Earlier this week Guido reported on Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) not-so-independent senior leadership: how two of Torsten Bell’s former colleagues from the Resolution Foundation (RF) now pull the strings at the quango expected to bless the government’s fiscal policies. It turns out there’s a third we missed…

Cara Pacitti, the OBR’s Senior Fiscal Analyst, also spent two years as an economist at the Resolution Foundation, where she worked alongside her future OBR boss Richard Hughes on one paper assessing the “damage” of a no-deal Brexit, and another which claimed “tax rises tend to harm the economy less than spending cuts“. The latter paper, “How to support the economy today and repair the public finances tomorrow”, may as well have been drafted by Gordon Brown. 

Here’s a flavour of what it proposed:

• Public support is necessary and so taxes on corporate crisis windfall profits should be considered – which is Labour Party policy.
• Freezing tax thresholds and raising the Corporation Tax rate should be seen as low-hanging fruit for raising revenue – a massive stealth tax on individuals and a jobs destroying burden on businesses.
• Reforming wealth taxes can improve the functioning of the tax system and raise significant revenue – the Corbyn agenda.

So that’s three senior members of the OBR who are about to assess a budget which obviously runs contrary to their declared ideological objectives. The Resolution Foundation has never seen a tax it doesn’t like, is run by the Labour Party’s former policy chief and advances an agenda that is socialistic. How is it that out of the thousands of economists turned out by British universities every year, the OBR over and over again keeps hiring senior economists from the one think-tank run by Labour’s former policy chief? What are the odds?