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The House's Tax Bill Levies a Tax On Graduate Student Tuition Waivers (nytimes.com)
Camel Pilot writes: The new GOP tax plan -- which just passed the House -- will tax tuition waivers as income. Graduate students working as research assistants on meager stipends would have to declare tuition waivers as income on the order of $80,000 income. This will force many graduate students of modest means to quit their career paths and walk away from their research. These are the next generation of scientists, engineers, inventors, educators, medical miracle workers and market makers. As Prof Claus Wilke points out: "This would be a disaster for U.S. STEM Ph.D. education." Slashdot reader Camel Pilot references a report via The New York Times, where Erin Rousseau explains how the House of Representatives' recently passed tax bill affects graduate research in the United States. Rousseau is a graduate student at M.I.T. who studies the neurological basis of mental health disorders. "My peers and I work between 40 and 80 hours a week as classroom teachers and laboratory researchers, and in return, our universities provide us with a tuition waiver for school. For M.I.T. students, this waiver keeps us from having to pay a tuition bill of about $50,000 every year -- a staggering amount, but one that is similar to the fees at many other colleges and universities," he writes. "No money from the tuition waivers actually ends up in our pockets, so under Section 117(d)(5), it isn't counted as taxable income." Rousseau continues by saying his tuition waivers will be taxed under the House's tax bill. "This means that M.I.T. graduate students would be responsible for paying taxes on an $80,000 annual salary, when we actually earn $33,000 a year. That's an increase of our tax burden by at least $10,000 annually."
This "tax cut" 10 years out fucks the 99% to help out the 1%. Everything I hear about it is wrong. It's truly amazing how the R's can't avoid putting the booger hook on the bang switch, taking off some tootsies in the process.
Why is removing a tax deduction classified as LEVYING a tax when it is on something leftists want, but cutting taxes on corporations is classified as taking money from the poor?
All taxation is theft. It is the violent, forceful confiscation of the property of another. The only ethical tax rate is 0.
Then move to Somalia you whiny motherfucker.
In the early 1990s this tax on tuition waivers as income was proposed, I believe it never passed back then.
I had just finished my masters' but I remember being incensed at the economics of it. With tuition waivers, I was living on $1200/month as a teaching assistant and getting my degree. Without tuition waivers, I would have been paying tax on $3000/month total "income" which would have taken away about half of my actual cash income - turning my situation from independent and sustainable to one of dependence on my parents to continue to foot the bills for my education. Other majors' TA salaries were much lower, and it would have turned them from earning small pocket money while getting a degree into paying out of pocket to cover the taxes.
Face value of tuition is a farce, so many students are given tuition waivers, scholarships, reduced rates, etc. Taxing it at face value would be like paying sales tax on the sticker price of a car, regardless of what you negotiated it down to; but worse, cars are only marked up 20%, I'd put average tuition markup closer to 60% at many of the "higher priced" institutions.
The House GOP members are simply delivering what their constituents want.
And by "constituents" I of course mean their rich donors.
I stole this Sig
Some day, hopefully soon, we're going to have a Harvey Weinstein moment about these tuition costs and the criminal cabal that is the university employees, administrators, and loan companies. Because someone is spending that $50k income from that student's tuition.
I'm glad the tax exempt status is going away. The only way this college crime syndicate is going to fall is when it hurts everyone everywhere.
Then we'll all have the Weinstein Effect: "Hey that college rap$d me!" "You too, huh? They rap$d me too but I didn't say anything at the time" "#metoo, they fondl$d my tuition" "Well, I didn't get rap$d but the college stood right in front of me and raised tuition by 15% per year. I still have PTSD from that!"
There a lot of bad people in this world and I'm absolutely certain anyone employed, owning, or managing a college nowadays or any business surrounding it is going to hell first. It's unconscionable what humanity has allowed to happen with education costs and the mortgaging of futures.
Youngsters like you have a lot of learning to do. When you graduate high school and move on to college, or a to work life, you'll eventually come to see all the things that this country could not do without a pool of money. The roads you drive on, the basic research that leads to medical and engineering advances, even the Internet, would be impossible without taxation. Taxation is not theft, it's simply expecting citizens to contribute to a collection of beneficial services.
