[ideamotor]

This comment suggests you don’t understand how taxes work in many scenarios. If I receive more ordinary income (whatever the source and reason it is treated as such) it is added to the year I received it. To minimize taxes, I will mot want to receive this additional ordinary income during the year I already would have already had the most income. That’s what being pushed into a different tax bracket means.

Example: year one 50k income 22% marginal tax. Year two 180k income 32% marginal tax. You have 100k more ordinary income. You will pay less tax if it occurs in year one.

Yes for this to matter you need to have some control over the order of payments. This is most commonly a 401k. Otherwise, it’s likely to be relevant through some form of business ownership. Perhaps you have a big contract coming in, or you are self employed, or you are receiving a bonus, or perhaps you own some shares where you could elect to sell when they only qualify as ordinary income as discussed by the original article.