Most people will. What most people are getting mad about is that a lot of the personal deductions will expire in the future, and that the ultra-wealthy are getting a tax discount as well as the average person.
Who is this most people? Most people on HN, being white collar professional types might benefit in the short term from this bill, but most people across the country are in that under-$30K category that is going to get screwed. I'd be interested in hearing the personal accounts of grad students about to get taxed on their tuition breaks as well. This bill is bad news all the way around.
short term = small benefit for most
medium term = benefits expire, national debt is huge, "we have to cut social security and medicare that you paid into all these years"
This calculator is deceptive as it shows the initial change which is everyone gets a little bit of money and rich people get huge gobs of money. After a few years it all changes and we have to make huge cutbacks since "we" were so fiscally irresponsible.
I will be itemizing this year, it would be nice if I could add some of those writroffs in with this calculator. In my case, it's the difference between my taxes going down or up
Is the site broken for anyone else? I see {{ STATE }} when I get into the page and a bunch of template variables in the page. None of the controls work and I have disabled my adblock, https everywhere, etc.
This is interesting, but it needs more data input for a more accurate picture for those who own a house, or hope to own one soon. Particularly those in the Bay Area, where the 10k SALT cap wouldn't be too difficult to run into.
It's not a 10K SALT cap, its a 10k property tax deduction cap, the itemized deduction for state and local income taxes are eliminated in both House and Senate versions as far as I understand.
But let's be clear, US median household income is $59,039, so the $50K you cite is not actually "very little money" but rather a normal income for a household. Agreed that in reality, it is very little money when we take into account CoL, household debt, etc. This bill, combined with the ongoing burden of health care expenses, will continue to cripple the typical US household.
I love calculators. What I haven't seen yet is a calculator that shows you where the money originated from. How much of my tax deduction is new debt, vs money stripped from Medicare, Social Security, College Graduate deductions, etc. It's not enough to know how much more I am getting, but where the money originated from.
That's pure pessimism. You can compare the previous-year government budget and next-year government budget and work out the gaps. Sure, the money might have all sloshed together in the general fund, but the average values are all matter for analysis on an individual level.
I think the best you could get is a comparison of the per-capita debt incurred under some economic models, vs tax change realized individually, and possibly who/what accrues the benefits of the difference between those numbers.
It doesn't matter and for the most part will all be newly issued debt. To explain: For the first few years it will be approx 100% new debt... You can exclude college graduate deductions since that's basically a small amount compared overall spending on medicare and social security etc... THEN wait a few years for the republicans to gut SS, medicare/medicaid etc.. under the guise of shrinking the debt/deficit with maybe a balanced budget argument. At that point you could argue that they've paid for these tax cuts by making those spending cuts. However, the republicans actually really like to issue debt when it pays their backers so you won't necessarily hear the balanced budget argument unless the democrats make substantial gains (e.g. take the House or the Senate).. They may try to push spending cuts through in 2018 but they may very well wait until after the election because as an election issue it might be polarizing. 2018 will be the year of campaigns that say "hey we cut your taxes", "we stuck it to the coastal and academic liberals". We also fixed Obama care as we removed the individual mandate (which is really all that non-wealthy people hurt by the ACA care about)... so vote for us!!! And without that mandate ACA costs will rise b/c insurance co's get paid on the backend to make up the shortfalls already, so that will just increase and need to be "funded", most likely by new debt. For all of these plans, if Trump is impeached it won't matter as Pence (or Ryan if it's a 2 for 1) will continue similarly.
I only see one way out of this and that's that we need to appeal to Trump to save us. Since he desperately wants to be loved and respected by the people. The only issue is that Trump has to play ball with the Republicans or else they will impeach him, at least until Russia is out of the way. The only way to prevent that is to take back seats in the 2018 election.. but this is a tough task due to all of the gerrymandering that's gone on. If Pence or Ryan are President after the 2018 election with a democratic house basically nothing will happen. If Trump is in there might be a small chance of saving democracy. He'd have to go nuclear on the remaining republicans and may convert his base over to the more liberal populist platform to get re-elected. That's a stretch but not unimaginable.
Would be nice to include a field for long-term capital gains. Removal of the state income-tax deduction changes the effective tax rate for those gains, which would help someone decide whether to realize those gains in the remaining weeks of 2017 or else to keep holding.
Sure, my taxes will go down, but I have grad student friends that may have to drop out because they now have to treat waived tuition as income, and pay ~10k tax on it somehow with their 20k-30k stipend they get. And I've got friends with kids that are going to see their tax burden go up by thousands.
Meanwhile with all of this 'simplification' and 'getting rid of subsidies', we're not doing the same for corporate or high income 'subsidies'.
The biggest high income subsidy is the favorable treatment of investment income. That'll probably be supplanted in the new tax regime by the passthrough discount.
I have grad student friends that may have to drop out because they now have to treat waived tuition as income
If this happens, this will be a huge failure on their institution part. The only reason their tax bill might be affected is due to creative accounting practices of universities, who use the tuition waiver as a way to skim more money from the grants. Universities will just start offering education for free instead of waiving the tuition, and will find a new accounting trick to take money from federal science grants in "overhead".
