my pay rate is the same but my take home pay increased according to my pay stub. My tax refund increased.
It’s not a matter of opinion. It’s fact.
the current request is for 5 billion to extend the wall for additional security.
If your take home pay went up from one year to the next and your refund increase between those same two years, that still doesn’t prove your taxes are lower under the new law than under the old law.
The tax formulas change every year. The size of the standard deduction goes up. The point at which the first tax bracket kicks in goes up. These things are more or less tied to inflation. Even if the law had not changed at all, if the Republican tax bill had failed to pass, your taxes would have gone down slightly in 2018 compared to 2017 (assuming your pay stayed exactly the same and you used the standard deduction).
If you really wanted to prove that your taxes are lower because of the Republican tax bill, you’d need to look at the formula which the IRS had been planning to use for 2018 before the bill passed, and look at the formula which the IRS actually used for 2018 after the bill passed, plug in your numbers and see which one gave you a lower tax.
Let me put it this way. We want to compare apples and oranges. That’s fine. We want to see if the apple is better for you or if the orange is better for you. But the problem is that you compared a 2017 apple to a 2018 orange. You should have been comparing a 2018 apple to a 2018 orange. And the only way to do that is to look at the formulas. But you didn’t do that.
What you did is that you trusted someone else to look at the formulas, you trusted someone else to calculate your taxes, and then you compared two numbers but you didn’t compared the right numbers.
I stand by my claim: You don’t actually know how the tax formulas changed and whether the new formulas are better for you than the old ones. You didn’t even look at the formulas at all. You just trusted someone else’s interpretation of the formulas.
I’m not picking on you. The same goes for pretty much everybody. Almost nobody reads the formulas, let alone understands them. Almost nobody bothers to compare one formula for one year with a different formula for the same year. Somebody else analyzes the formulas, makes a comparison, and then we take their word for it that they did it right.
I read the formulas every year because I have to calculate withholding for my employees’ paychecks. But I don’t understand the formulas well enough to look at two of them side by side and instantly tell which one is better for me. I don’t even bother to compare the formulas at all, let alone compare a formula from one law to a formula from a different law. When I say nobody actually knows, I’m including myself.
The issue is what do you support, not what is being proposed now. You said you support the same wall that Pelosy [sid] did. Which wall are you talking about? I commented that you certainly weren’t talking about the 2,000-mile long concrete wall running from ocean to ocean, because Pelosi never supported that. But Donald Trump did in 2016, many times. Therefore you don’t support the thing that Donald Trump repeatedly promised in 2016. I also do not support the thing that Donald Trump repeated promised in 2016. That’s something you and I have in common, correct?