Then I looked up who created this calculator, and it's Maximm Lott, a writer for Fox News who's twitter retweets Republican talking points and is bending over backwards to sell this plan:
https://twitter.com/maximlott?lang=en
This propaganda has no business on HN. If you want a tax plan calculator, use the NYT's.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/17/upshot/tax-ca...
At least it looks nicer.
It looks correct to me and is obviously more featured than the NYTs calculator which only allows you to pick ranges and subsets.
Aside from visiting HN I also see the stories percolate up my Facebook feed via following https://www.facebook.com/hnbot/, and this story made the cut.
Indeed, a lot of terrible stories, often flagged off the front page, end up being posted by that bot. Given that only a small, small percentage of HN stories get posted to their Facebook feed it is mystifying, and certainly isn't the best of the best. Asking generally to any who know: Is it only if a story has a Facebook-ready sized image?
You will see the results of the calc are consistent with NYT's, except TaxPlanCalculator.com actually takes you exact info. NYT forces you into buckets -- "married 2 kids" is their only option.
TPC also first out, on Fri night, and budget $0 + server costs!
I have absolutely no faith in the current governance of the federal government, so I'll probably put my savings into a high yield savings account or a low-risk investment vehicle. When I again agree with the direction of the federal government, I'll pay this insane tax break back United States Treasury.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
Also, the problem is that the government now has to plan its budget based on the new tax plan. Even if I donate a few thousand extra, that won't stop a lot of important programs from getting cut, and it won't stop general inequality from increasing.
When I say I don't fully understand them, what I mean is, it looks like they have changed pass-through entities into (effectively) negative pass through entities for up to 20% of before tax earnings ? And I think this is for "draw" or "dividend" income that you extract from the entity ?
So it's like santa claus came and gave me an enormous gift that I never even dreamed of asking for ?
There must be something I am missing here ...
It's something I was discussing with an accountant when these tax proposals were first being discussed. The accountant _would not accept_ what I was describing as their proposed pass-through treatment of income because it would be _ludicrous_.
Ultimately, though, that's what they did. I get a _huge_ tax break that I don't want and don't need, because we happened to structure our business as a partnership instead of an LLC.
Edit. In fact both of the numbers for both plans are way less than any tax bill I have seen in the last few years. I would honestly take either of those over that I actually pay.
The loss of the state and local deductions is more than made up for by the drop in the marginal rates, apparently.
Now, if we had other deductions (e.g., student loan, mortgage interest and tax, medical, etc.), I suspect we'd lose out here.
I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion on HN, so let me say I don't believe we deserve such a large tax cut, but I'm glad to see this plan is not incentivizing debt or artificially inflating home prices as much as the current one.
However, at the state level (in Minnesota), I get no child tax credits. This means I suddenly have a 10% increase in my AGI (with no corresponding increase in gross income to show for it) that will suddenly be taxable at the state level, because state taxes are keyed off of federal AGI.