If a university is charging tens of thousands of dollars to some students and waiving those charges for other students because of the work they are doing for the university then that's a value being provided in trade for work. Why shouldn't it be taxed?
Contrariwise if no one is really paying these tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, with the university just eating the "tuition bill" in the case of e.g. an English grad student, then why should a grantor have to pay that tuition bill for a microbiologist grad student on top of her stipend?
I get that this sucks for people caught up in it but I don't see a lot of stepping back and thinking about what makes sense.
Yep, I was down voted in another thread for pointing out the the same thing. 20 years ago, I had to pay tax on all my employer provided tuition assistance for graduate level classes. Even if my employer cuts a check directly to the university, it's still counted as my income.
So why should it be any different for a university as the employer? This is just a loophole being closed. Just get rid of the damned "dissertation credits" and problem solved.
> If they keep charging everyone else and make education free for employees, the tuition they would have paid becomes taxable income.
Is this really true though? Some universities charge in-state and out-of-state students different tuition rates, but the in-state students aren't liable for paying taxes on the difference between the tuition rates. It seems like those are just different degrees of the same thing so the same rules should apply. Perhaps the distinction is that the schools who differentiate between in-state and out-of-state students are state schools and thus play by slightly different rules?
1) Why does the tax bill assume that treating waived tuition as income will raise revenue, then, if all universities will just switch to different accounting methods? Or is this one of the many parts of the tax bill that will actually increase the deficit but needs some kind of plausible cover until the buck can be passed?
2) "creative accounting" and "skim more money" are pretty ridiculous ways to describe how research grants work. It's a system like any other. Disrupting it for no particular reason is anything but conservative.
It's because the tax bill needed to pass through reconciliation (which has special rules related to the deficit). Generating artificial savings on paper allowed the GOP to increase the size of the tax cut on paper.
As for 1), I don't think it's about raising revenue. Even if accounting methods didn't change, and grad students actually had to pay a few extra grands in taxes, this would be minuscule amounts of money in the grand scheme of things anyway. It's rather about making more money from the grants be spend on doing actual science. See e.g.: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/trump-wants-2018-nih...
For 2), "creative accounting" is exactly what it is. Research grants are for research. The money can be spent on various things, which include salaries of researchers, the cost of lab equipment and supplies, and there's even a special category for "overhead", which is the money that goes straight to the mother institution to keep the lights on. The trick is to allocate $55k per grad student in the grant, and instantly take $20k from it to pay for the "tuition". In practice, the science labs, and the grad students are bringing income to the universities through the grants they get, and the universities additionally charge them for the privilege to do so.
> Universities will just start offering education for free instead of waiving the tuition
Aren't you supposed to be taxed on the value of a good/service/gift received even if it was given to you for free? What is the "true value" of tuition?
I don't think waiving tuition will work, assuming tuition is taxed like most other things.
Largely agree. Part of the problem is the murkiness in which wealthy, private universities operate. We need much more transparency to justify institutions like Stanford to continue receiving a taxpayer subsidy of $63,000 per student compared to only $10,000 at UC-Berkeley and $4,000 at CSU-Fullerton [1]. Where is the federal grant money going and how is it divvied up? Maybe a graduate degree in dentistry provides a greater public good, even if there isn't a lot of ongoing research funding in that field. Here are some suggestions:
- A publicly searchable database, showing projects that derive as a result of public grants.
- Non-profit universities disclose administrative and faculty salaries like the UC and other states systems do, even if anonymized.
- Provide an explanation of why the size of their student bodies have stayed the same over the years while their endowments and operating income have ballooned, assuming their mission is to provide education as a public good [2].
That’s whataboutism. And why should grad students get special treatment? Most other people making $20-30k (ones that aren’t privileged enough to be in grad school) will get a tax cut.
What are you talking about? Lower class people are only able to afford grad school because of tuition waivers. By taxing them as income, only people who are able to pay out of pocket will have access to postsecondary degrees that grant higher incomes.
Only a small minority of lower class people ever go to grad school. Overwhelmingly, it’s a tax break that benefits the kids of upper middle class and wealthy families.
Do you know what "overwhelmingly" means? Your anecdote about a single person (you) being able to or not being able to afford college doesn't mean anything.
The other commenter's unsourced "overwhelmingly" claim is silly but so is yours.
Think of my comment as two separate statements. First, "overwhelmingly" is silly. Second, and more or less unrelated, it would have personally affected me. The second wasn't intended as support for the first.
> Only a small minority of lower class people ever go to grad school.
But so is this one (mine):
> A vast majority of graduate students are from low-income backgrounds.
However, this statement is totally false (yours):
> it’s a tax break that benefits the kids of upper middle class and wealthy families.
Many graduate students, especially those in STEM fields (80 - 90%), are poor international students. Their families are already taking on generations of debt in order to give their children a mere chance to emigrate to this country.
