Income-Taxes are a hilarious example where they use a function but the derivative is still a bracket because BRACKET! (doesn’t do that much damage in that case I guess though).
At least income taxes are continuous and monotonically increasing. That discontinuous second derivative is still a nuisance though, and I know of quite a few people who go out of their way to keep their income just under the threshold for their tax bracket.
Not to mention that the simultaneous use of brackets for both benefits and income taxes often leads to situations where final income after taxes and benefits fails to be a monotonically increasing function of gross pay. The result: serious economic distortion and people being disincentivised from working. Removing all those brackets would allow us to implement steeply progressive taxation and welfare systems without anyone being overly discouraged from working.
We could easily get rid of the brackets, and all those people who don’t like formulas containing logarithms and exponents should hopefully be able to muddle through using graphs and online calculators (which is probably what they are doing already).
See this blog post for a smooth function that approximates the Norwegian taxation system:
Income-Taxes are a hilarious example where they use a function but the derivative is still a bracket because BRACKET! (doesn’t do that much damage in that case I guess though).
At least income taxes are continuous and monotonically increasing. That discontinuous second derivative is still a nuisance though, and I know of quite a few people who go out of their way to keep their income just under the threshold for their tax bracket.
Not to mention that the simultaneous use of brackets for both benefits and income taxes often leads to situations where final income after taxes and benefits fails to be a monotonically increasing function of gross pay. The result: serious economic distortion and people being disincentivised from working. Removing all those brackets would allow us to implement steeply progressive taxation and welfare systems without anyone being overly discouraged from working.
We could easily get rid of the brackets, and all those people who don’t like formulas containing logarithms and exponents should hopefully be able to muddle through using graphs and online calculators (which is probably what they are doing already).
See this blog post for a smooth function that approximates the Norwegian taxation system:
https://tommyodland.com/articles/2024/smooth-taxes-without-brackets/index.html