Sarah Wilhelm, fiscal analysis director for Utah Issues, a low-income advocacy group, told the legislative task force subcommittee that an income tax credit (for those who file returns) or an outright rebate check (for those who are too poor to file a return) is the best solution.

Wilhelm said Utah Issues suggests a $75 credit or check for each low-income person. Wilhelm said a family of four spends around $315 a year on state sales tax on unprepared food, so $75 apiece ($300) roughly repays them the taxes they paid on food.

Each member of a family that makes $30,000 a year or less would get $75 each, as would seniors or disabled Utahns in that income bracket. Single people and married couples with no dependent children would get the $75 check if they made less than $18,000 a year each.

While that tax break would — if every low-income person took it — cost the state around $50 million a year, in reality, said Wilhelm, perhaps half of all those who qualified would actually take it.

So giving low-income Utahns a $75 tax rebate for state sales tax on food would only cost the state around $25 million a year in lost revenue, Wilhelm said.

Actually, it would cost less than that, said Hilton, speaking for the Coalition of Religious Communities. Two dozen members of that group rallied at the Capitol Thursday afternoon to protest the tax credit as a "cop out. . . . It's a way to say they addressed the issue without really doing anything," Hilton said.

She criticized members of the tax study group for failing to recognize the unprecedented public support for the measure.

Lawmakers, Hilton said, "respond to groups that can give them Jazz tickets or golf vacations. They don't respond to the wishes of the people of the state, the people who pay their salaries."

Earlier, Hilton told the subcommittee that an income tax rebate for food taxes paid is a bad way to go — too many of the really poor, the down-and-outs, wouldn't take advantage of it. But those people still buy food and they need help. Don't charge the sales tax on food, period, she said.

"We have homeless people living in camps down by the Jordan River," Hilton said. "We have 'homeless' people who don't have a permanent address — they stay in by-the-week rentals. They're cooking on electric fry pans if in a motel or on a camp stove" if unsheltered.

Such people would never understand how to get a Utah Tax Commission form, fill it out correctly and then stick around to cash a $75 check, she said.

"We're concerned that a food tax rebate program would be just another underutilized program for the poor."

Only 52 percent of poor people who qualify for federal food stamps take them, she said. Only 20 percent of people who could get telephone "lifeline" subsidies apply.

But legislators clearly want to do something to help poorer Utahns in context of reforming Utah's whole tax system. If they give the food tax rebates, they could say they are helping poorer Utahns on the one hand while they adopt, as some believe they will, a flat-rate income tax that would reduce taxes on Utah's wealthiest residents.

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Contributing: Angie Welling

E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com; lisa@desnews.com