As you probably know, the federal income tax rate brackets, 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. Due to the way they are calculated, upticks in the chained CPI numbers during inflationary times, like now, are a bit lower than upticks in the regular CPI numbers that you read about in the media. But the differences are relatively trivial. To keep things simple in this column, let’s just call the chained CPI the CPI and go with it. OK? Onward.  

As…