Effort to remove food tax soon to enter line of fire

By Jay Evensen
Deseret Morning News
Published: Saturday, Dec. 3, 2005 6:31 p.m. MST
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Apparently all of Europe is in a dither over someone's decision to shoot a sparrow that flew though an open window in the Netherlands and knocked over some dominoes. A reality TV show had spent many weeks setting up 4 million dominoes in order to set a world record. The sparrow showed a lack of appreciation for that as it fluttered away in a desperate attempt to find an escape.

The quick, and apparently very unpopular, solution was to just kill the thing.

It made me think about tax reform in Utah.

Not that state lawmakers are all fluttering around mindlessly. Nor are they necessarily birdbrains. The 15 members of a Tax Reform Task Force that just finished its work have spent countless hours seriously studying solutions. But every time they turned around they seemed to be knocking over dominoes.

In the end, on the vexing issue of removing sales taxes from non-prepared food items at the grocery store, they voted to be more merciful than the European television crew. They let every idea live, preferring instead to approve a broad concept rather than any detailed plans.

It will be up to the Legislature as a whole to shoot this one out, hoping they don't knock over all the dominoes in the process.

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Frankly, I'm encouraged they have come this far. For nearly a decade now I have been writing about the need to remove the tax from food. Even though the very poorest of the poor qualify for food stamps and other vouchers that are tax-exempt, food is life's most basic necessity. And the sales tax is a bigger burden the less money you make. As I said once before, it is like playing a basketball game in which the shortest players have to shoot at the highest baskets.

But I have often felt as if my opinions on the matter were stuck in a pneumatic tube and shot into the black void of outer space. Much is being made this time around about how much popular support exists for removing this tax. Seems we've heard that one before. The truth is, this idea has a disastrous history in Utah.

Back in 1980, one of the state's most prominent Democrats, Sen. Frances Farley, got so frustrated with her inability to get other lawmakers to accept the idea that she started a petition drive that got the food-tax issue onto the general election ballot. But public employees and other government groups worried the dominoes were headed straight for them. They campaigned hard against it, arguing the state couldn't afford to lose the revenue from food purchases, especially at a time when the economy was faltering. Voters bought that argument and defeated the measure 56 percent to 44 percent.

Ten years later, the economy was rolling along nicely when Merrill Cook and his Independent Party got another food-tax initiative on the ballot. This time, a future governor, Mike Leavitt, who was then a member of the state Board of Regents, helped fight it on the premise that the loss of food-tax money would lead to cuts in higher education. Voters again listened to the warnings — or maybe they just disliked Cook. In any event, they soundly defeated the measure.

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