The schools don't want to/won't pay the higher stipends required to offset the tuition waiver taxes (for the minority of graduate students who get them), and they don't want to/won't give up the massive cash infusion coming from these students (who don't have waivers) already.
Given the choice between the two, they'll choose the latter (the cash cow) and throw the former (the best and brightest) out with the bathwater, if you'll permit me to mix my metaphors. In the long run, this outcome will be bad for the schools, and bad for the businesses who hire these students once they graduate.
A vast majority of graduate students are not from low income backgrounds. Graduate students by definition already have a college degree, and statistically college graduates come from families that make substantially more than he average income.
Sorry to clarify, the poor assumption is that the fact that the people going to college being generally wealthier means that the people going to graduate school are generally wealthier. A uniform randomness would be required to determine which students choose to continue advancing which is not the case as those choosing to pursue a graduate degree are being influenced by other factors - how fast they need to begin acquiring income, how lucrative they think immediate employment may be, interests...
Sure. But aren't they even more likely to be well-off? Are people who can afford to forgo getting a job for 4-5 years after getting their college degree more or less likely to be from a lower-income household?
I'm not certain, but to offer a counter argument, aren't the more wealthy students likely to be content to get a Bachelor's degree of an MBA and move into the workplace? Possibly using their connections to supplement their other qualifications?
I always got the impression that the international students were from fairly well off families by the standards of their home country. After all, they can afford to pay full tuition, even after the exchange rate from currencies like the Chinese RMB.
Yup. The most likely outcome of the grad student changes in the House tax bill would be an even greater shift towards international students from well-off families.
You're simply wrong. Higher-income college students are far more likely to go to graduate school than lower-income students.
> The percentage of students enrolling in graduate school increases with family income. Among dependent 2007–08 four-year college graduates, 39 percent of those from families in the lowest income quartile, 42 percent from middle-income families, and 45 percent from the highest income quartile had enrolled in graduate school within four years of college graduation. [0]
It's also misleading for you to look only at figures for STEM fields, in which international students are much more highly represented than other fields. I'm not sure why you're using looking at STEM only and using that to prove your point. The NYTimes article you linked says it best:
> "in arts and humanities, the figure [of students which are international] was about 16 percent; in business, a little more than 18 percent."
Providing tax breaks for graduate school does disproportionately benefit the upper middle class and the wealthy.
Not to wade into the discussion about who makes what money (we need data, full stop) - but in humanities, students largely do not get the type of tuition waivers that are under discussion.
By ignoring STEM students, you're overlooking the people who would primarily be affected.
Depends on the field. Students from developing countries are usually not lower class, but, compared to Americans, have much lower income. In many fields, especially STEM ones that actually provide tutition waivers, these students make up significant chunk of the students. There is liberal arts, but tuition waivers are much more rare there.
I’m sure this is what the Trumpists were really after. He is not very friendly to immigrants, after all. And STEM doesn’t really mesh with make America great again mantra of bringing back low skilled manufacturing jobs.
No, it's not. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of that word. And you're really asking why we should focus and prepare citizens with higher education?
> Most other people making $20-30k (ones that aren’t privileged enough to be in grad school) will get a tax cut.
As will people with estates in the 11 plus million range, large corporations, and pass through entities. It's very easy to cherry pick to set one struggling group (grad students) against another (people making 20-30k), but that ignores who the primary beneficiaries of the bill are.
> that ignores who the primary beneficiaries of the bill are.
The outrage about rich people getting taxes breaks is uninteresting because it's impossible to give a tax break to someone who doesn't pay taxes. As the US has a fairly progressive tax structure, any changes to the system will primarily affect the rich.
> That's, of course, completely untrue in a world where refundable credits are a thing. Tax bills are not limited to non-negative numbers.
I'm pretty sure that is actually the case in the US tax system. A US taxpayer's tax burden cannot be less than 0. It doesn't have to be that way, but to make it so requires a more fundamental change to the US tax system.
Nope, there are several refundable tax credits which can take total income liability below $0; the Earned Income Tax Credit is the best known , but there are several others.
>That's, of course, completely untrue in a world where refundable credits are a thing. Tax bills are not limited to non-negative numbers.
Tax breaks and one's total tax obligation are two different things.
>(Also, lots of non-rich people pay taxes, even if you only mean personal income tax.)
A lot of people think they pay taxes, but they don't. And we'd need to define rich to really reach an agreement on the truthfulness of that statement. According to the CBO [1] (table 1 on page 31), households in the lower three quintiles of income are not net tax payers at the federal level. The gap in what they pay and what they receive in services is large enough that it offsets state and local taxes.
Reviewing the table I referenced above, I would agree that lots of non-rich people pay taxes. But the majority of non-rich people do not.
Let's say a person makes most of their income from exporting equipment to Europe. Are you going to subtract the value they receive from the US Navy protecting shipping lanes?
What about the value the owner of a retail store gets from the interstate system?
Only counting direct benefits in this calculation is absurd.
This is too simplistic to be real. Would you say the same if the tax break was "anyone earning over $500k pays no taxes of any kind"? After all, it primarily affects the rich, and that's to be expected.
