Chart assignment
Charts to read and discuss
Read each chart, then answer its questions. Every chart shows its source and date; open it for a table of the numbers and the data to download.
Chart 1 of 1 · Income tax
How many federal income tax returns are filed each year?
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About 153 million individual income tax returns were filed for tax year 2023, up from 119 million for 2001. The jump to 157 million for 2020 came as many people with little or no income filed to claim pandemic stimulus payments they had missed; returns filed only to get a stimulus payment in 2008 aren't counted. These counts leave out returns of people claimed as someone's dependent, and are IRS estimates from a sample of returns. One return can cover a married couple filing jointly, so returns are not the same as people.
Questions to discuss
- In one sentence of your own, what does this chart show?
- Find the biggest change or difference in the chart. What might explain it?
- Who collected these numbers, and how recent are they? What else would you want to know before drawing a conclusion?
Source: IRS Statistics of Income, Table 4.1 (individual returns by income percentile) (Public domain (U.S. government work)) · Data as of Dec 31, 2023
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