Policy Forum: From Independent Tax Commission to Independent Tax Authority
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Taxation is one area in which the imperatives of good and those of good politics consistently diverge. This has given rise to the occasional call to depoliticize tax policy, through the creation of an independent tax authority (ITA) that would be responsible for setting general tax policy and would operate with substantial independence from the government of the day. Such a change would obviously represent a move in the direction of a more technocratic form of government and will be resisted on those grounds. In order to advance the discussion, I begin this article by arguing that an ITA represents a response to a genuine problem, which is the exploitation by politicians of public ignorance and irrationality with respect to taxes. This leads to inefficiencies and inequalities that are introduced into the tax code, and also wasted time and energy through the constant diversion of public debate into arguments over pseudo-issues. Having motivated the proposal, I then outline the basic institutional structure that an ITA could have in Canada, the kind of mandate that it would be given, and the types of taxes that it would control. I conclude by presenting some of the more obvious objections and attempting a response.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.025 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.075 | 0.015 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".