Military pay is already much higher than people think. Tax free housing, food and clothing allowances cover most expenses. It’s almost all disposable income.
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and the benefit is not quantifiable.
A good summary blog of many of the proposed changes:
Thats not a realistic expectation.
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It’s not? Because before the ACA kicked in, I was paying $65 a month for my plan. And it was kind of bogged down with things I didn’t want even pre-ACA.
Is $65 a month a realistic expectation for a catastrophic only insurance plan? If not, how were they able to do it before the ACA?
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Which factual basis are you using?
CA sends more money per capita to the feds than TX or WA. NY & NJ are in the top 10.
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Your argument that your insurance ought to be $30 today is that it was $65 back 7 years ago pre-ACA ??
If it was $65 before ACA then it would be more like $130 today just based on you being 7 years older and the increases in healthcare costs.
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Was pretty shocked to see how large a tax cut the House bill would actually be for our family (married, soon to be 2 kids, $175k gross, $150k AGI).
Looking at my 2016 return…We would have paid $4,100 less (22k vs 18k). And with the 1600 child tax credit for kid 2 next year…would be $5700 less.
We were phased out of current child tax credit…but the phase out limit is more than doubled from $110k to $230k…so that’s $3200 of the $5700 reduction.
Have to say I’m scratching my head a bit. Didn’t really expect to see much of any cut.
are you sure you did the math right? I’m doing something in similar range & paying lot more in taxes. But i live in NJ and work in NY. So i lose out close to about $20K in itemized deductions (i.e. from $44K or so itemized, i might need to take $24K std deduction now that prop tax is capped at $10K and state income tax and few other stuff are gone). At say 25% tax marginal tax rate … that’s about $5K more taxes.
But on top of that - i just realized it - personal exemption is on top of itemized deductions. So family of 3 i would get $4K x 3 = $12K deductions (didn’t qualify for child credit). Now these 12K deductions will get replaced by $300 per person tax credit. At 25% tax rate, 12K deduction saves about $3,000 … vs $900 tax credit. So i pay $2K extra tax here.
So net net $7K more on tax … but i save about maybe a$3K net on lower tax rate - so net about $4K more taxes!!! Unless i’m dong something wrong in math.
I only itemized 17k last year. And then another 12k or so for the personal exemptions.
So my taxable was $121k.
I’d take the $24k standard now. So my taxable is actually higher…$126k.
However, all the brackets/rates will have changed/dropped…so my tax owed was actually less. Are you doing the marginal brackets correct? Your first $90k of taxable would be at 12%. Anything over that is 25%.
Then I had the child tax credits ($1600 each) pls this family flex credit of $300 per adult (which I’m not sure the rules on). $1600x2 + $600 = $3800 in credits I was phased out of before.
I assume these are to makeup for the loss of personal exemptions.
With the elimination of non-property SALT, which by itself puts me over the standard deduction line (I live in California with its high income tax), I would probably make changes to maximize the standard deduction. I would advance charitable deductions now and/or make them every few years all at once through donor advised funds, pay down my mortgage, and not leverage myself so much on my brokerage account (I paid about $4,000 in investment interest last year, which I would rapidly bring down to zero). Overall it would be a net loss to the economy since I would not deploy my free capital in the market but instead leave it in home equity.
How much income are you going to give up by cutting out the $4,000 in investment interest? Cutting nose to spite your face?
Want a road to drive to work? You should get a part-time job to pave it yourself! Need surgery? Get another part-time job so you can pay the surgeon?
How about we just decide that certain things, infrastructure, healthcare, education, etc are beneficial to all of society and fund them as a society?
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If it’s in liquid indices, you could switch to futures that embed the financing into the price and get 60/40 long/short capital gains treatment.
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I’m down for this, 100%! I want the government to provide 100% free healthcare so I can completely retire and take myself out of the workforce. I’d also like free food since I won’t have an income, and free or cheap housing. Maybe a free or cheap cell phone.
I’m tired of working and have a huge backlog of movies and video games to catch up on. As soon as we finally get the government to give me everything I need for free, there won’t be a need for me to work anymore. I have enough saved up to fund my discretionary purchases. Also, once the government starts providing free healthcare, taxes will go up, so there’s even less incentive for me to keep working.
Personally, I’ll be way better off with free universal healthcare and all sorts of other free stuff.
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The bill is proposing to expand the AOTC for a 5th year at 50%.
It also does away with the lifetime learning credit and hope scholarship.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/text#H3BEDA09CF25F4219941B22D519C67DFC
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Does this mean they’re closing the backdoor Roth? :
SEC. 1501. REPEAL OF SPECIAL RULE PERMITTING RECHARACTERIZATION OF ROTH IRA CONTRIBUTIONS AS TRADITIONAL IRA CONTRIBUTIONS.
(a) In General.—Section 408A(d) is amended by striking paragraph (6) and by redesignating paragraph (7) as paragraph (6).
(b) Effective Date.—The amendments made by this section shall apply to taxable years beginning after December 31, 2017.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/text#HC8B8DA04596F464E8E91B244480D9235
No, the prosposl means you can still convert your IRA to Roth in 2018, but if you do, you won’t be able to recharacterize it if you change your mind. For example, this makes it hard to “fill up” the 15% bracket by doing a partial Roth conversion in Dec and then recharacterizing some of it if you guessed wrong, got K1s with additional income, etc. you’d just get one guess and then you’re stuck with it.
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An article that I read suggested that the IRA to Roth IRA recharacterization was stopped because some people were converting then if the Stock Market dropped, they would recharacterized back to IRA then immediately convert to Roth again. Rinse and repeat. This would give the converter the lowest conversion taxable amount for the year.
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Maybe you quoted the wrong post or something? I’m 100% sure I didn’t use the word ‘free’. Perhaps you should re-read it.
It’s really sad that people are not members of the workforce because they couldn’t afford the proper healthcare. Now they are 100% disabled and a burden on society. Look, we can both be strawmen.