White House Chief of Staff under Barack Obama and former Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel, once said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” A majority in the Utah State Legislature seemed to agree with this political philosophy as they convened in special session to take on tax reform, but where was the crisis, and why did it require such an urgent response?

Under the Utah Constitution, all income taxes go to fund education. The rest of the state budget, the general fund, relies mostly on sales tax collections. In the fiscal year ending June 30, 2019, Utah realized a massive surplus of income tax revenues. This did not occur by chance. Utah lawmakers failed to address the effects of federal tax changes from 2017, leaving many Utah taxpayers in the lurch for 2018. Think back to earlier this year when you filed your 2018 individual return. You probably had a lower state tax refund than previous years or perhaps had to pay for the first time. The legislature’s inaction is a principal reason for this. State lawmakers, to their credit, fixed this in the special legislative session with retroactive refunds payable early next year to Utahns with dependents, but the surplus is at least in meaningful part, of their own making.

At the same time, state sales tax revenues fell short of forecasts and created a multimillion-dollar deficit. Republican lawmakers used this imbalance in revenue collections (i.e. the crisis) to suggest that massive tax reform was the only answer.

This seemed premature on the sales tax side, when taking into account recent changes in the law with respect to online sales tax collection. In 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that allowed states to compel out-of-state online retailers to collect their sales tax. On Jan. 1, 2019, Utah’s online sales tax collection law became effective. Moreover, on Oct. 1, 2019, Gov. Herbert signed a marketplace facilitator law that compels third-parties that provide online sales platforms (think Amazon Marketplace, eBay and Etsy) to collect taxes on sales they facilitate in the marketplace. Would it have been too much for state legislators to sit tight and see how these dramatic expansions of Utah’s sales tax collection base play out over the next few years before cutting income taxes (and thereby cutting funding for education) and, among other sales tax increases, raising the sales tax on groceries?

Yet, state legislators just increased the sales tax on grocery items to the full sales tax rate. Have you ever really thought about the sales tax? It is a consumption tax, but it is more than that. It is a completely hidden tax in terms of total taxpayer burden. Quick, how much have you paid in sales taxes this year? How much did you pay last year? You have no idea. When taxpayers are unaware of their tax burden, it becomes state lawmakers’ responsibility to administer that tax fairly.

Fair administration of the sales tax must acknowledge that all consumption is not the same. Buying a new TV is not the same as buying groceries. Yet state legislators have effectively lumped substantially all consumption into one big pot. This has the potential to detrimentally and disproportionately affect low-income families and individuals: those whom state legislators should be protecting. Retorts that the bill includes a credit for low- and moderate-income Utahns, while politically soothing, misunderstand taxpayer budgeting and tax return filing circumstances.

With the increased sales tax, taxpayers will notice higher grocery bills and strains on their monthly budgets. They will hardly notice, however (let alone consider as compensation for their higher grocery bills), a slightly higher refund in April of the following year when they file their income tax return. What’s more, many of Utah’s lowest income individuals (including members of Utah’s disabled community) have income that is low enough (or not taxable, e.g. social security disability payments) that they have not historically filed a tax return. In all likelihood (outreach efforts and associated funding in the tax reform package notwithstanding), a critical mass of these taxpayers will bear an uptick in their costs of day-to-day living without realizing that they now need to file an income tax return to receive remediation.

So with the Legislature’s special session concluded, keep in mind that the crisis, to the extent you’re willing to call it that, on the income tax side, was in critical part, the product of the legislature’s inaction; and on the sales tax side, may have resolved itself with new online sales tax collection laws. Revamping the tax system on this level and in this way seems, as Jon Huntsman Jr. suggested in this paper last week, “unimaginative and harmful” on the part of state legislators (who would rather do this than expend political capital amending the Constitution to siphon money more obviously away from education). They certainly didn’t waste this crisis.

Eric Smith is an associate professor of taxation in and serves as associate dean of Weber State University’s John B. Goddard School of Business & Economics.