Paul Johnson

They're just going to wait until they die.

And that will be a really genuinely big disincentive to inflation.

So there is a reform to capital gains tax that I'm very, very much in favor of.

Would it raise tens of billions?

No, of course it wouldn't.

I mean, capital gains tax is expected to raise about $20 billion this year out of $1,100 billion that the tax system raises.

So it's good to talk about reform.

But the way that these guys are talking about it is not as a way of having a more efficient tax system.

It's a kind of pretend way of saying, oh, we can solve all our problems by increasing capital gains tax, just as you can pretend that you can solve all the problems by having a land value tax.

Again, our system of taxing land and property is chaotic.

It's catastrophically bad, and so let's have a proper talk about how to reform it.

But we actually raise more from it than most other countries.

So the issue is not do we raise enough, it's do we raise stuff in a way that is both fair and efficient, to which the answer is no, it's not in the least bit fair, and no, it's not in the least bit efficient.

I mean, I don't know the answer to that question because it's not in the interest of any individual politician to do it.

I mean, that's what my old job and my former colleagues at the Institute for Fiscal Studies did.

spend a lot of their time trying to do.

And it's what you guys do in this podcast and through your reporting.

Because until you have a government which is willing to sort of say that this is the issue, it's going to be very hard to do.

Now, I mean, the closest, and whatever you think of it, and this is not, let me be clear, a sort of defence of it, the closest we got in a way was back in 2010 when you did get a government coming in and saying, look, we are really going to cut spending

We're going to kick you.