When Ideology Trumps Ethics 
By Martin Harris

In an attempt to preclude accusations of snarkiness (you might test your recent high school grad on definition and etymology) I’ll refrain here from asking why the "higher" professions have found it necessary to develop and publish elaborate canons of moral and behavioral ethics for mandatory compliance by members while plying their various trades. I’ll simply note that the productive professions have done just that, while the political profession --ideologues and pragmatists, active politicians and passive commentators—hasn’t.

Thus, for example, members of the California bar are required not to withhold evidence which, if released to the opposition, might damage their own chances for a courtroom victory. I’d guess that the rule was put in place because winning-trumps-everything barristers might otherwise do just that sort of withholding, and prior reliance on idealistic notions of "conscience" hadn’t worked without a printed rule, which now appears in the California Code of Judicial Ethics, Canon 3D, identifying seven categories of egregious lawyer conduct. #4 specifically proscribes "…willful… withholding… exculpatory evidence… " Presumably, if Item #4 weren’t in there, lawyers would do just that. Now, with rare exceptions any more, they don’t. Having chosen not to adopt that written code, the political profession usually does. Here’s an example.

Drawing on a recent State-by-State income/wealth vs. taxation study by the Washington-based (not lobbyist-infested K Street but information-analyst-dominated P Street) Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the Vermont-based Public Assets Institute has just published a press release with this ITEP quote: "…the Vermont tax system already falls most heavily on the very poorest families in the State". You can find the 130-page study, with multi-color bar graphs showing percentage-of-income tax levels for all income quintiles for all States, on the ITEP web site. Vermont, for example, is shown with the bottom income quintile paying 8.2% of income and the 4th quintile (middle-income) category from $54 to $85K paying 9.2% (an ITEP fact about distribution of tax burden not deemed mentionable or reportable by PAI) while the top quintile pays an average 7.7%, lower than the bottom quintile, hence the PAI equality-based-outcome-seeking angst. It’s the argument of both ITEP and PAI that such numbers illustrate an inherently wicked level of favor-the-rich unfairness. And why would both ITEP, and with a greater verbal intensity PAI, choose to withhold the stats showing that it’s the Vermont middle- and upper-middle-income quintiles which pay the highest percentage of their income in taxes, not the lowest? And that, therefore, contrary to the breathless  PAI re-assertion that "the Vermont tax system falls most heavily on the very poorest families in the State", the truth is that the heaviest burden falls, as almost inevitably happens, on the long-suffering middle-income quintiles? Even the proverbial oblivious-to-politics-resident-of-East-Overshoe knows the answer: it’s because the ideological template of the Left, in pursuit of "re-distribution of wealth", requires that only those stats showing the poorest paying more and the richest paying less may be legitimately recited. Absent any Canon of Ethics for the profession of politics, and particularly absent any Item #4 requiring disclosure of exculpatory evidence, and, of course, absent any personal inner compass or sense of conscience motivating PAI writers to meet the Joe Friday "all the facts, ma’am" standard even if not legalistically required to do so, the ideologues typically choose to ignore those inconvenient facts which don’t fit the pre-conceived criticique-of-pervasive-social-injustice-in Amerika template and recite only those facts which can be made to appear to fit.  Note that it isn’t a case of earnest but incompetent oversight or unintentional but non-malicious research gap: the inconvenient facts are there in black-on-white print and graphic full color charts on the Vermont pages (pp. 106-7) of the ITEP study PAI has chosen to analyze and interpret. The only way to miss the troublesome facts is to choose to.

As if this mis-stating of tax burden distribution weren’t enough, there’s more. It’s the Holmesian non-barking dog, the missing set of income (or, more precisely, imputed income, the monetized value of goods and services received without payment by the recipient) data showing the value of transfer payments from the middle- and upper-income quintiles to the lowest income quintile via tax-and-spend re-distribution programs. These data aren’t even mentioned in the ITEP study, and so, perhaps, the PAI press release scribes can be excused for similarly ignoring them, but the impact on total ‘real’ income these transfer payments represent is substantial. Consider, for example, that a family of four with a nominal income less than $27K/year receiving Food Stamps thereby enjoys a purchasing power gain of $668/month. That’s $8K/year, raising the real income to $35K, an income level which, if entirely recorded as real income, would place that family in the highly-taxed middle-income quintile. And the Food Stamps buy food with non-taxable dollar value, unlike the hapless real middle-class family which buys its groceries with after-tax dollars. And, similarly, there’s subsidized housing and even Dr. Dinosaur. Why doesn’t PAI mention these? Ask the guy from East Overshoe.

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights