For more than 50 years, we have been told that in order to be competitive, Utah needs to sacrifice and try harder. The legacy of that societal propaganda trap is that Utah has lower-than-average wages, higher-than-average individual taxation, an admirable work ethic and business taxation below average for the Intermountain West.

With Utah's emergence as world-class presence in several arenas, this proposal seems to be unnecessarily self-sacrificing.

The theory is that if businesses (or the wealthy) are taxed less, more jobs will be created, thereby creating an increased tax base (while business profits increase but are untaxed). What actually increases is the population needing state-supported infrastructure and services, while the total tax revenue is virtually unchanged. What truly changes is which pocketbooks pay the taxes, a clever shell game benefiting businesses and the wealthy.

There are serious critics of supply-side economics including Warren Buffet and a combined group of 10 Nobel Prize laureates in economics that made public statements in 2003 and 2004. George Akerloff, 2001 Nobel Prize laureate in economics, remarked on the Bush implementation of supply-side theories that the debate "has been much too polite . . . the proper reference point is that the Bush policy is the worst in 200 years . . . what we have here is a form of looting."

What he meant was placing an increasing portion of the tax burden on the middle class, including the eventual payment of the deficit.

Besides that well-recognized creation of tremendous national deficits, other legacies of these misadventures into theoretical economics are:

l While the economic wealth of the country has grown significantly, wealth has been transferred in massive quantities from the middle class to the upper class, leaving the middle class and lower class with no concurrent improvement in the purchasing power of their total incomes.

l The percentage of Treasury Department receipts from businesses has dropped from 28 percent to 7 percent while business profits skyrocketed.

l Business profits have been so robust that CEO compensation for major corporations, which used to be 45-50 times the salary of the average individual worker, are now 400-500 times that same average salary. These businesses continue to aggressively lobby for ever-increasing special exemptions and tax reductions.

l There has been no significant federal effort to prevent corporations from banking their profits in foreign countries to avoid having U.S. tax obligations, thereby further reducing funds available for the budget.

l A 2004 General Accounting Office report revealed that for the years 1996-2000, 60 percent of all businesses on a national basis had a federal income tax obligation of zero dollars. Included on the list are IBM, Microsoft and Haliburton, among other giants.

l With 60 percent of businesses paying no federal income tax, those businesses successfully lobbied to further protect not only their profits, but the profits of stockholders, by exempting dividend payments from income tax.

The United States has provided a rich and fertile environment that has encouraged and nourished the growth and development of businesses that have flourished, and some have, indeed, grown corpulent. These businesses then lobbied and leveraged their influence to engineer an environment in which they were asked to contribute ever-smaller amounts for the maintenance of the fertile ground from which they arose.

It seem unjustifiable under any reasonable moral, ethical or economic model to extend that federal corporate welfare taxation policy to the state level.

Perhaps we need a better model. Thomas Paine's words come to mind: "Those who expect to reap the benefits of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."

Maybe Gov. Huntsman's clouded vision could be improved by understanding that truly visionary concepts never become tarnished or dated. When that vision becomes obscured, the leadership missteps and self-interested influences threaten to undermine the dream of a more perfect union for all.

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Dennis L. Kay is a retired physician living in Salt Lake City. He is an avid reader, interested in public policy issues.