matter?”To me it matters because when your opponent is Tom Salmon, but you go out of your way to get involved in the governor’s race and you call one of the gubernatorial candidates a liar, then you’d better not lie yourself.BTW, Hoffer has been maniacally screaming for years, with his fingers in his ears and a blindfold on, that Vermonters are not taxed more than the residents of other states. And he lashes out viciously at anyone who has the nerve to say otherwise. All studies — and there have been many — that disagree with him are “flawed” or “biased.” Oh, but of course although he’s a Prog HE’S not biased. Apparently he’s either the ONLY person in America who knows how how to do a tax burden study, or he’s the ONLY honest and well-intentioned person who has ever done one. Instead of saying he disagrees with the information that Dubie relies upon, he calls Dubie a “liar” and his ideas “stupid.” How nice! And yet when he does his own tax comparisons he leaves out Vermont’s property tax, and therefore did not do a true total tax burden analysis! How the christ can you completely ignore the property tax, but say that you’ve done a valid tax comparison??? And the only conclusion you can come to about why he is so vicious, er, passionate about this is that he desperately WANTS Vermonters to pay more taxes and WANTS government to spend more money. Why? Why is that his business? His burning desire to convince people that they are not taxed enough seems downright pathological. And if you want government to spend more money and citizens to pay more taxes, then at least be honest about that, instead of backdooring the issue by insisting that we’re undertaxed and that if we believe otherwise we’re liars and stupid.He’s running for Auditor, for God’s sake, not “Tax Policymaker-in-Chief.” What business does he have inserting himself into the governor’s race and calling only one of the candidates (the Republican, of course) a liar, when, if you’re going to get into it, there’s at least as much to talk about on the “ethics” front with the other candidate?

  3. Jimmy, as I recall — and I couldn’t locate the email in which I received Mr. Hoffer’s material — it was a written statement, but it was not specifically or uniquely addressed to me or Seven Days.Why does this matter?

  4. I know he said that. He specifically said that he hasn’t issued any press releases about Brian Dubie. Picard says above that this story arose from a “press statement.” So either it was a statement to 7D alone, or Hoffer was lying.

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