The IRS recently announced its annual tax brackets adjustment for 2026, raising income thresholds to account for inflation. The top bracket now kicks in at $640,600 for single filers, up from $626,350, and the standard deduction rises to $16,100. Politicians will call this relief, and policy experts will debate whether the adjustments keep pace with price increases.
They’re all missing the point. If our tax code provides special benefits to those who have the resources to decipher it, bracket adjustments are nothing but political theater. Even if these brackets perfectly tracked inflation, we’d still have a tax system that violates basic principles of justice. We pretend to have one tax code, while we functionally have two.
Consider two people making $150,000. One is a nurse who files a 1040, takes the standard deduction, and pays what TurboTax tells her she owes. The other is a consultant who knows how to establish an S-corporation, run a cost segregation study on his home office, and funnel appreciated stock through a donor-advised fund. While making the same income, and landing in the same brackets, these two might pay taxes that differ by $30,000.
For a legal obligation to be legitimate, its requirements must be reasonably understandable . We accept that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but only when the law is genuinely knowable. Anyone can read a speed limit sign; the tax code runs 6,871 pages, ignoring the 75,000 pages of official guidance and IRS regulations. Interpretation isn’t just about intelligence. Whether neurosurgeon, bricklayer, or philosophy professor, it is nearly impossible to navigate the tax code without specialized expertise.
Even those in the highest offices in our government cannot navigate the tax code with confidence. Former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, would send a letter with his tax return each year stating he had done his best to comply with the law but could not be certain he had done so correctly. When understanding our legal obligation requires hiring a tax-translator, something is fundamentally wrong. The government doesn’t just owe us fair rates and adjusted brackets. It owes us comprehensible demands.
Equal treatment under law means more than having the same rate on paper. When identical incomes pay different taxes, based solely on whether they’re able to hire a CPA or have experience with fiscal policy, the law is not functionally equal, even if it is technically neutral. The IRS could index every bracket. States could all follow suit. We’d still have the core injustice of complexity as a two-tiered legal system.
The usual response is that complexity is needed for fairness. Indeed, it seems reasonable that different situations warrant different treatment. But there’s a difference between tailored rules and incomprehensible ones. The mortgage interest deduction is complex but understandable. Very few people even know what a captive insurance arrangement is, let alone how to use one. Even if we accepted that some complexity serves fairness, the current system goes far beyond what that principle could justify.
Every one of the 13 hours annually the average American spends on tax compliance is an hour conscripted by the government to decode obligations that could be made clear. The consultant hires someone, and the nurse loses her Saturday. Time is the scarcest resource of all. . Understanding our tax burden should not consume it senselessly.
The cost of this complexity extends beyond wasted time too. More fundamentally, citizens who cannot understand the law lose faith in the system. The tax code becomes an insider’s game and erodes the legitimacy of our institutions. We’re told taxes are the price we pay for our society; it should not be difficult to know what that price is.
The path forward is straightforward. We need simplification, not rate tinkering. If special treatment is truly necessary, it should be automatic like the standard deduction, not some opt-in like the deduction for Qualified Business Income. Two people with the same income should pay roughly the same tax, regardless of expert advice.
The IRS’s inflation adjustment is welcome, but it's just rearranging chairs on the Titanic. The government doesn’t just owe us indexed brackets. It owes us a tax code we can comprehend. Until then, we aren’t all equal under our tax law.