It's unfortunate that your high school curriculum is probably so simplified that you've been duped into believing something so simplistic and naive. The time is now, before you enter college, to accept that your limited life experience has not yet allowed you to comprehend the complexities of the world. It's not a personal insult -- many of us go through the stage where our ability to make (more or less) logical arguments exceeds our legitimate knowledge of the world. But the greatest barrier to your future learning as a young adult is your rigid certainty that you know all there is to know about the world. The sooner you acknowledge your limited experience, the sooner you will begin to understand the complexity around you.
Best of luck in your future schooling.
... and in turn, reduces the number of intelligent, motivated and educated foreign students who will move to the USA.
In turn the workforce will become less educated, productivity will drop and the USA will slide down the wealth tables.
The influence of the USA worldwide will also reduce because there will be fewer students who get an advanced education in the USA and return to their home country, taking with them American values and mind share.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Then be honest. The vast majority of the middle class takes the standard deduction, which doubles under the "R's" tax plan.
The vast majority of the middle class making under $50k yearly per year take the standard deduction, but the majority of middle class families making over $75k yearly itemize their deductions. This plan does help the majority of middle class Americans a little, and helps wealthy Americans a lot. This is all paid for by the upper middle class, middle class citizens in many blue states, and all citizens overall by increasing national debt. It is the bill that wealthy donors have been working for years to get passed under the illusion it will help the economy. In truth it is merely a huge tax break for the wealthy.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Taxing people who don't have money isn't the same as taxing those who have loads of it and don't benefit society to the same extent.
LOL, Property rights! You MORON. If you have a RIGHT to property, you outright own it. If you have a TITLE to property, e.g. a car or real estate, you never own it and are forced to pay taxes on it. If you don't pay the taxes, you lose it or are penalized with more fines or jail time.
Learn the difference, retard!
That's OK. Other countries will pick up the slack that your fellow travelers in Washington are dropping.
America had a good run... a violent revolution against difficult odds, an Industrial Revolution that never really ended, and two world wars that left us better off than everyone else on the planet.
But all empires fall sooner or later, like dead trees in a forest that become food for the ecosystem. Our number is up. We're done. Next...
I charge a million dollars for my service of replying to slashdot posts, but I'm waiting your fee for that today. Congrats, you now owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes to the feds.
Since when is declining to make someone pay for a service the same as giving them income?
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Ignore the small-souled bean counters who are entirely convinced you will never wind up making a contribution to a cure for cancer, or the first workable fusion reactor, or add a small piece of the puzzle to the problems of aging or perhaps limb regeneration.
These are conservatives. They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. As far as they're concerned, you aren't an investment. You're nothing but an up-scale counter clerk, worth not one cent more than the hours you worked yesterday.
Come on up to Canada, or maybe move to the EU. The US is already falling behind in cutting edge research. The so-called "god particle" was discovered at CERN because these bean-counting half wits yanked funding from the planned US particle accelerator that would have relegated CERN's large hadron collider to the dustbin. And China has just built a hyper-sonic wind tunnel that blows the doors off anything in the US.
Even if the current crop of envious, anti-intellectual cretins is swept from power, the damage they have already done will take a decade to fix, maybe longer. If you want to win a Nobel Prize some day, you would do better to come to a country where "research" isn't defined as "can you write software to cut a millisecond off e-trades and make Goldman Sachs even richer".
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I have a bridge to sell you, and some fine land in Florida.
Seriously, they really have conned you, haven't they?
These populists are blowhards who are supported by ultra-wealthy interests, who pander to the worst instincts of low information voters. People who want to impose their own will on others in many aspects of life. People who think that they alone have the framework for a moral life, rejecting any competing ideas.
Just look at the tax plan: promoted by the biggest populist of them all: Donald Trump. It's a huge bung to ultra-wealthy, a minor tax cut for a few middle-class people, and a tax increase for many other middle class people.
