The average Utah family pays a fourth of its income in federal, state and local taxes, according to a recent study by the Utah Taxpayers Association.

That is actually a bit less than in recent years, said Mike Jerman, who put the study together for the association, a tax watchdog group mainly funded by businesses.

"We decided to look at taxes paid for 2008, because that's when most of the tax cuts (given by the Utah Legislature) kick in," said Jerman, who recently left his position as vice president of the association to become director of sales for a charter school development firm.

Lawmakers reduced state income and sales taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars over the past several years.

The taxpayers' study found the biggest chunk of taxes — 11.4 percent of the average family's income — goes to Social Security.

Individually calculated, other taxes don't come close to that — with the second-highest taxes, 2.9 percent, each going to state income tax and state and local sales taxes, Jerman found.

Jerman defined the average Utah family as two adults working — one at a full-time job, the other at a part-time job — with three children at home living in a $220,000 house, the median price of a residence in 2006.

All told, the family made $57,700 a year. (The taxpayers' complete study can be found at www.utahtaxpayers.org.)

Jerman also included in the family's wages and salaries the cost that the family member's employer paid in employer payroll taxes.

"That is fair," said Jerman, because economists count the direct employer's payroll cost toward the employee's salary, even though the employee never sees that cash and doesn't pay direct taxes on it.

Sarah Wilhelm, with Voices for Utah Children, said middle-to-low-income people have benefited from the Legislature's recent tax cuts and tax reforms.

"Lowering the sales tax on food was a good start," said Wilhelm, who heads up the group's fiscal analyst unit.

But because low-income Utahns already were paying little or no state income taxes, reductions in that tax didn't help them at all.

"Low-income Utahns are still paying 11 percent to 12 percent of their income in taxes," she said.

And while that may be a smaller percent of their meager income than higher-income Utahns pay in dollar amounts, richer Utahns clearly can afford to pay more in taxes.

"The low-income family doesn't have the money to pay their taxes in the first place," she said.