GOP legislators struggling with tax reform this year wanted Utah's largest teacher union to say Wednesday exactly which taxes should be increased, which cut or which changed.

But they didn't get all they wanted during a meeting of the Tax and Revenue Interim Committee, as the Utah Education Association brought in a tax expert to point out shortfalls in Utah's current tax system.

"We want specific tax proposals," said Sen. Curt Bramble, R-Provo, co-chairman of the committee. The education community has complained for years that the state has no long-term strategic plan for education funding, said Bramble. "So where is it?"

UEA president Pat Rusk said they did propose rebracketing Utah's personal income tax — which has changed little in 30 years. Legislators should also consider removing from state returns the current 50 percent deduction for federal taxes paid. And the UEA opposes repeal of the corporate income tax, among other tax change ideas.

"So you'd raise income taxes, one way or another," said Bramble.

Any tax changes should be considered as a whole, said an increasingly frustrated Rusk as she tried to answer the legislators' questions. She said she cut down her presentation because the meeting started an hour late, so she wasn't reading all of her handout.

(Both the House and Senate GOP caucuses stayed in closed meetings an hour past the afternoon interim committee hearing start times, keeping hundreds of people waiting, to discuss a proposal to stop any future lawsuits on the Legacy Highway.)

But GOP legislators clearly wanted the UEA on the record, so several members started reading the UEA's proposals out loud.

The UEA handout noted that the 2005 Legislature was one of the few times that education funding was put in direct competition with highway construction — a poor competition.

But Rep. Becky Lockhart, R-Orem, jumped on that wording, saying in the seven years she's been in the House general fund monies have been put into roads, and in fact during hard times those monies were pulled out of road construction budgets to fund other programs, including education. "This is nothing new."

The Republican majority did like one UEA proposal — that there are better ways to stimulate Utah's economy than repealing the corporate income tax, such as not taxing business inputs.

"It's better to cut the sales tax on machinery" and other production purchases, said Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper.

Richard Sims, who at one time worked as a tax expert for the National Conference of State Legislatures, said that Utah's current tax structure harms low- and middle-income families too much while not taxing wealthy families comparatively.

States with healthy, growing economies have those in large part because they have "invested" in public education, roads and other transportation facilities, said Sims. And those states are also usually "high-taxed states."

But, said Stephenson, it sounds like Sims and the UEA advocate just raising taxes for education: "that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps by taxing ourselves more."

"If you want to grow as a state" economically, said Sims, "then you have to invest, get more high-quality jobs, and the best way to do that is to invest in your work force" through education.

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E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com