Here’s a spiffy idea: Someone should pick a group of people to decide what kind of taxes Mississippians will pay.

Members of this group will spend months hearing testimony from job-creation experts. They’ll thumb through stacks of documents to review regional and national trends. They’ll consider ideas from the general public. They’ll weigh what works and what doesn’t.

And at the end of this lengthy process, they’ll recommend a list of tax-code changes.

Gov. Haley Barbour created just such a group back in January as he prepared to launch his second term in office.

The hitch?

Mississippi already had a group of people paid to do exactly the kind of public policy analysis the governor asked his volunteer group to do.

The existing group is called the Legislature — 122 House members and 52 senators chosen, for better or worse, by the voters of this state.

As the governor’s tax study commission releases its final report this week, nobody is criticizing the members’ work ethic. Goodness knows, they’ve spent hundreds of hours and exerted plenty of brainpower to examine Mississippi’s tax system.

However, several critics have noted that the governor’s commission — through no fault of the members — is far from representative of Mississippi’s population. It is overwhelmingly male, white, conservative and business oriented.

The Legislature, by sharp contrast, represents widely divergent political viewpoints. After decades of civil-rights challenges and court battles, it also nearly mirrors the black-white balance of Mississippi’s population. Women are still underrepresented as a percentage of the population, but that isn’t fixed through redistricting.

Mississippi NAACP president Derrick Johnson said early this year that he believed Barbour chose a tax study group that would write a report reflecting the governor’s own wishes. Tax cuts for businesses. Changes in personal income taxes to benefit middle- and upper-income Mississippians. No reduction in the 7 percent grocery tax.

Turns out, Johnson was right about the group’s suggestions.

The commission can make recommendations, but it can’t enact any changes in the state tax code. That is the sole responsibility of the bureaucracy already in place — the elected men and women of the Mississippi Legislature.

Once the report goes to the House and Senate, there’s no guarantee Barbour will get his way. The smart money says that the governor will get only part of what he wants.

Barbour’s immediate political benefit is that he can use the commission’s report to show lawmakers he’s not alone in wanting certain changes in the tax structure. He’ll argue that some of the state’s brightest minds came up with the list.