The large percentage of people who don t owe federal income tax is a feature, not a bug, of the revenue code, write the Tax Policy Center s Philip Stallworth and Daniel Berger. By design, the federal income tax always has excluded a significant fraction of households through a combination of personal exemptions, the standard deduction, zero bracket amounts, and more recently, tax credits.
According to the Tax Policy Center s 2018 estimation, nearly 99 million Americans were expected to file a tax return in 2020. That figure may increase due to the pandemic, however, since people are being asked to file a tax return to claim unpaid stimulus checks, even if they aren t required to based on income.