What do you guys think of it so far? I need to see the income brackets before I give it two thumbs up, but currently I give it one thumb up.
I've always been in favor of lowering our ridiculous corporate taxes, and the "repatriation tax" seems like a fair balance that should satisfy both Rs and Ds (though Ds are screaming about it being too low). Otherwise the corporate/business/small business stuff looks fair when you look at it as part of the overall plan. It seems like a lot of complainers are just picking certain parts as "favoring the rich" without looking at other parts that balance things out.
As far as personal taxes (again, depending on what the income brackets are), I think I could live with that as well. I saw Schumer, et. al. are going off on the new 12% lowest rate versus the current 10%. However, it seems to me that is disingenuous. More accurately, the lowest rate is 0% (just as now) but given the doubling of the standard deduction, more people will qualify for 0%, just as more people will drop from 25% to 12% using just the new standard deduction.
I'm also fine with eliminating the state and local tax deduction even living (for now) in high tax CA. This is another area where progressives are screaming about "penalizing the poor and middle class". I would submit that if anything, it penalizes the wealthy. Most of these high tax states are progressively taxed. In CA, if you make $50K, you might pay around $1700 in state taxes. At $100K, you pay ~$6500.
So if you're eliminating the state tax deduction, all you're doing at the $50K level is changing (not counting anything else) AGI from $50K to $48.3K. The left is pushing a narrative (which is already a common misconception by many, many people who don't understand taxes) that you're losing $1700 out of your pocket versus only changing your AGI by $1700, which might not affect your taxes owed by much of anything. At the very high income levels though, the deduction could in fact knock you into a lower tax bracket. At $500K in CA, the tax is ~$47,500. So again, if anything, removing the state deduction does not help "the rich and penalize the middle class" but potentially hurts the wealthy and has little effect on the middle class. The opposite of the left's narrative. I saw that the current tax code keeps over $100 billion of CA taxpayer money out of the fed's coffers, so the new plan would, mostly via the wealthy in CA, bring in an extra $100 billion into the fed coffers. Add in the other high tax states, which I believe are almost all progressively taxed to penalize the wealthy, and that money adds up quickly.
Anyway, I still want to see the tax brackets, and also want to see what they're doing with dividends and capital gains (currently if your AGI is <$48K, you pay zero taxes on dividends and capital gains). I know they want to increase those taxes on the Buffets and Zuckerbergs, but I'm hoping that they don't do a blanket increase across all income brackets. Many people depend on the dividend and capital gain income for their retirement.
