In an article amusingly called “Math tips for the rest of us,” USA Today warned (at least on its website):

That raise actually might not be as good as it looks. The extra money is nice, but it could very well bump you into the next tax bracket, possibly leaving you with less money than you had before the raise.

As Steve Benen, among others, pointed out, this is absolute nonsense, though a lot of people seem to operate under the same misapprehension.

Apparently some of these corrections reached the folks at USA Today, because the text of the article has been changed to read:

A hefty raise might not be as big as it looks. Extra money could bump you into the next tax bracket, which means you’ll pay a higher tax rate on earnings above a certain threshold. Relax: Your earnings below that threshold are still taxed at the previous, lower tax rate.

And at the top of the page it now says, “An earlier version of the story below misstated the impact of tax brackets on raises.” (Italics in original.)

As Benen points out, ABC News ran a report more than two years ago about some high-income people trying to keep their income just under $250,000 for fear of higher tax rates. But the report initially didn’t make clear that these people were, basically, nincompoops, and ABC News, like USA Today, had to revise its web article.

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