The Legislature's tax reform task force apparently disagrees, because it voted last week to ask state lawyers to draft a bill with a 4 percent flat rate. No progressive brackets, no deductions for mortgage interest payments or charitable giving.

In the abstract, this is eminently fair, and it's simple. Everyone pays the same rate. Rich people pay more tax, in absolute dollars, than poor ones because they earn more.

Trouble is, this system would not eliminate income taxes on people living below the poverty level, as former Gov. Olene Walker's flat tax proposal would have. Poor people must spend all of their income for necessities. The government should not make them poorer.

But that's what a pure flat tax system would do.

To understand how, consider a few statistics from the State Tax Commission.

First, though, remember that Utah's current system of individual income taxes is progressive in name only. Though rates range from 2.6 percent to 7 percent, the top rate kicks in at under $9,000 for a married couple and $4,500 for a single taxpayer. Essentially, it is a modified flat tax.

Under that system, resident taxpayers in 2003 with adjusted gross incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 paid an effective state tax rate of 3.96 percent. That is also the largest group of taxpayers in terms of returns filed. Taxpayers with incomes below this level paid lower effective rates; wealthier taxpayers paid higher ones. The highest was 5.36 percent for those earning more than $250,000.

Presumably, then, under the 4 percent flat tax, the effective rates for the groups with incomes from $50,000-$75,000, or less, would increase, and would decline for those with higher incomes.

This is a tax shift, but it is not tax fairness.

Proponents of the flat tax might point out that taxpayers earning more than $250,000 a year in 2003 paid roughly 19 percent of the state income tax collected, even though they represent only 1 percent (actually 0.9 percent) of the filers. To one way of thinking, that isn't fair, either.

But if Utah parallels the nation as a whole, in which about 1 percent of the population owns about 40 percent of the nation's net worth, then it could be argued that they aren't carrying their share of the load even under the current system.