Our tax code is an unholy mess of wrinkles, loopholes and unintended consequences
Fiscal drag is a boring term for a thoroughly miserable phenomenon.
New data has revealed that higher earners in the UK are set to pay nearly £2,000 in additional taxes by 2027 which has come as a result of this.
Salaries go up, take home stays the same; the state takes the increase and doesn’t dare speak its name.
Last month the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned that there would be no room for unfunded pre-election tax cuts despite the government having pushed through the colossal £52bn a year stealth raid on incomes.
Calling it a stealth tax is easy but it’s more iniquitous than that.
Our tax code is loaded up with wrinkles that disrupt the basic economic incentive of work: do better, take more home.
At the lowest level, the way benefits are taken away as people add hours makes it sometimes deeply unwise for individuals to take an extra weekend shift or earn a few quid extra with a second job.
At the highest, the bizarre exemptions and rules around so-called free childcare effectively encourage young parents to stay on salaries of £99,000 a year.
This is rather than earning £130,000, because you end up worse off as the benefit is taken away.
It’s crackers, it’s obvious, it’s there in black and white: and yet government has failed time and time again to deal with it.
Jeremy Hunt and his colleagues have been pretty clear that the forthcoming Autumn Statement will be one of tinkering rather than radicalism.
But perhaps the focus should not be on the numbers but the detail: a radical simplification of the tax code, or at least starting that, could be transformative.
It’s become a standing joke.
Or at least among some pretty odd folk on Twitter, including this newspaper’s editor – to compare and contrast the size of the UK’s tax code today with its previous iterations from years past.
But by God does it need sorting out.