Our tax system is hopelessly complicated and inefficient. Let's dump it and start again.

Covering 12,000 pages, Britain's tax rules are massively complicated. So what would an ideal tax system look like?

I've often written here before about the excess burden of taxation the added deadweight effect of the time and effort involved in paying and avoiding it, along with the unintended consequences it pretty much always creates.

But here's an unusually graphic illustration of the concept: in the US, there are 6% more fatal crashes on tax filing day than there are on an average day. That's a figure based on 30 years of accident data. It's also one that tells us just how stressful the tax system in the US is for ordinary people.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.