from Hacker News

New Tax Plan Calculator

by programminggeek on 12/20/17, 4:11 PM with 46 comments

• by ideonexus on 12/20/17, 4:57 PM

  I am very confused by "Current Tax System You'd save $0" part. This makes no sense and reeks of snakeoil.

  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.

• by slg on 12/20/17, 4:44 PM

  This says I will save a few thousand dollars. I am a single young person with no dependents and no debt and I make a six figure income that likely puts me in the top 10% of earners in this county. If anyone deserves a tax cut, it isn't me.

• by quantdev on 12/20/17, 4:44 PM

  Surprised to see such a big tax decrease (~14%) even though my wife and I live in Manhattan and our state and local taxes are about ~10% effective.

  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.

• by rsync on 12/20/17, 4:54 PM

  This does not take into account the changes to pass-through entities which I still don't fully understand ...

  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 ...

• by mbrumlow on 12/20/17, 4:40 PM

  Fairly sure some of these calculations are wrong or I need to get a new tax person. There is no way I will pay as little on the current bill as they think. I think it is making the current plan look way better than what I would actually pay and have been paying. This makes me distrust the what I would pay part.

  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.

• by teilo on 12/20/17, 8:00 PM

  The big unknown with this tax bill, is how the states will react. My adjusted gross income goes up substantially because of the elimination of the personal exemption, but my child tax credits offset this - but only at the federal level.

  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.

• by notacoward on 12/20/17, 4:55 PM

  According to this I'm saving quite a bit. This year. Next year, not so much. Year after that, even less. It's like if I offered you a job at a really nice starting salary, but decreasing over the next few years to even less than you make already. Apparently a lot of people are stupid enough to accept that deal, and the folks in DC are dishonest enough to offer it. That's even before we consider how things will look in ten more years, as the deficit interest piles up and everyone's earning power is less than it would have been with a healthier economy.

• by product50 on 12/20/17, 4:43 PM

  This is totally wrong. It doesn't take AMT into consideration at higher salary levels in the current tax system.