It's a common misconception because there are plenty of situations where making more money actually decreases your take-home pay. It's just not via the bracket

It's a common misconception because there are plenty of situations where making more money actually decreases your take-home pay. It's just not via the bracket system, it's via other incentives in the tax code (and welfare benefits in certain cases). There are a lot of things (IETC for example, or benefits, or health insurance) which have $ cutoffs. Or tax breaks (i.e. electric vehicle credit) that only apply below a certain income. Exceeding those fixed points can certainly make you make less money. One thing I ran into recently was fiscal incentives for homeownership (though not directly related to taxes) - there is a cutoff at a certain income level where if you stay below it you get a $10K credit towards closing costs. The tax code is full of things like that (or getting your student loans forgiven if you make less than $X for Y years). If you want to see how bad the welfare cliffs are, there are cases where a single mother is better off making $28,000 per year (and receiving all federal benefits), than making ~$70,000 per year (and qualifying for none of them). Image of the welfare cliff effect, example in Pennsylvania: https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-7de186ce44f6a868056098e4478db8ab https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-7de186ce44f6a86805609...