Of course I'd not say the same, that's a very different situation than across the board reductions.
In a country where 47-50% of tax returns have zero income tax liability, and 60% are not net tax payers, a new policy that lowers the tax rates across the board, but has a floor of zero, will obviously only affect those who have actually pay taxes.
Another question I would be interested in hearing an answer to is why is everyone so concerned about tax breaks for the rich? Since the federal government doesn't operate on a balanced budget, the only motivations I can see are greed or spite. Greed because people are afraid they will not get services paid for by someone else, or spite because they think it's unfair that someone has more than them.
In case you haven't been following the news, the recent tax bill was passed under a rule that limited the impact it was allowed to have on the deficit. Therefore, in order to make tax cuts for the rich not cost too much for the bill, they've included changes that remove funding from services or that raise taxes from the not rich. It doesn't matter whether the government as an abstract operates on a balanced budget or not, this particular bill is a (roughly) zero sum one. If you didn't know that, you should really do some more background reading.
This doesn't apply to all college students. This is specifically to PhD programs at each state's best research universities. The kind where we'd want our brightest students to attend, no matter what their financial situation.
Currently, these students are paid a small salary to attend these programs ($20-$30k per year), and their tuition is waived. Under the new tax rules, the tuition waiver counts as income. So for example, a student at MIT who makes ~28k/yr is going to be taxed like they earn $80k/yr.
The universities prefer to give the discount because it let's them do stupid accounting tricks that let them get more money in grants and stuff. Universities should just adjust the tuition for these students instead of giving a discount.
Because they want to receive the full $80k from the grant - often federal - and pay the student $25-30k. The right answer is to fix the accounting measures. For a PhD student primarily doing research which benefits the university and grantor, and taking no or few classes, why are they paying tuition? If it’s for facilities or university staff salaries, then just send the full grant to the university directly, and let the university pay the students whatever both parties see as fair.
> If it’s for facilities or university staff salaries, then just send the full grant to the university directly, and let the university pay the students whatever both parties see as fair.
This requires a change to grant structure and cannot be done unilaterally by universities.
Then don't tie the tuition waiver to employment as a graduate assistant. The university can certainly choose to charge students with demonstrated need less so long as it's not tied to employment.
If they make the income threshold low enough that graduate assistants would qualify, say $25k a year, then pretty much everyone is going to qualify.
How many graduate students (outside of a few par time programs) make more than $25k a year? It doesn't make sense to consider parents income since graduate students are generally considered independent (even if they are being financially supported by their parents).
How do you stop everyone from qualifying for tuition waiver? Even rich parents will just make sure their kids don't have any assets if they plan on going to grad school.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you’re not giving out waivers to those with the need, then you’re actually treating the waiver as part of the compensation for being a graduate assistant, and it should be taxed.
You're arguing in circles. I know it's compensation, and I'm not the one who proposed we make it need based. I'm pointing out why your solution wouldn't work.
>it should be taxed
We tax what we want to tax, and we offer deductions to encourage behavior that we think is beneficial. Scholarship income used for tuition isn't taxed. We tax capital gains differently from ordinary income. We offer mortgage interest deductions.
Should is subjective. There is no inherent reason to tax tuition waivers the same as employment income, apart from that's the way the IRS does it now (absent this specific deduction).
At the risk of being labeled as an elite as a derogatory statement, because college graduates provide more social utility to the nation and tax revenue over the long term. So figuring out a tax policy that encourages that behavior is absolutely in the collective interest of every American.
I'm going to gain ~$3k, they're going to lose ~$10k each. So the math doesn't work out, even if that were a viable option without getting into gift taxes.
You can write a check payable to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, and, in the memo section, notate that it's a gift to reduce the debt held by the public. Mail your check to:
Attn Dept G
Bureau of the Fiscal Service
P. O. Box 2188
Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188
The senate bill does not have the change which counts tuition waivers as income, so at least on the senate side of the things, this site really isn't missing that.
This makes no sense. Of course the University has to waive the tuition fee to avoid their grad students leaving en masse. If they don't, then another University will offer waived tuition.
What are you basing your contention that people with kids are going to see their taxes going up on? All evidence I've seen has them significantly expanding the child tax credit.
Would be great if this supported my situation, single member LLC (pass-through). Though probably not popular here on HN, the bill's goal is to reduce the burden of taxes on small business and corporations to promote repatriotization of capital back to the US.
Didn't the House version support pass through entities but the Senate version threw it out to reduce the deficit (to avoid filibuster)? Still waiting to see what the rectified version looks like.
Well, the rectified version will be finished at 11:30PM some long Friday night and passed at 11PM the same evening, so you really won't have much a chance to look at it beforehand.
Nope. The House version is fairly complicated, but amounts to most non-service businesses treating 30% of the income as "capital return" and being taxed at 25%.
The Senate plan started out as being a 17% deduction of pass-through income on 1040, and then got ramped up to 23% before being passed. It is limited to 50% of W2 wages paid by the pass-through and excludes a bunch of service industry categories, but both of those limitations only apply to businesses where taxable income is below $250k single / $500k married.
