On Sunday, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg pulled up a graph on her studio screen. It showed that Liz Truss’s plan to reverse Rishi Sunak’s national insurance hike would leave richer households with more additional cash than poorer households. “Is that fair?” Kuenssberg asked the incoming prime minister.

“To look at everything through the lens of redistribution, I believe is wrong,” Truss replied, “because what I’m about, is about growing the economy. And growing the economy benefits everyone.”

The hysterical reaction to this response shows how far tax debates have shifted. Twenty years ago, the basic economic proposition that the tax system should raise money efficiently, avoiding distortions and maintaining good incentives to work and invest, was uncontroversial. Redistribution through cash transfers was considered the best way to help those in need.

Yet ever since Gordon Brown put “distributional analysis” at the heart of policymaking, it has been weaponised against individual tax cuts. Rather than looking at the impacts of taxes and benefits in the round, every single tax cut proposal gets deemed unfair if the static cash gains are greater for the rich than poor. Given that those on low incomes or making small transactions tend not to pay taxes already, this distributional frame rejects almost all tax cuts outright.

The sincerity of this argumentation is sometimes questionable. Few of those opposing the national insurance rate cut on these grounds complain about rail subsidies or the state capping social care costs, despite these benefiting the rich disproportionately.

Thankfully, not all politicians succumb to the arguments. George Osborne, the former chancellor, stood firm against criticism of unfairness to cut corporation tax and the 50p income tax rate, arguing that the benefits to incentives were paramount.

Truss is right, though, that public debates have been warped by the conception that any given tax cut is unfair unless its first-order effect is redistributive downwards. Many Conservatives fear these distributional charts and this can entrench anti-growth tax policy.

Our VAT system is riddled with inefficient “pro-poor” carve-outs and tax preferences on food, clothes and energy, for example. The steeply progressive stamp duty distorts the high-end property market. Perverse incentives in the income tax system (such as the removal of the personal allowance above £100,000) are left unreformed, while capital taxes remain higher than ideal. All these harm efficiency and growth, but political concerns about who will be perceived to benefit preclude reform.

James Mirrlees, the Nobel prizewinner, wrote that what matters from a distributional perspective is the effect of taxes and benefits overall. Here, Office for National Statistics data shows the UK state already redistributes heavily. The richest 10 per cent of households pay a 31 per cent effective tax rate (contributing £45,723 net to the Treasury), while the average household in the bottom 10 per cent receives £2.35 from taxpayers in benefits and public services for every £1 earned (receiving £12,444 net). Despite the breathless media coverage, in fact, a recent Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis accounting for all permanent tax and benefit changes this parliament, even incorporating Truss’s national insurance cut, suggests policy will have become more “progressive” in redistributing cash, not less.

That so few feel satisfied strengthens Truss’s point. Stronger economic growth is paramount to the poor’s long-term wellbeing. On policy, the progressive argument that every individual tax change must reduce inequality hinders that goal.