Watching the debate over taxation is like watching a guy shop for groceries without a cart. After a while, his arms are full, but he’d really like to pick up a bag of apples, so should he put back the gallon of milk, or will one more item fit on top of the stack, or how much weight can he really hold with his teeth …

In Iowa, everybody seems to agree that commercial property taxes are too high. The unavoidable question is: If you lower those taxes, how do you make up the shortfall? This is where the carton of eggs hits the floor.

A speaker at last week’s annual meeting of the Iowa Taxpayers Association introduced a nice new twist. “Gross receipts taxes have come back from the dead,” said Joe Crosby, a Washington, D.C., lobbyist with the Council on State Taxation. “Gross receipts taxes are a very efficient way to raise lots of money.” And without troubling many individual taxpayers/voters.

Unlike a sales tax, which is paid by the buyer in a transaction, a gross receipts tax is levied on the seller. Delaware, for example, has no state or local sales taxes, but imposes a gross receipts tax on sellers of goods and providers of services. No deductions for labor costs, delivery costs or anything else.

But so far, Iowa’s legislative leaders aren’t talking much about new tax paths to explore. Like Donald Rumsfeld on his way out the door, they’re making a list of the obvious choices. We could replace those taxes with money from — somewhere – or we could shift the tax burden to – somebody — or we could see to it that local spending is cut — somehow.

Governor-elect Chet Culver told the Taxpayers Association that he has formed a task force to find the answers.

Mike Gronstal, the leader of the Senate Democrats, told the same group that commercial property taxes constitute the most compelling taxation issue facing the Legislature. But he kept warning them that it’s not something that can be solved quickly.

“It took 28 years to dig the hole we’re in, and it’s going to take a long-term effort to solve it,” Gronstal said. “There may come a time to look at alternative sources for funding local government.” Hmmm. That last part sounds interesting.

Gronstal also mentioned that as much as he likes using a rollback mechanism to encourage home ownership, he’s not so enthused about the ancient Homestead Credit program. “We spend $100 million to give people an exemption on the first $4,750 of their home’s value,” he said. It probably was a great deal when it started several decades ago, but “does it make sense now?”

Crosby, the D.C. lobbyist, said the widespread victories by Democrats at the state level last month mean that “we’ll see a lot of rhetoric about businesses not paying their fair share of taxes.” He sees the landscape differently. “States overly rely on the business sector for taxes,” he said. “Forty-five percent of state and local revenues are generated by business.”

That sounds like a plea for burden-shifting, but Crosby noted: “What is rational from a policy perspective may be completely irrational from a political perspective.”

Which puts us back dangerously close to square one.

When Bob Dole ran for president, one of his best lines went like this: “I was on the Senate floor before I left in June, and I said one day: ‘Now, gentlemen, let me tax your memories’ … and Ted Kennedy jumped up and said, ‘Why haven’t we thought of that before?'”

We’ll never explore quite that far – probably — but we just might have some scary tax adventures ahead of us.