Income tax brackets

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Why are the tax/income levels so random? Sometimes there’s a 2% increase between levels, and sometimes 10%. The first tax bracket is until $11k, but the ones after that seem completely arbitrary.

Is there a reason for these amounts? Wouldn’t it be simpler/better to just have even numbers?

In: Economics

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Tax brackets change every year to reflect inflation. Even if you get a nice “even” number one year (like we did in 2018 when the single filer 35% bracket was $200k and up and the 37% bracket was $300k and up), that number isn’t going to stay nice and even the following year. The brackets do tend to be rounded to a multiple of $25, but rounding at a less granular level than that (to the nearest $100, $1000, etc) could result in billions of dollars more or less in revenue collected for the government, so there’s no sense in rounding just to get a pretty-looking number. Computer programs and calculators don’t really care if a number is easy to read or not.

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