Eric Crampton: Bracket creep is a stealthy and dishonest form of taxation

If you want to know the effects of small changes to tax rates or tax thresholds on government revenue, Treasury provides a handy calculator. But the calculator breaks if you ask it to tell you the effects of inflation on tax revenues since April 2021, when the new 39% tax rate came in.

It warns, “The change is too large for this model to give a realistic estimate of change in tax revenue.”

Parliament did not legislate for a tax increase large enough to break Treasury’s tax calculator.

Nobody proposed it. Nobody campaigned on it.