Guest opinion: When it comes to tax reform, time may be the best teacher

December 22, 2019 (Deseret News)

So it goes with tax reform. The reforms made now end up being part of a longer process. And significant reform isn’t easy, nor it doesn’t always win friends. As Thomas Jefferson once put it, “Politics … holds up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.”

The particulars of the current tax reform were wide open for debate, with the necessity of a tax cut, the sales tax on food and education funding among the most contentious issues. But I would submit that most Utahns are tax reformers to some degree, even if they don’t know it. To shift from a Jeffersonian to a Jeff Foxworthian approach, consider the following propositions.

If you think Utah’s long, seemingly arbitrary list of sales tax exemptions is a problem, you might be a tax reformer.

If you think Utah’s growing list of earmarks unnecessarily ties the hands of policymakers, you might be a tax reformer.

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