Can the Chancellor really not see how outrageous the diabolical freeze on tax thresholds is?

Can he really not see that what is most outrageous in the current tax system is the diabolical freeze on thresholds?

The Chancellor has obviously heard of the Laffer Curve. He actually made an explicit reference to it in the Budget speech. And he went on at some length about the need to incentivise paid employment: to  “make work pay”. So he gets it. 
Not only does he understand that lowering tax rates can actually increase tax revenue (as Arthur Laffer has demonstrated) but that people are much less likely to work if the state is confiscating too much of their pay. He said that too in clear terms: the earnings that people receive for their labour do not belong to the state. They are entitled to regard their pay as their own money, by legal and moral right.
You might have expected that what would follow from these unequivocal statements of faith would be a serious programme of lowering the outrageous levels of tax now being levied on work. What we got was the heavily-trailed 2 per cent cut in National Insurance. The grounds for reducing NICS rather than income tax is supposedly to confine the advantage to working people rather than non-working ones who pay income tax but not National Insurance. 
Has he overlooked the fact that people who are beyond retirement age but still working do not pay NICS so will receive no benefit at all? But even more to the point, can he really not see that what is most outrageous in the current tax system is the diabolical freeze on thresholds which brings those on very low earnings into the income tax net and penalises those whose higher earnings come from greater productivity and enterprise? Oddly enough, he does seem to understand this in principle because the one threshold that he did raise was the level on which self-employed people and small business owners must register for VAT.
There are a great many such people, particularly in the creative industries, who deliberately keep their earnings below the threshold because they are determined to avoid being caught in the VAT system which is a nightmare requiring dedicated software or an accountant’s expertise. By raising the amount that can be earned before entering this maze, Mr Hunt knows that he is liberating people to produce and earn more. 
Can he not see that this very same principle can be applied to employed wage earners? Several times, he repeated the mantra that the answer to increasing productivity was not endless migration. Can he not see that the shockingly large proportion of the indigenous workforce which seems to see little point in working, is directly linked to the failure to keep income tax levels in touch with reality?