'Restoring' is just another way of saying 'tax hike'

Among the many challenges facing Utah lawmakers early next year is one of semantics.

Those who favor taxing groceries at the full state sales tax rate of 4.7 percent (rather than the current rate of 1.75 percent) have to decide how to refer to what it is they are trying to do.

If they say they are going to "restore" or "add back" the tax, they use language that assumes the money rightfully belongs to the government, not the people they are taxing. They fall into the category of those in Congress who want to "restore" the Bush tax cuts.

What they really want to do, of course, is raise taxes on groceries. Few politicians would go so far as to advocate a tax increase at the start of an election year. And yet, in a real sense, they would be taking real dollars out of a struggling economy from the pockets of real people of all income levels and giving them to the government.

Secondly, if they do this without also raising cigarette taxes, they will be saying, as one person put it, that the state would rather raise taxes on green beans than tobacco — a message unworthy of a health-conscious state.

This isn't how key Republican lawmakers who support this tax hike view it. To be fair, they do offer some compelling arguments. Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, wrote a thoughtful piece for the Utah Taxpayers Association newsletter in which he argued that lawmakers made a huge mistake by lowering the food tax.

Stephenson said it would make good fiscal sense to raise the food tax and lower income taxes in general, and then to apply a tax credit or refund to people who earn up to 150 percent of the poverty level, thus giving them back the money they paid in taxes on groceries during the year.

Reducing corporate and individual income taxes, he argues, would stimulate the economy a lot more than lowering the tax on groceries. And if the Legislature did this, it could avoid semantics altogether. It wouldn't be raising taxes.

He may be right, but who out there wants to bet that lawmakers would vote to reduce income taxes in a year when they have to close a deficit of between $750 million and $1 billion? It's much more likely they would grab the food tax as a way to make up some of that deficit, then keep looking for more money elsewhere.