An $18 million tax cut for 70,000 Utah taxpayers this year was further solidified Tuesday when the House's Conservative Caucus voted for the measure.

According to House Speaker Greg Curtis, R-Sandy, the tax cut for self-employed, self-insured Utahns will be the only significant tax cut to come out of the 2008 Legislature.

And Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and GOP legislative leaders aren't even selling the measure as a tax cut. They say it is just part of the cost of health-insurance reform, which takes one step out of this Legislature, but still has a long way to go.

Currently, self-employed or other Utahns who are paying their health insurance premiums are paying those premiums out of income that has already been taxed by the state. Two different bills will allow such self-employed Utahns to pay those premiums out of "pre-tax" dollars, like those whose employers provide health care can now do.

Besides backing the tax cut for self-employed Utahns, the Conservative Caucus, made up of the more right-wing House Republicans, also supports so-called "differential pay" for public education teachers, said caucus vice chairman, Rep. Craig Frank, R-Pleasant Grove.

Sen. Howard Stephenson, and Rep. Greg Hughes, both R-Draper, each have ideas on how public teacher pay should be changed — with ideas including paying science and math teachers more than other teachers and instigating some kind of performance pay plan to reward outstanding teachers.

Utah Education Association executive director Susan Kuziak said her group, the largest teacher union in the state, "is not opposed to differential pay, but what does that mean" in the context of what conservative GOP legislators want.

For example, the UEA is against Stephenson's bill that would pay math and science teachers more for just teaching those subjects. "The bill has been amended to say you have to teach one of those subjects for two years" to get the extra money. However, she said, some rural teachers may teach biology one year and health the next year, and so couldn't get the extra money.

"We will never agree to 'performance pay' if that means teaching to a test," she said. In other words, the UEA is against giving teachers whose students do well on standardized tests more money, because that would penalize good teachers whose students may not learn as well or as quickly.

"There is too much on the downside of that program," she said.

The UEA endorses Rep. Brad Last's task force on teacher pay, HB81.

And Frank said the Conservative Caucus also wants a task force to study the issue between now and next Legislature.

HB81 has passed both the House and Senate. But it costs $59,000 and so must be prioritized both as one of the task forces that the Legislature wants and in the 2008-09 budget.

As it now stands, the UEA only endorses one teacher pay bill that would pay math and science teachers extra if they teach in the summer time, Kuziak said.

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E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com