Encouraging it, that is, right up until the day the over-leveraged family declares bankruptcy.

Yet the governor's plan would reward an upper-class variety of irresponsible behavior by putting out a help-wanted sign for rich folks who want to improve their own financial situation on the backs of other taxpayers, and the state as a whole.

Fresh analysis of Huntsman's 5 percent "flatter tax" shows it would either soften the blow or come out a wash for some 600,000 of the state's 900,000 taxpaying households. It would do that by both lowering the rate (now 7 percent for most taxpayers) and boosting personal exemptions for those in the lower income ranges.

Much of the benefit would accrue to working-class households that could take the maximum exemptions while paying the lower rate. But also coming out ahead would be the so-called CEO class, families with incomes above $240,000, who wouldn't get any exemptions but would really benefit from the reduced rate.

Taking one for the team would be, generally, those making between $57,000 and $139,000 annually. The big shock wouldn't hit everyone in that income range, just those who have sunk themselves deeply into mortgages they cannot really afford.

Those families rationalize that behavior because it provides them a tax break, a tax break they would lose under the Huntsman plan. But pulling that rug out from under those over-extended families isn't really so cruel, the argument goes, because the existing tax break is a false guard against financial collapse that will come anyway for many families.

Maybe. But offering cuts in taxes to the highest-income households on the grounds that it will attract more big business managers, their factories, offices and employees to Utah, also includes a serious element of irresponsibility.

Businessmen who move here for a cheap tax bill will have failed to stop and wonder how Utah can afford to do that. By squeezing the middle class? By shorting the state's schools, highways or public safety systems?

If that's why the rich come, they would be relying just as much on an unsustainable house of cards as any over-mortgaged middle-class household ever has.