Some of the basketball fans who watched the University of Michigan dominate last week’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament or saw UCLA win the women’s bracket may believe that those tournaments have always started with 68 (or at least 64) teams. But there used to be a lot fewer teams — and a lot fewer brackets — for those tournaments.
As the basketball tournaments’ brackets have become more expansive, the U.S. tax code has essentially worked in the reverse. At its peak, from 1918 to 1921, the United States had 56 tax brackets. But today there are only seven. This quiet collapse in the number of tax brackets has come along with a new Gilded Age fueled by growing income inequality. While March Madness has come and gone, April 15 — Tax Day — is a good time to examine this madness in our tax code.
This is a preview of Samarth Gupta’s latest column. Read the full column here.
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