New Tax Plan Calculator | Hacker News Reader

New Tax Plan Calculator

taxplancalculator.com

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.

Was the irony in your last paragraph intentional?

The NYT did seem to put more effort into it:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/17/upshot/tax-ca...

At least it looks nicer.

I quite like the no-frills approach of the originally posted calculator. It's kind of refreshing.

Who cares who created it? The calculation is laid out and unless you have an error to present, you're criticism is invalid.

It looks correct to me and is obviously more featured than the NYTs calculator which only allows you to pick ranges and subsets.

This one was off by a tremendous amount for me. From any user expectations POV, the NYT calculator didn’t allow as many inputs, which forced me to accept that it would be ballpark approximation at best. However, the visuals gave me a good idea of which variables (income, itemized deductions) would push me closer to seeing a decrease vs increase in my tax bill.

Are you able to point to where it's factually incorrect? For me, the NYT times estimates were in the same range.

That means you save $0 compared to current system. (Maybe obvious, but it retains format of the boxes for all the bills.)

You will see the results of the calc are consistent with NYT's, except TaxPlanCalculator.com actually takes you exact info. NYT forces you into buckets -- "married 2 kids" is their only option.

TPC also first out, on Fri night, and budget $0 + server costs!

This propaganda has no business on HN

Aside from visiting HN I also see the stories percolate up my Facebook feed via following https://www.facebook.com/hnbot/, and this story made the cut.

Indeed, a lot of terrible stories, often flagged off the front page, end up being posted by that bot. Given that only a small, small percentage of HN stories get posted to their Facebook feed it is mystifying, and certainly isn't the best of the best. Asking generally to any who know: Is it only if a story has a Facebook-ready sized image?

Is that Facebook account affiliated with Y Combinator and Hacker News?

No idea, and it isn't verified. But it does use the official icon, and has some 130,000 followers so it is fairly mainstream.

Well, there's two things that contribute to what's seen from that bot: what the bot is actually doing, and what Facebook's algorithms end up displaying in your feed, neither of which we have much insight into :(

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.

Cool so will you be writing a check for the difference to the IRS as a “donation”? You can actually do that you know.

I don't think you can donate to the IRS. You can do similar things, but none are quite the same as paying taxes.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...

Also, the problem is that the government now has to plan its budget based on the new tax plan. Even if I donate a few thousand extra, that won't stop a lot of important programs from getting cut, and it won't stop general inequality from increasing.

You're correct that you don't donate to the IRS, specifically. You can write a check to the "United States Treasury", however.

They will gladly cash your check.

I have written checks to the United States Treasury in the past to better cover what I think my tax obligations _should_ be.

I have absolutely no faith in the current governance of the federal government, so I'll probably put my savings into a high yield savings account or a low-risk investment vehicle. When I again agree with the direction of the federal government, I'll pay this insane tax break back United States Treasury.

No, not the IRS. A few thousand dollars has zero marginal impact on the US government. I would rather donate my money to an organization that can better use a donation on the scale that I can afford to give.

And yet, it makes much more than a zero marginal impact for most Americans, including you.

So why don’t you deserve it, if even only just to use to donate it to charity?

Because certain projects are only possible when we pool our money together in an organized fashion. That is the whole point of collecting taxes.

Isn't that what charity is? You could donate 100% of your tax savings to one or more charities next year. If there's a specific government project you want to support, aren't there ways of donating money directly government organizations instead of just the IRS or the Treasury Department?

The government doesn't have to do everything; it's better when citizens take a more direct approach in my opinion.

There are certain things charities don't or can't do. I can't donate to a charity and have them repair a local bridge for example. And my donation wouldn't move the needle on nearly any government project. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in my situation. You can take a penny from each of them and it would beat my donation. That is the whole point of taxes, to pool our money together for the greater good. You can't run a country on just the charitable generosity of its people. Things like infrastructure would never get built in that world.

> I can't donate to a charity and have them repair a local bridge for example.

You actually could probably send a check to your state/county/township/borough's public works / infrastructure fund.

> There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in my situation.

All of whom have the option to write a check for as much as they want to the Treasury.

> That is the whole point of taxes, to pool our money together for the greater good.

And trust me, we as Americans pay plenty in taxes, and those who disagree, are welcome to pay more - it's perfectly legal, even encouraged. The real issue is government spending.

It seems weird to use the word "deserves" here, as if tax cuts were doled out depending on who has been naughty and who has been nice. I would prefer tax policy thought up more in terms of budget needs and setting the right economic incentives, but I guess us all being humans makes this unavoidable.

I agree. I gave the word "deserves" a second thought when I initially wrote the comment. The proper word is somewhere between "needs" and "deserves", but I don't know what it is. I think most people reading this on HN, probably don't "need" a tax cut but I am betting a decent percentage feel they "deserve" a tax cut if the government has already decided that a tax cut is going to be given out.

How about "usefully benefits"? where "usefully" is defined as improved quality of life, and/or most able to apply that to improving the economy.

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.

this probably removes the AMT if you're making < 500k individual or 1M married, which, for us, was huge last year.

FYI that is a bit of an oversimplification. See the AMT page on TaxPlanCalculator.com/static/AMT.html to see if it really eliminates your AMT in that range.

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 ...

No, there's not.

It's something I was discussing with an accountant when these tax proposals were first being discussed. The accountant _would not accept_ what I was describing as their proposed pass-through treatment of income because it would be _ludicrous_.

Ultimately, though, that's what they did. I get a _huge_ tax break that I don't want and don't need, because we happened to structure our business as a partnership instead of an LLC.

Use the tax break to pay for increased healthcare costs!

I’ll take it off your hands! I just sent my name and address to you via PM, but let me know if you’d prefer to send through PayPal instead of a check.

No thanks!

I'm going to put it into a savings account or low risk investment, and write a check to the US Treasury at a time when I have more faith in the federal government.

So... you do want the huge tax break then?

Hopefully you'll consider donating at least some (perhaps even all) of that tax break money to a homeless shelter or a food bank, maybe an animal shelter as well, especially this time of the year. That would definitely make that money go much further than it would if you paid it in taxes or sent it to the Treasury, be it this year or 10 years from now.

I thought an LLC can elect to be taxed as a pass through entity also (sole proprietorship or partnership-equivalent for tax purposes), so they might also be included.

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.

In my case, the federal tax bill amount shown is ~1/3 of my actual.

Are both of you incorrectly taking into account payroll taxes or AMT or state and local? It seems accurate to me.

Yeah, this doesn't include SS or Medicare taxes, just federal income taxes.

I am only looking at my federal tax bill. That being said the site seems to be giving me different numbers now that I am on a computer at home. I checked my phone (still had the tab open) and it was showing near half what the site is showing now. But now the site shows the new tax bill will save me money, when before it said I would pay more.

The numbers I am getting on my computer are closer to the real numbers for the current plan.

As far as somebody saying "current tax bill saved zero" being weird. Yea it is weird but not really an issue. Keeping the same plan won't save you anything, I would be more upset if it tried to suggest it did save you something.

Same. My actual federal tax bill is at least 1.5x what the calculator showed for current tax code. Other things seemed off by huge margin as well.

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.

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.

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

If you are in high-income, it links to a page that tells you how to figure out AMT yourself.

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