It would work like this:

• Phase out the sales tax on food over several years.

This could be done two ways. The state's 4.75 percent sales tax could just be reduced each year at the cash register. Retailers may not like this much — it would be more work for them. But larger grocery stores could deal with the changes.

"The retailers tell me they don't want to change the tax each year" — too messy, Curtis said.

Or each year a larger and larger food tax credit could be given on state income taxes. Low-income people who may not be filing taxes, however, would have to file a form to get their rebate check, and many likely wouldn't do that. So, low-income Utahns, the ones who need the food tax relief the most, may not actually see it during the phase-in time.

After several years, the state would repeal the food tax.

• Pay for the $226 million cost of removing the sales tax from food by implementing a statewide, single-rate sales tax.

That would be no small feat. But such a move would qualify Utah to enter into a nationwide effort of taxing Internet, catalog and other "off-site" sales.

No one knows how much Utah sales tax is avoided by residents buying items on the Web or through catalogs.

Bramble and others estimate Utah could bring in $5 million to $50 million more the first year Utah gets into the single-rate taxation system. A few years down the line, after the new system really gets going — and as Internet sales continue to grow — Utah could receive hundreds of millions of dollars more in off-site sales tax collections.

"Technically, this is not a tax increase," Bramble said. "People already owe this tax, it is just not being collected" by Web site and catalog retailers.

Turning Bramble's idea around a bit, Curtis said, it would be better to just take the tax off food all at once and raise the nonfood sales tax rate a bit. Then, as the off-site sales tax revenue really does come in, lower the nonfood sales tax rate, either all at once or a bit each year, until the nonfood rate is about where the current overall rate now sits.

Like Valentine's and, to a lesser extent, Curtis' plan, the problem still remains in how to deal with cities that have a 1 percent sales tax; with counties that have a quarter-cent sales tax; and with the other, special sales taxes, such as the Utah Transit Authority and the voter-approved ZAP tax.

If the phase-in is handled through state income tax rebates, that wouldn't affect those local tax revenues at all until the final year when the whole food tax is removed.

If the phase-in is through yearly reductions in the food tax at the cash register, the local governments' tax could be taken off the final phase-in year.

Still, historically, local governments spend all of their sales tax revenue. So, at the end of the phase-in, they would still be short a lot of cash, having lost their food tax revenues.

Local governments would have to put their sales tax growth revenues — coming to them, as it would the state, through increased off-sight collections — into investment accounts instead of spending it, Bramble says. Then when the food tax finally comes off, it wouldn't be a big hit, or any hit at all, to local governments, the senator said.

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E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com