I'm pretty aggressive on tax avoidance and even I'm surprised by how crazy this is.
So in a hypothetical example, I'm married and earn $600k from a consulting business. After retirement contributions to a solo 401k, maybe some charitable / mortgage / property tax deductions, etc, I get my taxable income to $500k. Which means I get to deduct another 23% of the business income (23% x $600k = $138k), dropping my taxable income to $362. And the Federal income tax on that is $80k. Plus another $40k or so for SE tax. So $120k in Federal tax on $600k in income, or 20%. If you live in a no-tax state, then that's all you pay. That's pretty crazy.
It's not a sweetheart deal. US corporate tax rates are some of the highest in the entire world. It is just smart by Apple to ship capital off until it makes business sense. I suspect we are not going to agree about this though.
Did you even read the article you linked? There is a reason all the bay area tech companies have offices in Dublin Ireland... 12.5% corporate rate.
> The long answer: The U.S. has the highest top corporate tax rate at least among advanced economies. Compared with nations in the OECD — the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of highly developed countries — the U.S. has the highest top corporate tax rate in the world.
How would that work exactly? They're not breaking the law. Apple probably has IRS agents on its campus at all times for what amounts to an ongoing audit to ensure that they're not breaking the law.
Apple makes legal business decisions to shift profits to lower tax jurisdictions and lower their tax burden. And you're going to fine them for that?
Not only would that not hold up in court, it's crazy unfair. That's like fining someone who moves from CA to FL or buys a house or saves for retirement to save on their taxes. How DARE YOU make a decision to reduce your tax burden??!??!
It's not about fairness, it's about pragmatics. We have higher taxes on corporations (actual taxes, not just paper rates) than countries like Canada, Germany, France, the U.K., and Switzerland. France's corporate tax burden is half of ours. Meanwhile, Europe has over the last 20-30 years dramatically liberalized its economies, and as a result is a pretty compelling place to do business.
It's one thing to have higher tax rates than some desperate third-world tax haven. It's another to have higher rates than highly developed countries with strong business environments (i.e. our competitors on the international stage). Many companies are happily shipping jobs over to the U.K., Canada, etc., to lower their tax burden.
Very interesting. Unsure how reliable the source is, but when you play with salary indicator.. at $250k everything slowly starts turning gray and then red. So this bill truly hits into top % of these that make more than 25k or 125k per spouse.
Only question remains what will the rich do with these savings. Administration says people will hire more and buy more goods that will obviously turn into more jobs and better economy. Let's hope for that!
Make sure you use incognito mode! I hate looking at sites like these. I'm sure this one is probably OK but most aren't to be trusted.
Not only are you giving away personal financial info to an unknown site, you're pairing that with your browser so making yourself a target to every advertiser and scammer in the future.
Indeed, the source code only considers tax brackets, the personal exemption, and the standard deduction. I've read of an increase of $650 in the per-child tax credit combined with the loss of the per-dependent personal exemption and an increase in the standard deduction. If your last $4333 of annual income is going to be taxed at rate of 15%, then a $650 credit is just as valuable as a $4333 deduction or exemption and thus slightly more valuable than the current $4050 personal exemption. Thus, contrary to this calculator, middle-class families with lots of kids will not get big tax increases.
The tax bill is a boon for billionaires because of (1) estate tax repeal (house) and (2) corporate tax cuts that will benefit the capital class that holds corporate equity.
I would like to see that data Brock Whittaker used to make this tool.
It's funny how I just assume a well done app is correct.
I don't have any reason to question Brock, but we need the parameters. I looked him up, and didn't see any reason to question him.
And yes, it looks like those making 1-3 million will pay more.
If this is the case; I'm for the bill. The only Rebublican I trust is Mccain. If he's going for it--it might be ok.
(I would like to see this app with projected tax saving on corporate income. Actually, I get it now. The wealthy will set up more corporations overnight, and pay themselfs a nominal wage. All their income will be taxed at a lower rate than than the rest of us. Warren Buffet's secretary will still pay more taxes than Warren--percentage wise. CPA's will be busier than ever.)
1) These are the first year income tax cuts, but most of these income tax cuts are getting phased out over time after the first year. By 2027 some of these income groups may see tax increases, and most won't see much benefit at all.
2) The temporary income tax cuts are peanuts compared to what is happening with the corporate rate, pass-throughs, capital gains, and estate tax (all permanent), which benefit people that own companies and/or inherit wealth - which is predominately the richest people. The richest people in the country don't get their wealth from their income, but rather from returns on capital.
This shows only a small portion of the impact of the bill - the SALT and child/marriage/standard deductions increase for earned income, but none of the passthrough changes, changes to the way unearned income (stock market investing, e.g.) is taxed, corporate changes. M/Billionaires don't file a 1040-ez, but that's what this page is showing (before said deduction increases expire)
EDIT: I'm skeptical this is right. I'm in a high tax state, with high property and mortgage interest. Yet this shows me between 1% and 12% better off despite every report I've read and www.republicantaxcalculator.com showing me much, much worse off.
