What point are you making?
If you claim a “donation” to a state government to be your required tax, then it does benefit a specific individual (the taxpayer) and is NOT “solely for public purpose.”
well, you nailed it.
By that interpretation, any donation to anyone is not a charitable donation.
I didn’t say they weren’t, just that they’d have to qualify somehow (which apparently they do).
Yeah, that’s not how any of this works. It means there cannot be strings attached to the money by the donor. So your $5 million contribution to Chicago to build the septimus Memorial Library is not tax deductible, but your $5 million contribution to Chicago’s general fund is.
Interesting take on this from Josh Marshall, over at Talking Points Memo
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-political-consequences-of-the-end-of-salt-deductions
To grossly oversimplify, he says that the tax bill will give a modest benefit to the lumpenprole, and will hugely benefit the oinking class, but will afflict the comfortable class, the well-off but not rich.
Kinda like if you own a house worth fifty million, the reversal of deductions for taxes on that house will hurt, but be massively compensated for by other treats and goodies. If you own a house worth one million dollars, you get the bite but not the goodies. Hence, the comfortable suburban class will be be pissed.
In Santa Clara county, $1M gets you a dump. Well, maybe not a dump, but the median home price is about $1.2M. Higher in San Mateo County (north, up the peninsula) and I suspect even higher still in SF. But, it’s 70 deg today where I am, so there’s that! It’s likely that the Republicans will get 5% of the vote in SF next time instead of the usual 10%. 
(I made those numbers up. They are probably higher, but I think the point is made.)
CBS published this piece recently, showing how three families had received bad information about the tax reform bill, and their reactions when they realize they’re actually going to save money (well worth 5 minutes of your time IMHO). Republicans are essentially betting the House that this will play out over and over again all across the country next year.
They didn’t receive bad information. Nobody asked the accountants to estimate their tax bills in eight years, when the chained CPI bracket adjustments and other delayed provisions will have increased their taxes.
They also did not ask to see what sorts of services and other govt functions would be sacrificed in order to get them that tax cut, nor how much those cuts will end up costing them.
Nor did they ask to see what sorts of taxes the children will be paying in the future when this deficit needs to be addressed.
But sure, most people will be getting a couple hundred, maybe even a thousand or so saved on their taxes for as much as 8 years.
I don’t know how better to describe this:
Maybe misinformed? Deceived?
We (meaning the CBS news piece, these three families, the CPA, and myself) are not talking about taxes in eight years. We’re talking about next year’s taxes, you know, the ones that will happen before the 2018 elections.
There are two things here, really. First, what source did they use to determine that their taxes would be higher? I’ve been against this bill for a number of reasons, but everyone seemed in agreement that most people would get a temporary tax break.
Also, what version of the tax bill were they looking at at that time, keep in mind that it changed with fairly dramatic effects several times.
Misinformed, absolutely, they were operating under information that did not turn out to be correct. Deceived? Now you are throwing in motivations for their understandable ignorance that have no evidence.
I would say that the most likely reason is because, with all the constant changes and shenanigans that the republicans played with the tax bill, they were confused as to exactly how it would play out for them. The last minute change on student loan interest deduction alone is enough that I went from a negative on the tax bill to a positive, in terms of tax savings.
I don’t think that’s true. According to the study linked in post # 1091, the future tax increases are small to non-existent for the vast majority of taxpayers.
But - psychologically - how will this be perceived? For instance, consider the $40k administrative assistant whose taxes will be lowered by $1300. Say she receives a biweekly check, so she can expect a ~$50 bump in her check. But next year, her health insurance is likely going up by, say, $20 per check, so she is actually seeing an increase of about $30 per check. So, okay, not a fortune, but welcome. Certainly better than a decrease. She won’t see just how much her taxes, in total, have dropped until she files in 2019, and compares that to her previous year’s return.
