So into our state's financial crisis marches a task force: 42 civic-minded volunteers chosen by Gov. Bill Richardson to seek ways of balancing a budget that many of our leaders say is $1 billion out of whack — owing, in great part, to special tax favors for the fatter of our felines.

Rolling back a bunch of overly generous, overly optimistic income-tax cuts would make sense — to everybody except those benefiting from them. But fear little, Mr. and Mrs. Croesus; your fortunes are sure to be fought for by the many special-interest lobbyists larded onto the task force.

And sure enough, at the group's first meeting, here in Santa Fe on Monday, the notion of retreating on income-tax cuts, or even hitting six-figure incomes with a 1 percent surcharge, was obscured by a smokescreen laid down by the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce.

What's really hurting the state, said the chamber's Terri Cole, is the 2004 repeal of the sales tax on grocery-store food, which rich and poor alike used to pay — but with lots less impact on the wealthy. As part of that year's legislative juggling, taxes on other purchases went up, and municipalities' pieces of the action went down. The grumbling over that tax reform has been going on among those interests so abundantly represented on this fiscal task force.

So, Cole suggested, let's reinstate the food tax; that'd boost the state treasury by $200 million a year ...

What — and return to those regressively bad ol' days when New Mexicans, already hard hit by the prices of what went in their shopping carts, paid another couple hundred bucks or more a year for the privilege of having something to eat?

This isn't just nuts — it's an offensive stumble backward to the days when New Mexico, along with a couple of other states at the bottom of the social-progress scale, clung to gross-receipts taxes on groceries to shore up their pitiful treasuries. Today, Alabama and Mississippi are alone in fully taxing grocery food. The last thing we should do is join them.

When the task force meets again tomorrow, perhaps there'll be more attention to such revenue sources as higher liquor taxes, or increased gasoline taxes — which, like food taxes, are tougher on the working poor, but they take a beating anyway whenever the price-fixers of Big Oil decide to gouge the motoring public.

What the group should do is turn its attention to the big-money people — and their potential for revenue if income taxes went back up from below 5 percent toward the old 8 percent level.

We're in tough times, to be sure; especially tough for middle- and low-income families. Slicing into their grocery budgets would be especially cruel — and, perhaps, politically costly to whatever legislators might consider such a thing when they convene ... in an election year.

We applaud the willingness of the task force's members to try coming to grips with financial problems a profligate governor and Legislature have dragged us into, largely by way of a bloated payroll. Now, if only this group can grasp the notion of shared sacrifice ...