I’d expect a bit more sensitivity to interest rates now with the deduction restricted. Also, hard to tell how sensitive things have been to rates historically. It was certainly helpful when I doubled my mortgage knowing that I was going to get a third of that back in taxes (pre-Trump).
Wouldn’t now be the best time to get rid of it if they did get rid of it? I mean interest rates are at historic (or near historic) lows, the standard deduction just doubled, and SALT elimination along with the larger standard deduction eliminated mortgage interest deduction for very large portion of the population not in the upper income ranges.
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{Checking my tax return}
Yes. Now would be good time to just eliminate it.
Keep increasing that standard deduction, though.
I was talking to a friend about this yesterday. Really I could not think of anything that came about specifically from Trump that was really good. Most of the things I approve of are just basic conservative things that he happened to sign into law. The things he specifically decided on and presided over from the executive branch were almost totally either stupid or wrongly executed. Maybe a better framing of this question would be what did Trump do that an average generic Republican would not have done do you approve of?
I think the tax bill would definitely fall in the list of things any Republican would have done and it was largely drafted without much influence by Trump. Mitch had that thing ready to go almost immediately upon Trump taking office.
Things Trump specifically was responsible for are the border wall (stupid), the Trade War (poorly executed although it needed to be done in some shape form or fashion), immigration regulation (horrific IMO), the transition of the Justice Department to the Trump legal and investigative team (corruption at it’s finest), etc, etc, etc
I’m not so sure I agree with this, what benefits did we get out of the trade war? I imagine you’d agree tariffing Canada fits well into the “poorly executed” part, but even with China. We angrily dropped from the TPP which would have given us greater influence over the East Asian region in order to tax ourselves to harm China and then gifted a bunch more money to the farmers. Did we do anything on intellectual property issues other than blow hot air?
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Pre-funding vaccine manufacture, while not a hard call (the US is hardly the only entity to have done this) was a good call.
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I disagree. The point of my long post was that the impact will be modest. House prices are impacted by a variety of normal economic fluctuations, removing the mortgage deduction is not terribly out of line with other factors.
As Lucy pointed out, a bunch of people already lost the deduction, or much of the deduction, when the standard deduction went up. We didn’t see massive losses in house values.
This is a good take. I mentioned SALT cap. I’m sure it was in Ryan’s planned bill before Trump started running. A generic R would have probably kept it.
(It’s possible that it would have been dropped due to Rs feeling heat, but Trump kept the cap in because he is vindictive.)
I think that “trade war with China” and generally “China is a problem” is more of a Trump thing than an R thing. Rs are historically free trade.
I think the Ds and Rs got together in the 1990s and decided to give China a good trade deal. They were giving up lots of blue collar American jobs in hopes that China would “join the community of civil democracies”.
For a while, it seemed to be working (Deng). But, Xi has shown us you can have a modern economy without civil rights or a democracy. It looks like we made a massively bad bet.
Trump is at least getting some attention to the problem.
(OTOH, trade war with Canada and Europe is a different thing)
Bump: created a cottage industry of Fact-Checkers.
I mean, look at this PolitiFact Fact-Checking of Biden’s speech (mostly accurate):
Bunch of people will be out of work. THANKS, JOEBAMA!
I mean, they could still fact-check Trump, but who will care what he says…oh, right, 74 million.
Trump sucks. He is a well below replacement level executive. Anything good he does was a no brainer that he somehow managed not to fuck up.
But in the spirit of the thread, Pence getting the vaccine live is a good move.
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Worth repeating. It really looks like we will make it all the way through his term without any new wars. I was worried about North Korea, and about Iran, but it’s looking promising.
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In today’s news, Trump is calling for $2000 stimulus checks. Way above the offer from Republican Senators. The mere act of articulating this is a positive.
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Is it going to be need based this time? It seems crazy to me that we’re handing out borrowed money to gainfully employed actuaries, that has to be the most economically inefficient way to generate fiscal stimulus.
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Given that you got nothing if your income exceeded $99,000 (single) or $198,000 (married) I’m guessing that most credentialed actuaries who are employed did not get a stimulus check last go around. Although I suppose a married actuary with a SAH spouse might. And most actuarial students probably did.
That’s fair, I suppose I’m relatively low family income with a mostly SAH spouse and only 6 or so years in the actuarial world, although giving money to employed people all the same seems a bit silly unless we’re talking poverty level.
It really depends on the reasoning behind the stimulus checks. If it is to keep people afloat, then yeah, means test the heck out of it, although there are some folks who are probably above the max threshold that could really sue the money. We don’t know everyone’s individual situation. If the rationale is to stimulate the economy, then the stimulus checks can be distributed to a larger group who would then use the money to keep businesses going.
I’m not sure about the exact purpose of the checks, but I know one goal of the program was to distribute them as quickly as possible. The more restrictions / qualifications there are, the longer it takes to figure out if people qualify.
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We got it, married but only one income. Spent half on summer semester tuition for one kid who had a really rough time with in-person school shutting down in the middle of spring semester and donated the other half to a food bank.
Didn’t stimulate much, but I do think it did some good.
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I think this is the reason, combined with the urge to do it quickly. I understood with the previous checks because urgency was a big deal, but for round 2 I think we could be more thoughtful about it.
For example maybe only 20% of the checks are going to people where it will really have an impact, so keep those 20% but use the other 80% on stuff that actually invests in the economy, like build a high speed railroad between Boston and NYC or something.
Thinking back I think they also used the 2018 tax return which was coincidentally quite good timing for me. Right before I switched jobs but right after my youngest was born.