Not taking property and mortgage interest into account, this tool is misleading at best! I just did my projections. This calculator shows our family will benefit slightly, when in fact our taxes will increase approx. 25K or 40% per year.
That's what I was expecting too. How did you do those calculations, if you don't mind sharing? With an accountant, the hard way with a spreadsheet, or (please!) some magical accurate online calculator with 5 fields and a big button?
Well, first I used the new brackets to calculate the tax and found us slightly in the black. Then I dug out my last year tax return, added four numbers -- income tax, property tax, mortgage and donations -- subtracted proposed 24K standard deduction and applied our new bracket (35%) to the difference. Subtracted the first number. Felt robbed.
That said, I'm waiting for my CPA to get back to me with the projections for 2017 along with the tax reform impact estimate.
This website literally just loads another page, IP address, over raw HTTP. There's no way in hell I would trust it in any way, shape, or form. You really should build your website better before showing it off.
Edit:
It looks like the page does not just load an iframe to an IP address any more. I'll take back what I said.
I'm curious as to why you even used a server at all. From the looks of it, you could have shipped the server code with the frontend and saved some bandwidth.
217 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadinteresting.
Additionally, the House plan raises the tax burden in those making less than 30k.
Thanks Obama!
This calculator is deceptive as it shows the initial change which is everyone gets a little bit of money and rich people get huge gobs of money. After a few years it all changes and we have to make huge cutbacks since "we" were so fiscally irresponsible.
But, you should add the state tax as well as the FICO and social security tax/ medicare tax, to show a more complete picture.
EDIT: Never mind, false alarm
they'll only be able to deduct 10k of the prop taxes too
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/business/economy/income-r...
I only see one way out of this and that's that we need to appeal to Trump to save us. Since he desperately wants to be loved and respected by the people. The only issue is that Trump has to play ball with the Republicans or else they will impeach him, at least until Russia is out of the way. The only way to prevent that is to take back seats in the 2018 election.. but this is a tough task due to all of the gerrymandering that's gone on. If Pence or Ryan are President after the 2018 election with a democratic house basically nothing will happen. If Trump is in there might be a small chance of saving democracy. He'd have to go nuclear on the remaining republicans and may convert his base over to the more liberal populist platform to get re-elected. That's a stretch but not unimaginable.
We don't know that yet, that discussion will happen next year.
EDIT ==== How in the heck do you run it?
Sure, my taxes will go down, but I have grad student friends that may have to drop out because they now have to treat waived tuition as income, and pay ~10k tax on it somehow with their 20k-30k stipend they get. And I've got friends with kids that are going to see their tax burden go up by thousands.
Meanwhile with all of this 'simplification' and 'getting rid of subsidies', we're not doing the same for corporate or high income 'subsidies'.
If this happens, this will be a huge failure on their institution part. The only reason their tax bill might be affected is due to creative accounting practices of universities, who use the tuition waiver as a way to skim more money from the grants. Universities will just start offering education for free instead of waiving the tuition, and will find a new accounting trick to take money from federal science grants in "overhead".
If they keep charging everyone else and make education free for employees, the tuition they would have paid becomes taxable income.
Contrariwise if no one is really paying these tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, with the university just eating the "tuition bill" in the case of e.g. an English grad student, then why should a grantor have to pay that tuition bill for a microbiologist grad student on top of her stipend?
I get that this sucks for people caught up in it but I don't see a lot of stepping back and thinking about what makes sense.
So why should it be any different for a university as the employer? This is just a loophole being closed. Just get rid of the damned "dissertation credits" and problem solved.
Is this really true though? Some universities charge in-state and out-of-state students different tuition rates, but the in-state students aren't liable for paying taxes on the difference between the tuition rates. It seems like those are just different degrees of the same thing so the same rules should apply. Perhaps the distinction is that the schools who differentiate between in-state and out-of-state students are state schools and thus play by slightly different rules?
Also, what was the point of the tax bill if you expect everyone to just rearrange the deck chairs so they don't have to pay any new taxes?
2) "creative accounting" and "skim more money" are pretty ridiculous ways to describe how research grants work. It's a system like any other. Disrupting it for no particular reason is anything but conservative.
It's because the tax bill needed to pass through reconciliation (which has special rules related to the deficit). Generating artificial savings on paper allowed the GOP to increase the size of the tax cut on paper.
For 2), "creative accounting" is exactly what it is. Research grants are for research. The money can be spent on various things, which include salaries of researchers, the cost of lab equipment and supplies, and there's even a special category for "overhead", which is the money that goes straight to the mother institution to keep the lights on. The trick is to allocate $55k per grad student in the grant, and instantly take $20k from it to pay for the "tuition". In practice, the science labs, and the grad students are bringing income to the universities through the grants they get, and the universities additionally charge them for the privilege to do so.
Aren't you supposed to be taxed on the value of a good/service/gift received even if it was given to you for free? What is the "true value" of tuition?
