Tax-cutting bills easily advance
But revenues may be insufficient to cover all 4
In a little over an hour Wednesday a Utah Senate committee approved — without a dissenting vote — four tax-cutting bills that together would trim $66.5 million from state coffers.
Some of the cash would stay with businesses, the bills being sold as good for economic development.
Others are pass-throughs, the money ending up with individual subscribers and ratepayers of the industries that get the breaks. The bills would make a "level playing field" in tax burdens between the affected firms and their private-sector competitors.
Utahns are split over the bills, a poll for the Deseret Morning News and KSL-TV conducted by Dan Jones & Associates shows.
Fifty-two percent oppose giving a sales tax break on business "inputs" — items bought by a firm, used in production, on which they pay sales tax (SB33).
But Utahns like the idea of taking a tax off of electricity sold by Intermountain Power Project and Utah Power, the $5.5 million reduction being passed down to ratepayers. Jones found that 58 percent like that bill (SB34).
But 57 percent of Utahns don't like a bill that would reduce cable TV bills by a total $9 million (SB32), Jones found.
A fourth bill, SB31, includes both a business's repair and replacement parts as sales-tax exempt, costing the state $11 million a year.
Lawmakers have record tax revenue this year: about $600 million in new revenue growth and $400 million in one-time surpluses.
Even one of the staunchest supporters of tax cuts — Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper — admitted that not all of the $66.5 million may ultimately be given back to businesses and citizens.
"These (bills reflect) sound tax policy," said Stephenson, who is president of the Utah Taxpayers Association, a business-backed group that supports all the tax measures heard Wednesday.
But there may not be enough revenues allocated to tax cuts to pay for the four bills passed Wednesday, as well as take the sales tax off food and cut/reform state personal income taxes, Stephenson noted.
"We ought to give the same exemptions to as much of our basic industry as possible," he said, "so that our tax policy is not a barnacle on the ship of our economy."
The cable TV bill (SB32) will be so structured, cable TV executives said, that subscribers will not be paying a sales tax on part of their bill that really isn't there — a concern that arose with how the original implementation would work.
Instead of a subscriber's bill just being reduced (and the sales tax applied to the original bill without the reduction), the tax break will come off of a state excise tax, which is added on later. So subscribers will see the full benefit of the tax cut, executives said.
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