But, come Christmas morning, when most of those children found that what was under the tree fell significantly short of what had been promised by St. Nick himself, there would be many unhappy children, many upset parents and a Santa Claus who was nowhere about.

The difference between that scenario and the recommendations made Monday by Utah's tax reform task force is that the Santas who made many promises - lowering the state's de facto flat tax rate from 7 percent to 5 percent, with partial credits for mortgage interest and charitable donations and elimination of the much-hated sales tax on groceries - will still be around to hear the anguished cries of those who discover that they can't really get everything they want.

After meetings and numbers-crunching stretching back to May, the task force Monday basically decided that it would pass along some general recommendations that sound good and fit on a postcard, leaving it to the general session of the Legislature in January to work out the details.

But the point of such a task force is supposed to be to step back, take a global look at a complicated problem and present a fully thought-through, footnoted plan for addressing it.

The Legislature would have to consider it, amend it as desired and then pass it, or not. But lawmakers would have the considerable benefit of the spade work done by a group that was devoted to fleshing the problem out and considering it from all sides - something that's darned hard to do during the brief and hectic legislative session.

Notably, of the three general plans that the task force had before it Monday, the one recommended was the one with the least detail and no particular numbers on whether the tax burden would be shifted, as most flat-tax plans do, from the wealthy to the middle- and working-classes.

And even that plan doesn't specifically include the task force's stated desire to end the sales tax on groceries. The group just sent that idea along as a bonus, with no suggestions as to how, or even whether, to make up the more than $220 million that would be lost to state and local governments.

Read this task force recommendation the way a good Santa Claus makes his promises: "We'll see."