I don't think waiving tuition will work, assuming tuition is taxed like most other things.
- A publicly searchable database, showing projects that derive as a result of public grants.
- Non-profit universities disclose administrative and faculty salaries like the UC and other states systems do, even if anonymized.
- Provide an explanation of why the size of their student bodies have stayed the same over the years while their endowments and operating income have ballooned, assuming their mission is to provide education as a public good [2].
[1] http://nexusresearch.org/
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/09/harv...
The other commenter's unsourced "overwhelmingly" claim is silly but so is yours.
> Only a small minority of lower class people ever go to grad school.
But so is this one (mine):
> A vast majority of graduate students are from low-income backgrounds.
However, this statement is totally false (yours):
> it’s a tax break that benefits the kids of upper middle class and wealthy families.
Many graduate students, especially those in STEM fields (80 - 90%), are poor international students. Their families are already taking on generations of debt in order to give their children a mere chance to emigrate to this country.
The schools don't want to/won't pay the higher stipends required to offset the tuition waiver taxes (for the minority of graduate students who get them), and they don't want to/won't give up the massive cash infusion coming from these students (who don't have waivers) already.
Given the choice between the two, they'll choose the latter (the cash cow) and throw the former (the best and brightest) out with the bathwater, if you'll permit me to mix my metaphors. In the long run, this outcome will be bad for the schools, and bad for the businesses who hire these students once they graduate.
Sources:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/12/new-report-sh...
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...
> The percentage of students enrolling in graduate school increases with family income. Among dependent 2007–08 four-year college graduates, 39 percent of those from families in the lowest income quartile, 42 percent from middle-income families, and 45 percent from the highest income quartile had enrolled in graduate school within four years of college graduation. [0]
It's also misleading for you to look only at figures for STEM fields, in which international students are much more highly represented than other fields. I'm not sure why you're using looking at STEM only and using that to prove your point. The NYTimes article you linked says it best:
> "in arts and humanities, the figure [of students which are international] was about 16 percent; in business, a little more than 18 percent."
Providing tax breaks for graduate school does disproportionately benefit the upper middle class and the wealthy.
[0] https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/86981/...
By ignoring STEM students, you're overlooking the people who would primarily be affected.
I’m sure this is what the Trumpists were really after. He is not very friendly to immigrants, after all. And STEM doesn’t really mesh with make America great again mantra of bringing back low skilled manufacturing jobs.
As will people with estates in the 11 plus million range, large corporations, and pass through entities. It's very easy to cherry pick to set one struggling group (grad students) against another (people making 20-30k), but that ignores who the primary beneficiaries of the bill are.
The outrage about rich people getting taxes breaks is uninteresting because it's impossible to give a tax break to someone who doesn't pay taxes. As the US has a fairly progressive tax structure, any changes to the system will primarily affect the rich.
That's, of course, completely untrue in a world where refundable credits are a thing. Tax bills are not limited to non-negative numbers.
(Also, lots of non-rich people pay taxes, even if you only mean personal income tax.)
I'm pretty sure that is actually the case in the US tax system. A US taxpayer's tax burden cannot be less than 0. It doesn't have to be that way, but to make it so requires a more fundamental change to the US tax system.
https://www.irs.com/articles/refundable-vs-non-refundable-ta...
Tax breaks and one's total tax obligation are two different things.
>(Also, lots of non-rich people pay taxes, even if you only mean personal income tax.)
A lot of people think they pay taxes, but they don't. And we'd need to define rich to really reach an agreement on the truthfulness of that statement. According to the CBO [1] (table 1 on page 31), households in the lower three quintiles of income are not net tax payers at the federal level. The gap in what they pay and what they receive in services is large enough that it offsets state and local taxes.
Reviewing the table I referenced above, I would agree that lots of non-rich people pay taxes. But the majority of non-rich people do not.
[1] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-...
What about the value the owner of a retail store gets from the interstate system?
Only counting direct benefits in this calculation is absurd.
Friedman was really into negative income taxes.
In a country where 47-50% of tax returns have zero income tax liability, and 60% are not net tax payers, a new policy that lowers the tax rates across the board, but has a floor of zero, will obviously only affect those who have actually pay taxes.
Another question I would be interested in hearing an answer to is why is everyone so concerned about tax breaks for the rich? Since the federal government doesn't operate on a balanced budget, the only motivations I can see are greed or spite. Greed because people are afraid they will not get services paid for by someone else, or spite because they think it's unfair that someone has more than them.
Currently, these students are paid a small salary to attend these programs ($20-$30k per year), and their tuition is waived. Under the new tax rules, the tuition waiver counts as income. So for example, a student at MIT who makes ~28k/yr is going to be taxed like they earn $80k/yr.
This requires a change to grant structure and cannot be done unilaterally by universities.
How many graduate students (outside of a few par time programs) make more than $25k a year? It doesn't make sense to consider parents income since graduate students are generally considered independent (even if they are being financially supported by their parents).
How do you stop everyone from qualifying for tuition waiver? Even rich parents will just make sure their kids don't have any assets if they plan on going to grad school.
