The GOP's turd of a tax bill

[popeyespappy]

If I plug last year's numbers into this plan and take the standard deduction I'd pay about $200 more in taxes under the new plan than I did last year. I itemized last year, and I probably couldn't under the new plan due to changes in SALT deductions so that is probably about where I'd be at. Luckily for us, Karen and I plan on getting married next year. Under this plan that will cut our combined taxes by about $4360 over filing separately because more than $36,000 of our combined income would be taxed at 12% instead of 25%. I'm not sure what our combined taxes would look like under the current plan.

Interesting... If my partner and I got married, we'd pay a few thousand more under the GOP plan over filing separately, however, I am able to file as head of household instead of single and her income is sufficiently low that she would pay no federal tax so that's certainly where the difference lies.

I wouldn't mind paying the higher taxes if there was actually something in the wings for lower income people - you know, like the health care they want to slash and burn - but that safety net is more likely to contract rather than expand.  

I have a spreadsheet I cooked up to model my own tax situation, I think I'm gonna spend some time modifying it to compare 2017 rates to what they're proposing and working up some hypothetical income/tax situations and see where things break, see where the winners and losers are.

The marriage penalty / break usually works in a couple's favor if one of them earns considerably more than the other. Against them if their income close to the same level. It looks like it would work the same way under this plan. For us it would look like this:



Trumplethinskin is right about one thing. Most people could do their taxes on the back of post card under this plan. The thing is most people could do their taxes on the back of a post card now if they don't itemize deductions.

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Interesting bit of fun.  If the corporate tax rate and our income tax rate both end up @25%, we could conceivably revive our llc...write off most of our bills as the llcs bills -pre tax-, deduct for development incentives, and then reduce our wages paid and drop our income tax bracket...... effectively paying no taxes while qualifying for federal assistance again.

It's almost as if this thing was designed to promote legal tax evasion or something. 

If this plan passes in anything resembling it's current form you definitely want to go the LLC route.