I am indeed a big fan of the sort of authority you are mentioning – when I wrote on it back in 2009 that was the idea I had in mind. And when I read Blinder that is what I took from his piece as well.

I just felt the suggestion that the authority would pick his tax structure and just set that up a little self serving and unrelated to the initial idea – so had to ping it 😉

Mind you how much attention did the Govt pay to the last Task Force on taxation?? Sweet FA by all accounts…

Indeed – don’t get me wrong, I have a huge amount of sympathy for the idea of making sure the debt/GDP ratio remains at a target level. And if we felt short-termist governments could not manage that (looking at you UK) there could be scope for an independent tax authority based on that mandate.

Of course, even then it is about setting a level – not a structure. Morgan’s article creeps across into structure when he starts presuming that a independent tax authority would magically pick his preferred tax structure … and this smacked a bit to much of dictatorial technocratic design for me

“Pursuing policies that are consistent with a reasonable degree of predictability about the level and stability of tax rates for future years.”