What will inflation do to next year’s tax brackets and why should I care?

As you probably know, federal income tax rates and many other federal tax parameters are indexed for inflation using a factor based on the monthly average of changes in the chained consumer price index or chained CPI. Because of the way they’re calculated, the rises in chained CPI numbers during inflationary periods like this are slightly smaller than the rises in regular CPI numbers you read about in the media. But the differences are relatively trivial. To keep things simple in this column, we’ll just call the chained CPI the CPI and continue with that. OK? Continue.

As…