I’m not clear on why alimony should ever have been tax deductible?
I guess yeti don’t use the internet much.
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May I suggest a holly daze present for them?
Retro!
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Look, you won’t catch me betting on Dems developing a solid spine here, but that’s a piece of speculation by Mathew Yglesias you’re linking, not a policy doc. It may well be what happens, but unless you have a time machine, citing it as evidence that the Dems have fallen down on this is premature.
Um, I believe that’s what’s called a “feature”, not a “bug”…
the part that everyone seems to be missing is that states and municipalities aren’t going to suddenly cut back on services. even without the sunset, property taxes are going up. state taxes – if you live in a place with them – will also have to go up. gas tax, and all the rest as well.
our infrastructure is already tearing at the edges – take 1-2 trillion of revenue out of the federal government… it’ll have to come back in from somewhere.
and it ain’t coming from the 1%.
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According to the BBC’s look at the plan, I am most definitely a Loser. I wish there was something I could do about it.
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America is the loser. Flags should be at half mast.
I will spit, piss and shit on any and every trump supporter for the rest of my life.
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Because it’s money the payer doesn’t get to keep. Up until now been counted as income for the payee instead, which seems very sensible to me. For example, my salary might be 80K, but I’m really only getting say 60K because I’m giving the rest to an ex. The current system has the person actually getting the money paying income tax on it; the new system will have the person paying tax on money they don’t have.
Nah. You earnt it, you pay tax on it. What you do with it after that is up to you.
You would think that, but you would be wrong.
So… who did you vote for if you voted? I voted for Bernie in the Primaries because I honestly thought he was the best choice. But I certainly voted for HRC in the General because she was far and away the most qualified candidate for POTUS. Besides, if you could not see what trump represented from a 1000 yards away you would have to be stoopid of delusional, take your choice. IF HRC were elected I believe Progressives would have pushed her on many issues to move to the left and I think with Bernie on his soap box it would have happened. I stand by my initial response… HRC would NOT have made all the insane, cruel and heartless actions trump and fuckers like Senator Hatch have made, and whom by the way is one of my Senators and I called him and Senator Mike Lee several times per week leading up to the votes on taxes and Net Neutrality, so I am somewhat familiar with what repugs have in mind for our safety and welfare. Yes, things in our nation and our lives would have been very different if HRC was elected. So… is it being stoopid or delusional? Take your pick.
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Supply siders say you need tax cuts and spending cuts sort of like communists said you needed to use evidence to determine agricultural policies. While I don’t doubt there are honest theoreticians who genuinely believe their ideas would work, they aren’t the ones running things.
The rationale is fairly obvious: when you live with your spouse you are considered by the tax system to have conjoined finances, so money you spend to support your spouse is still your money. When you are divorced the money you pay to your spouse is their income, not yours, so they should be the ones taxed on it at whatever rate they pay (I have no idea if it works this way).
Of course, ultimately, the tax code is political, not logical. We should be worried less about the rationale and more about the outcomes of policy. I imagine that the writers of this bill were worried about neither.
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I’m sure they were very aware of the outcome. Presumably, the spouse paying alimony makes more money than the spouse receiving it. Very possibly a significant amount more. By shifting who pays the tax, it also shifts which tax rate is applied. It’s likely that the rate is higher this way, and they’ll collect more in taxes.
A way to offset the reduction in other taxes.
I wonder if this creates other loopholes. You’re only allowed to “gift” so much money a year to someone before they need to claim it as income and it’s taxed. Money that you already pay taxes on, since it’s a gift and not alimony in the old system of changing who pays the tax. In a world where alimony is no longer income to be taxed, could you set up “alimony” payments to anyone you want to transfer wealth to?
For instance, in the system today, you can transfer wealth to your grand children over time with a gift each year, below the gift limit. Could you instead pay them an “alimony” payment of a larger amount with the same tax free implications. Perhaps to care for a formally joint owned pet they they take full custody of.
