Paul Johnson is the current director of the IFS, and has written a book covering all aspects of fiscal policy: how the government raises revenue through tax and what it spends it on. The aim is to provide – as the author puts it – an explanation of where the money comes from, where it goes to, how that has changed over time and how it needs to change in the future.

The book has some interesting ideas – a call for the long overdue reform of council tax, a flat-rate VAT, the devolution of more power over spending to local authorities – and the chapter on post-school education is excellent. But it doesn’t really break new ground, pushing up to the boundaries of orthodoxy but never beyond them. The book comes highly recommended, it's a huge achievement and should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in politics, or the broader issue of financing and running the country.Equally, the author assumes that the current structure may not change. We might ask, however, how sustainable the structure might be with ever increasing amounts of debt being added to the existing pile? There is little to help that conversation in this book. The book also allows us to link together income and expenditure in a fairly useful way. For example, national insurance receipts very nearly equal the spending on the health service. I find that a useful piece of information because the NI system was originally supposed to fund the NHS. The obvious implication is that if we want to raise the funding for the NHS, we will need to raise NI levels. Government decisions determine the welfare of the poor and the elderly, the state of the health service, the effectiveness of our children’s education, and how prepared we are for the future: whether that is a pandemic or global warming. As a society, we are a reflection of what the government spends. Finally, it's great to see a well-deserved shout-out to Steve Webb for revamping the state pension and introducing DC freedom of choice; but there's still work to be done on UK pensions. Let's be more frank that DB members have it really good (and indeed better than was probably originally intended), and think about ways to improve the new DC world we live in for the current workforce generation. Higher default DC contributions? Is CDC the answer? And is there more that we can do with existing DB assets? I could posture on these all day (let me know if you fancy a coffee or beer 😉), but at the very least the status quo is surely not enough. The book is an historical account of income and spending in 2022-23. In setting it out, it highlights the strengths of the Treasury approach, but also it's pitfalls as well. The account is not forward looking, other than vague reference to future events, such as increasing number of Boomers retiring. There is a sense of where we have been, but not much sense of where we are heading. This allows for some misleading conclusions to arise. One large impending budget item that the author has missed is the cost of servicing the public debt. In some forecasts, debt servicing in two or three years time will be larger than the defence budget.

If you want to understand why crazy politics routinely trumps economic rationality in government choices, read this' Robert PestonIf you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. For example, there are those who might say that inheritance tax only raising 1/34th of income tax is wrong. They might argue that inheritances from rich people to their heirs ought to raise a larger amount of income. The numbers suggest that even if the inheritance tax take was doubled, after allowing for avoidance and mitigation schemes, it would only allow, for example, a 12% increase in the schools budget. Not to be sneezed at, but not a significant amount, either.