Saturday, December 30, 2017

What the New Tax Law Didn't Change

Excerpt from The Short Cheap Tax Book for the Trump/GOP Tax Law:

What Didn’t Change

There was a lot of talk, and two passed bills, that went into the conference committee where the final bill language was decided.  Here’s a list of things they talked about, but didn’t change:

Capital Gains tax rates stayed the same
Identification of sold securities unchanged (no forced FIFO)*
No change to education credits
Student loan interest is still deductible
Savings bond interest used for education is still tax-free
Colleges can still provide tax-free education to their employees
Electric vehicle credit wasn’t changed
Employer education expense exclusion is unchanged
No change to MSA deductibility
No change to educator expense deduction**
No change to the sale of personal residence exclusion***
No change to Dependent Care Benefits exclusion
No change to adoption rules
No change to the solar credit
No change to the Credit for Elderly and Disabled
No change to Earned Income Credit
No change to employer-provided housing rules
No change to exempt organizations rules on “politicking”
529 plan money still not usable for homeschool

*There was a proposal to force partial sales of batches of stocks or other assets to be determined based on “First In, First Out” rules, rather than allowing the person selling to specify what shares of stock among a batch were the ones sold.  This was not adopted.

**As will be discussed later, a whole bunch of itemized deductions were eliminated including the employee business expense deduction that teachers often use to deduct expenses above the $250 educator expense deduction.

***I am actually going to briefly cover the rules in a later chapter since people still think they have to buy a new home to make this work – something that was changed over 20 years ago.


****Links to my blog post on the subject for South Carolina

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