Vice Presidential Debate

[GMDino]

(10-08-2020, 09:45 AM)Crazyjdawg Wrote: I can only speak to my personal experience, but my paycheck also went up by about 20 dollars a paycheck, or ~40 dollars a month. But then my refund was about 400 dollars less than it was the year prior with my finances remaining approximately the same. So I got maybe 80 dollars out of the deal?

I'm not a tax expert, but I remember at the time I read an article that said a lot of that gained money in paychecks was not because taxes were being lowered but because withholding thresholds were being lowered. So you felt like you got a tax cut when you really didn't. I'm not sure if that was true across the board, but it seems to have been the case with me.

And then the following year, I got slammed with a huge tax bill, owing about 2000 dollars, again with very little changes to my finances outside of a marginal raise, probably related to that lowered withholding limit. I didn't adjust my withholding between years, so I can't think of any other reason.

This is all anecdotal evidence, but I'm relatively certain I'd benefit greatly from them reverting that tax change haha.

Also, the Trump tax change did some pretty awful things regarding property tax and the personal exemption. If I remember correctly, if you pay more than $10,000 in property tax per year, you probably lost money in the tax change because they capped how much property tax you were allowed to deduct from your taxes.

And that doesn't even account for the massive cuts the wealthiest people in the country got. For the first time ever, the wealthiest people in the country actually paid the lowest tax rate in the entire country, across all levels of wealth.


That just doesn't seem right to me, personally.

We had a similar experience and had to adjust our withholdings.  That was part of the issue with the tax cuts was there was very little guidance for how it would affect your tax returns.