Is there a good reason taxes are done in income brackets instead of just plugging income into some sort of equation?

Is there a good reason taxes are done in income brackets instead of just plugging income into some sort of equation?

brackets are, at least on paper, a "simplified" form of a more general equation into piecewise brackets

people are too math illiterate to understand a more complicated equation than that even if it's just something simple, exponential log etc.

Inefficient antiquity. Taxes have been around long before calculators and have been done by hand. Obviously it's much easier with brackets even though a continuous function makes more sense. But changing the system is far too difficult.

Politicians are retarded normies.

Give example of a good tax equation

>sin(x)

0

It's a form of gerrymandering.

That's not true at all. Bracketing doesn't simplify anything. It's Before democracy, the aristocracy did not pay taxes because they had private armies and would kill the king if he tried to tax them. So instead they established a robber's pact between them.
In democracy, having different brackets allows you to promise different things to different people in order to win votes. Also, lobbyists playing the role of former aristocrats, campaign funds etc.

Technically it is in sort of an equation.
If the tax rates for $0-10k are 0%, $10k-20k are 2%, and 20-30k are 5%, to keep it simple, if you made 30k that year $10k is taxed at 2%, $10k is taxed at 5%. Not 30k all at 5%

What people seem to want to think how taxes work is:
>30k @ 5% = $1500

When it's actually:
>10k @ 2% with 10k@5% = $700
The first 10k is disregarded in the example as that's in the lowest tax bracket. The forms you usually fill out have this all figured for you so you don't usually see all the details of how it's taken out, usually just the end result, hence people thinking its the first way.

How about this, why don't we make a tax function and then find it's Taylor series. Then we can define brackets by how many terms of the Taylor series you have to pay.

If you are super poor, you only pay the first term which will be a small constant that anyone who counts as unemployed could pay (we could define it as a fraction of the minimum wage). After every higher income bracket has to pay an extra term of the Taylor series. And if someone eventually becomes infinitely rich then they'll have to find a way to pay an irrational amount of money.

I keked

It's so that the government can scam you.
Literally, that's the only reason.

I've filled out tax forms which have BOTH tables and an equation.
And I check both ways. The proper choice can save you a few bucks. Just a few.
Mostly though it's a matter of people freaking out over simple arithmetic.
Query for someone who uses TurboTax or equivalent: does the program use an equation or tables? Tables would say you owe $12,350 whereas an equation might say $12,347.12 (unless they built in a "round to the nearest $10" function.)

what the fuck are you on about

It's not that the politicians could not set up a more smooth curve equation. It's that everybody has to be able to do the equation.

Brackets are easier for the moms and pops all over the country who have to figure their taxes.

As a side benefit, it is easier for the IRS auditors to quickly check your taxes with brackets, so you can hire fewer folks at the IRS and they can be less highly trained, and thus cheaper.

This is why the state should just calculate your taxes for you, like they do in Estonia.

It's easier to maximise profit.

It's meant to avoid problems like paying enormously higher taxes for a small increment dw your income w. Either way, income tax is not Pareto optimal unless it's lumpy, as in a head tax.

Correct answer

This

>make exactly 80k @ 40%
>if i make just one more dollar, it will be taxed at 60%

Wtf I hate getting money now

>Go through effort of negotiating payrise with boss
>He agrees to a decent raise, fuck yeah
>Quickly calculate tax
>Would actually make less money
>Yeah sorry boss, forget about that payrise
>Oh sure user, but you were pretty adamant about it, what happened?
>Explain it
>His reply was
>Fucking government

>t. has never paid taxes

you'd bay 60% only on that next dollar, not on the rest of your 80k you jabrone

You sure about that? Not gonna get dogmatic about it, but the increasing factorial component would mean that the higher the amount you earn, the smaller that tax bracket hits you, i.e. the nth term will be f^(nth derivative)(a)(b-a)^n/n!. As Lim n-> infinity, the nth term approaches zero because the factorial component just wipes out everything else.

Not a mathchad though, so I could well be wrong.

Another reason is that brackets allow a greater tax take.

Inflation will devalue a currency over time. Normally, earnings will increase in line with inflation so that the buying power of your salary remains the same.

The point is that as people's wages rise, more people end up in a higher tax bracket, so are taxed at a higher rate. But the actual purchasing power usually remains pretty constant.

So a reason, at least in part, for tax brackets, is that the government can steal more of your money without you getting irate about it.

>people are too math illiterate to understand a more complicated equation than that
The complexity of taxes is only very minimally a mathematical one. It's meant to be obtuse because the less you know, the more the gub'mint gonna get.

>cos(x)

>assuming your function has a taylor series
retard

tan (x)

b-but if I make $100 dollars th-then I'm taxed at 100%

[math]\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} n[/math] that way everyone only has to pay -1/12 tax xDD

So if I make $31,415.9 a year I will owe infinite taxes?

solving a pre made equation where you just have to plugin for the variables isn't hardwork and doesn't require extra compitence

Lol he tricked you. See