>it should be taxed
We tax what we want to tax, and we offer deductions to encourage behavior that we think is beneficial. Scholarship income used for tuition isn't taxed. We tax capital gains differently from ordinary income. We offer mortgage interest deductions.
Should is subjective. There is no inherent reason to tax tuition waivers the same as employment income, apart from that's the way the IRS does it now (absent this specific deduction).
You can write a check payable to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, and, in the memo section, notate that it's a gift to reduce the debt held by the public. Mail your check to:
Attn Dept G Bureau of the Fiscal Service P. O. Box 2188 Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188
The Senate plan started out as being a 17% deduction of pass-through income on 1040, and then got ramped up to 23% before being passed. It is limited to 50% of W2 wages paid by the pass-through and excludes a bunch of service industry categories, but both of those limitations only apply to businesses where taxable income is below $250k single / $500k married.
I'm pretty aggressive on tax avoidance and even I'm surprised by how crazy this is.
So in a hypothetical example, I'm married and earn $600k from a consulting business. After retirement contributions to a solo 401k, maybe some charitable / mortgage / property tax deductions, etc, I get my taxable income to $500k. Which means I get to deduct another 23% of the business income (23% x $600k = $138k), dropping my taxable income to $362. And the Federal income tax on that is $80k. Plus another $40k or so for SE tax. So $120k in Federal tax on $600k in income, or 20%. If you live in a no-tax state, then that's all you pay. That's pretty crazy.
The horror of giving a fair share to the country that supports your corporation.
I think we should fine companies like Apple who bilk the US and refuse to bring back hundreds of billions until they get a sweetheart deal.
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/07/541797699/fact-check-does-the...
https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/actual-us-corporat...
> The long answer: The U.S. has the highest top corporate tax rate at least among advanced economies. Compared with nations in the OECD — the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of highly developed countries — the U.S. has the highest top corporate tax rate in the world.
> Factor In Deductions And Other Expenditures, And The U.S. Corporate Tax Rate Isn’t So High
How would that work exactly? They're not breaking the law. Apple probably has IRS agents on its campus at all times for what amounts to an ongoing audit to ensure that they're not breaking the law.
Apple makes legal business decisions to shift profits to lower tax jurisdictions and lower their tax burden. And you're going to fine them for that?
Not only would that not hold up in court, it's crazy unfair. That's like fining someone who moves from CA to FL or buys a house or saves for retirement to save on their taxes. How DARE YOU make a decision to reduce your tax burden??!??!
It's one thing to have higher tax rates than some desperate third-world tax haven. It's another to have higher rates than highly developed countries with strong business environments (i.e. our competitors on the international stage). Many companies are happily shipping jobs over to the U.K., Canada, etc., to lower their tax burden.
Only question remains what will the rich do with these savings. Administration says people will hire more and buy more goods that will obviously turn into more jobs and better economy. Let's hope for that!
Not only are you giving away personal financial info to an unknown site, you're pairing that with your browser so making yourself a target to every advertiser and scammer in the future.
The tax bill is a boon for billionaires because of (1) estate tax repeal (house) and (2) corporate tax cuts that will benefit the capital class that holds corporate equity.
I would like to see that data Brock Whittaker used to make this tool.
It's funny how I just assume a well done app is correct.
I don't have any reason to question Brock, but we need the parameters. I looked him up, and didn't see any reason to question him.
And yes, it looks like those making 1-3 million will pay more.
If this is the case; I'm for the bill. The only Rebublican I trust is Mccain. If he's going for it--it might be ok.
(I would like to see this app with projected tax saving on corporate income. Actually, I get it now. The wealthy will set up more corporations overnight, and pay themselfs a nominal wage. All their income will be taxed at a lower rate than than the rest of us. Warren Buffet's secretary will still pay more taxes than Warren--percentage wise. CPA's will be busier than ever.)
1) These are the first year income tax cuts, but most of these income tax cuts are getting phased out over time after the first year. By 2027 some of these income groups may see tax increases, and most won't see much benefit at all.
2) The temporary income tax cuts are peanuts compared to what is happening with the corporate rate, pass-throughs, capital gains, and estate tax (all permanent), which benefit people that own companies and/or inherit wealth - which is predominately the richest people. The richest people in the country don't get their wealth from their income, but rather from returns on capital.
What about mortgage interest and property tax?
EDIT: I'm skeptical this is right. I'm in a high tax state, with high property and mortgage interest. Yet this shows me between 1% and 12% better off despite every report I've read and www.republicantaxcalculator.com showing me much, much worse off.
Thanks!
Well, first I used the new brackets to calculate the tax and found us slightly in the black. Then I dug out my last year tax return, added four numbers -- income tax, property tax, mortgage and donations -- subtracted proposed 24K standard deduction and applied our new bracket (35%) to the difference. Subtracted the first number. Felt robbed.
That said, I'm waiting for my CPA to get back to me with the projections for 2017 along with the tax reform impact estimate.
Edit: It looks like the page does not just load an iframe to an IP address any more. I'll take back what I said.