When Utah Foundation released a comprehensive study on Utah’s sales tax base last June, we had only a vague sense that expanding the base would become the biggest item on the agenda for the 2019 legislative session. But, depending on the scope of the change our Legislature is contemplating, sales tax modernization could be the most momentous tax reform Utah has seen in years.
As reform efforts churn in the coming days and weeks, the public and policymakers ought to ponder some key points.
Tax reform is a fact of life: Short of repealing the sales tax, which is not on the table, there is no change legislators can propose that would be more radical than the decision Utah made in the 1930s to create the sales tax in the first place.