From Deseret News archives:
Tax plan — and Wright — may face rocky road
First Huntsman.
With the help of three well-known tax experts, the freshman governor announced this week his income tax reform package: A 5 percent flat tax, a credit for charitable giving, no deduction for mortgage interest paid, and exemptions for up to five people in a family (most likely for dad, mom and three dependent children).
There are some real advantages in this plan, Huntsman and his tax advisers say, not the least of which is that by using the federal Adjusted Gross Income on your state returns you broaden the tax base and make it more fair.
Also, the current system allows for great fluctuations in income tax revenue. Especially in good economic times, personal income tax revenue really jumps (as it has in the past two years) and even with a GOP-dominated Legislature, state government really grows.
Huntsman's plan will level out those peaks and valleys in tax revenues, his experts argue.
While Huntsman's experts have yet to make available tax charts showing how different individuals and families may be affected by the change, it seems clear that if you are a family that is now paying a lot of interest via your first or second mortgages (the second usually being a line of credit used to buy all kinds of items, like furniture, big-screen TVs and cars) and you have more than three kids at home, you are likely going to pay more.
Exactly how much more is yet to be seen.
But Huntsman says most Utahns will actually see a tax decrease because the top income tax rate will go from 7 percent to 5 percent.
So, for all the good that Huntsman's plan does (and it seems to do a lot of good), the political reality is, does the Legislature want to raise taxes on large families who are heavily in debt?
One could argue that current tax policy has given those families tax breaks unfairly. After all, the more children a family has in public schools the LESS tax they are paying to educate those kids.
Conservatives are always saying that government should be managed more like a business. But no business I know of lets you pay less for something the more you use it — five pairs of shoes at Wal-Mart don't cost less that two pairs of the same shoes.
Huntsman's tax advisers say that the idea that Utah is populated by large Mormon families is no longer true — it is a "myth."
Yes, there are still some large families here. And Utah's birthrate still leads the nation. But family size has dropped dramatically here since the 1950s — as it has across the nation.
