Opinion: Utah’s food tax survives a near-death experience

Four potential changes to the Utah Constitution will appear on your ballot when it comes in the mail next week, but don’t believe your eyes. It’s a Halloween trick. Two of them aren’t really there.

Thanks to separate rulings in state courts, you can vote for or against them to your heart’s content, but it won’t count. They are mere words on paper.

It may be fair to call this the year of ghost amendments in Utah elections.

Amendment D, which would have allowed lawmakers to change, amend or void any citizen initiative voters had approved, was stricken because legislative leaders wrote a misleading description of it on the ballot, and because they failed to publish notice of the amendment two months before the election in newspapers statewide.

Amendment A, which would have removed the roughly eight-decades-old earmark that gave all Utah income tax collections to public and higher education (and a few social programs), met the same fate this week because it, too, wasn’t properly advertised in newspapers.

The loss of two amendments, while embarrassing, isn’t necessarily an end point. These were tossed on technicalities. We may not have heard the last of either one.

However, there is one other casualty here — the long-sought-for removal of all state sales taxes on groceries — that has a less certain future. Long a pet issue for advocates of the poor and disadvantaged, it somehow found itself in an unlikely relationship with school funding.

The end of Amendment A said a yes vote meant “state statute will eliminate the state sales tax on food.” That tax rate is now 1.75%.

You may wonder what grocery sales taxes and education income taxes have in common. The simple answer is politics. Eliminating the grocery tax has, in recent years, gone from the political fringes to near the center of mainstream popularity. Five years ago, lawmakers had the temerity to pass a tax reform measure that did the opposite — raising this tax. That, along with some other parts of the package, met with a public revolt so strong lawmakers were forced to repeal the package as one of their first acts of the 2020 general session.

Lawmakers say the food tax was not added as an incentive to get people to approve Amendment A. It was added to get the amendment through the House.

A year ago, current House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, told the Deseret News that House members were more focused on taking the tax off food than changing how education is funded, which isn’t seen as immediately necessary.

Also, changing the income tax earmark would have freed up money to pay for removing the food tax.

Regardless, the food tax remains, having survived another near-death experience. Advocates, like the Greek mythical character Sisyphus , seem condemned to forever roll the boulder of tax relief up a steep hill, just to see it roll back again.

The tax brings in about $200 million a year, which isn’t much compared with the entire budget. The state has lost much more through recent income tax cuts in recent years.

It’s true that income taxes hurt the economy because they penalize productivity, while sales taxes apply to consumption and are, basically, voluntary — you don’t have to buy most things.

But that argument doesn’t hold for most groceries. Food is one of life’s necessities. That makes the tax regressive. The very poorest of Utahns qualify for food stamps or other programs, but those on the edge — struggling families or retirees — pay the most as a percentage of their income.

Through the years, legislative leaders have made all sorts of arguments to keep from removing that 1.75%. For a while, they even talked about raising the tax to fund programs for the poor .

So, what will be its fate?

Maybe lawmakers will save the food tax as leverage once again to get the House to pass the next version of Amendment A. Maybe they will finally pass a stand-alone bill to eliminate the tax.

Maybe, in a fit of irony, citizens will pass an initiative to do away with it, then dare lawmakers to mess with it.

Or maybe, like a never-ending Halloween, we just go on paying the 1.75% forever.