Thursday, December 21, 2017

Massive...Believe Me

One of the selling points of the new tax reform law that just passed was that the standard deduction would be doubled, which would eliminate the need for many people to itemize, supposedly making filing your taxes simpler. There's a few problems with this.

One problem is that it hasn't quite doubled. $6350 to $12,000 for singles and $12,700 to $24,000 for marrieds filing jointly. Perhaps this is nit-picking. For a married couple filing jointly this is still a reduction of $11,300 in taxable income. But one of the ways that this was paid for was by eliminating the personal exemption, which was $4050 per person for marrieds, for a total of $8100 lost. So now that $11,300 is only a taxable income reduction of $3,200. If this hypothetical family has one child, then the taxable income actually increases by $850. Two children, it increases by $4,900. To be fair, the child tax credit increased by $1000 per child, so with one child the decrease in taxable income is $150 while the increase for two children is "only" $3,900.

What about the people who will still itemize? For a married couple filing jointly they would have been itemizing over $24,000 in deductions to make it worth their while to pass up the standard deduction. These people are not getting double the deductions, but are still losing their personal exemptions. And if they're over 65 they're losing the over-65 exemptions as well. So add another $4050 increase in taxable income for each person over 65.

The actual tax paid will vary depending on income level. The first $19,050 of taxable income is still taxed at 10%; 19,050 - 77,400 decreases from 15% - 12%; the next bracket drops from 25% to 22% and expands from a ceiling of 156,150 to 165,000. Do the math yourself, but for anyone with a household income of $59,000, the median US household income, people with no children will see a modest reduction in taxes, while people with two or more children will see increases.

But on the bright side, you can deduct the cost of your private plane

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