The very silly history of capital gains tax

Rishi Sunak has now published his “tax return” (scare quotes because it’s just a one page summary), and so some people are discovering for the first time that we tax capital gains on shares at a much lower rate than we tax employment income.

UK capital gains tax has suffered from constant fiddling by politicians, with one shining moment of rationality in 1988 followed by a succession of changes that were never properly thought out.

I’ve just published a short article with some charts demonstrating the incoherence of CGT policy over the past few years. And I return to the question of how CGT should change.