Yup, and I’m sure they write it to be confusing and allow gray areas they can slip through themselves.
But it sounds like yes, from $1M to $1.2M, you will be “taxed” at a rate of 45%. But, your cumulative tax rate over all income at that point is still less. Ultimately, it’s not really a separate tax bracket, it’s simply a $12k drop from where in your income you start paying taxes.
Ok, reading the article more thoroughly (on phone so I just skimmed it earlier), it looks like this has nothing to do with the increased standard deduction, even though the article mentions it. This tax increase is weird. I think they’re going to 4 brackets, with rates of 12%, 20%, 30%, and 39.6%, or something like that. What this does, is it slowly changes just the first bracket ($0-45k) into the highest bracket once you reach $1M in taxable income.
So, at $1.2M+, your tax brackets’ rates would be 39.6%, 20%, 30%, and back to 39.6% again.