Will this largesse really be internalized to the point that she stands up and does a Republican cheer? She’s not stupid; she knows the bump won’t last more than a few years. She may also know that after the bump disappears, it’s actually going to leave a hole. She will also see many, many stories during 2018 describing how much the idle rich are making out under this plan. The Republicans seem to be counting on the population being so entranced by the small bump in their paychecks that they completely ignore the coming tax increase and the disparity of it all.
I’m not so sure the American public is that stupid, or easily fooled. I also don’t think the small increase she sees will be all that noticeable; remember, most miscellaneous paycheck deduction adjustments are made at the first of the year - changes in benefits, or merit increases, for instance - so people are used to seeing their paycheck change at the first of the year, every year.
After all, the Obama stimulus included a tax cut for the middle class, a larger one than this current tax bill. Judging from the media coverage at the time, I’m not sure anyone noticed.
Fox News will, of course, spend 2018 touting the tax cut as The Best Thing Ever, but for the bulk of America, it’s likely to be more of a “meh.”
That’s about how I imagine it will be perceived: “welcome”. The perception is probably a bit better because so many people had extremely low expectations (expecting their taxes to go up, they’ll probably be pleasantly surprise when they actually drop)
Yes, but she should see the improvement early in the year when the IRS updates their withholding tables. She probably won’t know the total, but she’ll know she’s getting an extra $X/paycheck.
Unknowable at this point. The Republicans are hoping so and the Democrats are hoping not.
If she’s not stupid, she probably knows that virtually everyone expects the middle-class individual cuts to be extended / made permanent. Almost no one actually expects that they’ll be left to expire.
This is the spot where our opinions diverge the most, I think. Admittedly, eight years is a political lifetime, but we have been witnessing increasing intransigence in the political discourse for at least nine years, and I don’t believe it has crested yet.
Is Congressional compromise dead? Maybe not, and maybe those cuts will be extended. But right now, the certainty is that the cuts will expire; permanence will require action. My expectation is that the Republicans will hold the tax cuts hostage for an agreement to cut deep into social programs, and that standoff will perpetuate beyond the cuts’ expiration.
Did I mention that eight years is a political lifetime?
Apologies, but I’m not likely to be able to reply until after the New Year, so best to you and yours.
Hunh. I thought I fixed this.
You can’t take a charitable deduction for a donation to the extent you receive soemthing of value. So if you donate $100 to PBS and you get a $100 amazon gift certificate, you can’t deduct that $100. If you donate $5000 to your state and get a $5000 tax credit for it, you can’t deduct that $5000 dollars.
I meant to fix this in the previous post.
That won’t work. You are getting something of equal value for your donation. You don’t get to deduct.
Boy, is my face red! Totally embarrassed to have missed this crucial data point! Why, i can hardly believe it! Point of fact, not sure I do.
I just thought this needed a bump. QFT.
And I could run out today, max out all my credit lines and buy a snazzy new car and a bunch of expensive new clothes and electronics and vacations. And my neighbors might think — “Gee, she’s much better off now than she was last week”. And, I might, for a little while, feel like I’m rich. But my neighbors would be wrong. And I would be wrong.
Which is exactly why I don’t run out and max out my credit lines.
The people I know that hate the tax bill - including my moderate Republican “because they’ve always been Republicans but maybe we’d better look at that again but not today” family - see the modest gains for middle class families for what they are, a small payoff for looking the other way while Trump and his minions loot the Treasury.
They’re too smart to fall for it. But this administration believes - and I’m paraphrasing the great media whore SHS here— “that no one cares how much Trump and the rich profit as long as they see a few extra bucks in their own paycheck”.
Now this kind of borrowing for economic stimulus might have made a little more sense if it was done in 2009 after the last Republican administration drove the economy off a cliff. But the debt was the biggest Republican concern then and the held the entire country in recession for 8 years as revenge for a President they hated.
But now that the economy is healthy enough to make stimulus debt is stupid, they’re all in.
Do you really think either party is going to raise taxes on the middle class? If the Dems take over Congress and the WH, they might raise taxes on “the rich” and/or bump the corporate tax rate up, but they won’t raise taxes on the middle class. That would be political suicide.