In Canada right now they are making revisions to the tax code to stop “income sprinkling” which is sort of like this. I’m not sure exactly how the rules work, but there is a way for some people to allow their dependents to “earn” some of their income and thus be taxed on it instead of them. Of course it’s mainly used by doctors and small business owners, so this comes across as an increased tax on doctors and small business owners. Those are not groups that it’s politically wise to aim tax increases at.
That’s why I say tax laws ought to be more about outcomes than about trying to have a good rationale. If I were starting from scratch I’d have very simple tax law and target programs at groups that I wanted to help rather than using tax law itself as an instrument to reward certain groups. Taxes just seem like a much bigger sea of unintended consequences than programs do.
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You are asking the wrong question. As it turns out I voted for neither; I live in California where my vote made no difference and I could not support her as President.
But this country slid to the right hardest as a result of the Clintons, who shifted the Dems to a center-right party and abandoned the traditional left alliance with the working class. It does not matter that there are people to the right of them; that is always the case. But by always letting the “left” candidate drift further right we do even more damage. Clinton licenses Republicans to be even more extreme because she normalizes so many right wing positions.
Once in power, Clinton would have consolidated her hold on the party and purged disloyal Bernie-types, not listened to them. We wouldn’t have Trump, but we would have had a less active left.
I have been watching this my whole life - pick the lesser evil and the country as a whole slides right. The long game played by capital- the steady stream of M&A, the relaxation of oversight, the creation of new property rights, all continues while we fret over presidential contests.
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I’ve been watching people talk about this plan for a while, and I’m convinced that the Democrats are fumbling badly. I’m hardly sure I’ve seen a representative sample, so maybe people are doing better than I think. But what I’ve seen is that they keep repeating the talking point that most people will be worse off in eight years.
Anyone who actually understands what is going on is going to know the tax plan is stupid or is going to be an unreachable ideologue. So they ought to be sending messaging to people who don’t know what’s going on. People who think, “This plan is too complicated for me to understand, some people say it’s good, others that it’s bad. I’ll just have to wait and see.”
The argument people see if about whether people will pay more or less taxes. Democrats say more, Republicans say less. Next year, the answer for most people will be “less” and people will say, “Oh, the Republicans were right.”
The Democrats are trying to keep this in terms of whether or not it puts more money in the pockets of the individual. They really, really want to say away from being political.
It’s time to be political.
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When has this ever been not true though?
The entire Republican campaign machine is just better than the Democrat’s.
Totally independent of the content and which content someone agrees with. The actual mechanical function of delivering the message and getting people to move in one direction or another, the Republicans just do it better. In fact, I would argue that they do it so much better they can get people to move in a direction even when it’s not in their best interest to move that way.
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Well since you don’t vote it is difficult to continue to converse with you on this subject. I live in Utah and my vote does not count, but I still vote. I support the removal of the electoral vote. We need to start somewhere. I am 56 and I have been politically active my whole adult life. I have stood down police on horseback in anti-Raygun demonstrations in the 80’s. I have marched and I have rallied here in Utah against the Bush administration and even a couple against the Obama admin. Just a couple weeks ago I attended one of the biggest rallies on the steps of the State Capital in support of keeping our National Monuments intact. I have demonstrated countless times in my life against the right wing. Living in California you have the benefit of the Dems bringing back prosperity to you and other Californians. You are more fortunate than others. Progressive policies have been implemented in California as opposed to Kansas where the disastrous failure of the right wing supply side economics are on full display for everyone to see. Sadly, now they will implement those same failed policies to the rest of the nation. At what point will you be active in our nations’ future or will you always sit on the sidelines and bitch about shit?
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The Coastal Elites will also be paying more, since that’s where the higher real estate prices are and they went after the mortgage interest deduction, which probably makes the deplorables just say “welcome to the club”. They already ripped off the bottom 80% now they’re just going after remaining 19% .
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