The IRS published the tax brackets for 2022 here [1]. The tax brackets are important because they tell you how tax burden is calculated. If you've never calculated your taxes, then understand that you are taxed on a marginal bracket schedule. If you are married and a joint filer, then the schedule starts with $20,550, and has steps at $83,550, $178,150, $340,100, $431,900, and $647,850. Each bracket is a bucket of burden where the tax rate changes from 12%, to 22%, to 24%, then 32%, 35%, and finally 37%. As you fill buckets your marginal tax rate changes. This complexity is why tax accountants make bank throughout the year. Or not ... Inline is an image that is the graph of the marginal rate by income. It's the gray line that is scaled according to the right hand side axis. It's also the only line always increasing. Your taxes are always increasing, no matter how much you make. That's the start of the misery. The hyperbolic-like lines are the relative changes of income
The SARS-COV-2 [1] virus pandemic that started in late 2019 and took over the planet in 2020 has been the big news of late. I don't think there is anyone on the planet who does not know about the virus and its impact on the world. XPrize [2] held a competition in 2020 called the XPrize Pandemic Response Challenge [3]. I competed in this challenge and made it to the final. The competition concerned itself with creating two kinds of models, one to predict mortality and morbidity, and another to predict intervention policy. The first round was the prediction portion where my model performed quite well. The model I wrote used some anecdotal knowledge about prevention and risk as well as some research topics that were emerging in 2020. Out of this competition there were some interesting anecdotal observations about virus transmission. Masks could be ineffective . When you respirate through a mask in an area that has elevated concentrations of the Covid-19 virus, the particles hosting t