This quick post looks at the effects of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA, the House GOP’s proposed tax plan introduced last week), but (selfishly) I focus on a specific segment of the population: families with children under 18.
It turns out that parents do far worse under the TCJA than the population as a whole, and making the expiring credits in the TCJA permanent only modestly changes this story. More than 40% of families with children face a hike under TCJA in 2027, even with the security of permanent filer credits and assumptions about the benefit of corporate tax cuts.
As always, I’m using the excellent Open Source Policy Center (OSPC) TaxBrain model for this analysis.
To set the table: under the TCJA as written (what I’m calling “TCJA law”), 72 million filers or about 37% of the total get a direct tax increase in 2027. This number falls to 50 million, or 26%, if I distribute the benefit of TCJA’s corporate tax cut similar to how JCT did in their score of TCJA last week. [1]
But filers with children under 18 fare much worse than the overall population. In 2027 I estimate that there are 24 million families with kids who see a direct tax hike, 55% of all such families. Distributing the corporate tax cut lowers this by 4 million to 20 million, or 45% — still a far higher proportion than all filers writ large.
Back in the day, RReagan’s day, the late super smart wife scored high enough on the CPA exams to receive an award. The local cpa club in town delivered the award. Besides the award there were speakers one of whom called Reagan tax overhaul the Tax Attorneys and CPAs Full Employment Act. I expect the same this time.
People are looking at this monstrosity of a bill incorrectly. If you are middle or working class, it doesn’t matter if you come out ahead a few hundred bucks a year or behind a few hundred bucks a year, as EVERY LAST ONE OF US is either going to be burdened with $450 per year in additional debt or spending cuts. Almost no one earning less than $100k is going to come out ahead in this, especially families for whom the $450 figure has to be multiplied by the number of people in the household.
For the record, we earn a little over $100k. The bills keep shifting, but generally we’ll break even, with a tax cut matching our additional debt load.