Brady Brammer Will Keep Cutting Your Taxes. Kelly Smith Won't.

The legislature has cut taxes each of the last six years. Would you have, or did you vote for those tax cuts? And if there’s another proposal to cut taxes in the next session, would you vote for it?

So I did vote for each of those tax cuts. And here’s part of why. I want to explain why I did that. So each of those tax cuts is an incremental tax cut, meaning it’s not a huge tax cut that cuts deep and makes it worse. What you’re looking for is can you cut the taxes in a way that promotes growth, that promotes wage growth, that helps businesses come here, that makes Utah more competitive.

And so we have cut taxes year over year with these small incremental tax cuts, and those have increased Utah’s GDP. At the same time that we’ve been cutting the income tax, over that same roughly same period, we’ve been able to double the amount of funds that go to our schools. So we’ve been able to cut taxes, increase the prosperity of our citizens, and increase our funding to schools by 100%.

Now, would I do it in the future? There may be instances where I would look at it and say this is not a responsible tax cut. There are irresponsible tax cuts. And you can look to Kansas as an example of when they made an irresponsible tax cut. But if the tax cut is such that it looks like it is responsible, that we can meet our obligations, and that it will make our state more competitive and bring more jobs to our citizens and increase the type of jobs that come to Utah, absolutely. I love a good tax cut.

And in 2023, I negotiated the largest tax cut in the history of Utah. And at this point we’re at 4.45. I’d like to get us down below 4% by the time I’m done serving.

I always think it’s interesting when we talk about cutting income taxes when we know that our income taxes are set aside for education. So while Brady will say that we have funded education, there are so many needs in education. I know as an educator that we still have a tremendous amount of needs. So any cut in income taxes is a cut in education funding. It just is what it is. And I think those small cuts make educators feel less valued. They make the people who work in our schools feel like we don’t care about education. And even though we’re raising the funding, it’s still not enough. And so why are we cutting these incremental amounts?

“It wasn’t a huge amount for my family. I doubt it was for your family.”

And then we’re still saying that we’re not funding education to the level that it should be. While we have children who have special needs, who are on Medicaid, who need things, all of these areas that we cover with income taxes, until people feel like those are well funded and we’re doing the best that we can for our children, that would not be for any more incremental income taxes cut.

I want to talk a little bit about educators and my value for educators. Now, we have had the fastest growth in educator income in the history of the state of Utah during the time that I’ve served. And we’ve done that by allocating money directly to the educators.

And so now we have the highest paid teachers of any state that touches our borders. We also have the fifth highest starting teacher in America, and our starting teachers start at the highest amount of any state that touches our borders.

We have really worked hard to take care of our educators. And so here’s the idea. You can say that any cut to income tax is a cut to education, but if you’re not looking at the bigger picture, that the most valuable thing to our education system is an income-producing job and a job environment that brings more business to our state.

And the proof is in the pudding. Six years in a row of cutting income taxes and six years in a row of increasing the amount that we can pay our educators.