“Moving up” in a tax bracket never means earning less in nominal or in real terms. It just means you get less in your pocket of the extra you earned, not of the total you earned.
0 - theguardian.com/money/2014/jul/20/benefits-cliff-minimum-wage-increase-backfire-poverty
Do some lawmakers only support a law because it will have a lower (min. wage) or higher (tax) real monetary significance in the future?
There are a few edge cases where these can be technically true but they are rare and limited in scope and magnitude.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/071114/can-moving-h...
Other places do have more horrid, retroactive taxation.
But that said, tax rates are typically based upon cutoffs. So the more you make, the more tax you pay.
So this means that if you get a raise to meet inflation, you could see your raise more heavily taxed, if it is above the next tax bracket.
Eventually, with enough inflation, and no changes to tax regs, you could see the very poor, taxed like the well to do, a few years before.
There are also some tax benefits, which have income cutoffs, and also programs which have income cutoffs.
With inflation at historic lows for 25 years, there is little institutional knowledge about how fast >10% inflation can erase buying power, and at the same time big raises mean nothing..
Being highly paid in salary you are subject to very high taxation where someone who receives most of their income in stock and sells after holding for a year would have dramatically less taxes on the same amount of money received. Its why these CEO's making $1 a year(and having stock grants in the 100's of millions) are a slap in the face to the working engineer who incurs substantially higher taxes as a percentage than the CEO making 100x his salary.
