A majority in the state House opposes recommendations from a consultant to the Tax Review Commission that call for several new tax increases to help finance state government, including an increase in the general excise tax.

The PFM Group, a Philadelphia-based consultant, has advised the Tax Review Commission that existing taxes will not be sufficient to maintain state government and that spending cuts alone will not cure the structural imbalance.

The consultant has recommended increasing the state’s 4 percent general excise tax to 4.5 percent — 5 percent on Oahu because of the surcharge for rail — along with a tax on pension income. The consultant also suggested eliminating the deduction for property taxes and raising the corporate income tax rate.

House Speaker Calvin Say (D, St. Louis Heights-Wilhelmina Rise-Palolo Valley) and more than two dozen other lawmakers opposed those recommendations in written testimony to the Tax Review Commission. House Minority Leader Gene Ward (R, Kalama Valley-Hawaii Kai) also opposed the tax hikes on behalf of Republicans.

“We feel that such a significant net tax increase probably will be detrimental to private businesses, residents, or both, and that PFM has not sufficiently analyzed the impact of the tax increase on the economy, businesses and residents,” Say and the other lawmakers wrote.

A Tax Review Commission analyzes the state’s tax structure every five years and makes recommendations to the Legislature about tax policy. The commission’s recommendations are advisory, but they are often used to inform debates over taxes.

The commission will determine what, if any, of the tax changes recommended by The PFM Group will make the commission’s report to the Legislature in December. In addition to the GET, pension and corporate tax rate increases, the consultant also recommended higher taxes on tobacco and alcohol and making a temporary increase in the hotel room tax permanent.

“The Legislature is free to accept, reject, modify or accept some of the recommendations,” said Randy Iwase, the commission’s chairman and a former state senator. “It is their call.”

State Rep. Isaac Choy (D, Manoa), an accountant who was chairman of the last Tax Review Commission, said the consultant failed to consider the steps the Legislature can take to control government spending and manage long-term public employee retirement and health care costs.

Others said a significant tax increase would be hard to justify when state tax collections are improving as the economy recovers.

“It’s important that we come out now and at least voice our opinion of why we feel it’s deficient,” Choy said.

Ward, the House’s leading Republican, called the higher taxes in the consultant’s report “a shopping list of how to grow government.” He said lawmakers could use an analysis of the impact of tax credits for renewable energy or high technology but have already had debates about raising the GET or imposing a pension tax.

“You’re re-enforcing — you’re emboldening, if you will — the tax-and-spend people in the Legislature,” he said. “We already know how to do that, and this thing is going to embolden people to do it even more and they’re going to cite this as part of the rigor for doing it. And it’s going to be for even those on the fifth floor (Governor’s Office) who pulled back on the pension or the soda tax; it’s going to embolden them.”

Lowell Kalapa, president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii, said it was “truly astounding” that the consultant compared the state’s unique general excise tax, which is applied on most financial transactions, to retail sales taxes on the mainland. The GET is the state’s largest source of tax revenue and has been praised — and criticized by some — for its broad reach.

Kalapa said Hawaii would likely need a retail sales tax of 11 percent, much higher than the average on the mainland, to generate the same revenue as the GET.