Well, there are two problems with that.
1. Even if some of the accusations are fraudulent (and none have been proven to be so), others remain. Moore didn't even deny all the allegations.
2. McConnell is also the enemy. You support the Republicans despite their policies being aimed to impoverish ordinary people and put your faith in people who are even more right-wing, even more determined to impoverish ordinary people.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Well, we all know what really matters is that there will be new tax breaks for people who own private planes. You know...the middle class.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-...
You are welcome on my lawn.
The difference in this case is that they are working at below-market rates to get that waiver, so in some sense it really is part of their income. But the biggest problem with taxing it is determining the fair value of the waiver because tuition is often discounted for other reasons.
I donâ(TM)t think it should be taxed, but there is a sane argument for doing so.
Republicans... doing everything they can to destroy the future of the United States.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
People are trying to argue that all income should be taxed.
Estate Tax is being repealed in this very same GOP plan. How can anyone argue that inheritance isn't income? And the assets in an inheritance (property, stocks, bonds) have their basis (original cost) magically stepped up to present value and thereby dodging the normal Capital Gains tax.
It appears the Republicans favor old money, the idle rich and trust fund babies than they do scientists, doctors, educators, engineers - you know the people that actually make American Great.
The "populists" are the ones who are making sure those middle and working class people can still get a tax write-off for their private planes, and will now be able to bring back "trophies" when they go on their African safaris.
The "populists" are the ones laundering Russian drug money through their real estate deals. The "populists" are the ones trying to get $15,000,000.00 to kidnap and deliver a foreign national to a corrupt Turkish dictator. The "populists" are the ones who have been shown in the Paradise Papers to be involved in deals with Russian oligarchs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Clearly, they're concerned about the well-being of the common American.
Because Moore is a pedophile. He diddled little girls to show what a staunch "populist" his is.
Actually, McConnell immediately started a Senate Ethics Committee investigation into Franken. The same kind that got Bob Packwood tossed out of Congress not long ago.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If they are going to tax the tuition waiver, set graduate tuition at $1 and let the student pay $0.20 or whatever to the IRS.
Universities don't want to do this, of course, because it's a way of siphoning money from research grants into the general fund. Which is kind of hilarious (at least it was to me when I was a grad student) because the university already takes 'overhead' that is meant to cover mundane things infrastructure, grounds, offices, keeping the lights on. And it's not a small take, most overhead is calculated at 50% or so of the grant (that is, if the grant is $100K to do research, the NIH will kick in another $50K to the university, 1/3rd being overhead).
So even after taking overhead, the university then wants to take the grant money and use it to pay itself a tuition waiver.
A few notes before someone actually believes I'm a right wing troll: I think we should be increasing funding on research, I think we should better support grad students. Universities do provide a needed structure for all this, but are woefully inefficient and mismanaged, which in the end means less money for actual research and teaching. To be against this is not to be against the university, it's to be for the university's ultimate mission.
I don't get it, perhaps because I'm British, but this sounds like a scam to me.
"My peers and I work between 40 and 80 hours a week as classroom teachers and laboratory researchers, and in return, our universities provide us with a tuition waiver for school."
In England, that would make you an employee of the university, not a "student". If you are working (picking a mid point) 60 hours a week, that's 12 hours a day (5 day week) or about 8.5 hours a day (7 day week). On the first it is impossible to study anything else if you eat and sleep, and on the second it could be a part time course at best.
Here's what is sounds like. The University charges for "tuition" that they aren't actually getting , and this charge is subsidised by the government, so its effectively a handout to the University of $50k p.a. to each researcher.
The 'populists' are useful idiots. All that is required to win their support is to wave the flag a lot, talk about how great America is and blame every problem upon immigrants and foreigners.
Moore did not win because he was standing up for the people: He won because he isn't ashamed to tell the people that Christians are the best, nonbelievers are all America-hating commie filth, and that homosexuals are plotting to rape their children. It's Alabama, that sort of thing goes down well there.
I'm not the one who's been fooled into thinking that making an education as economically unfeasible as possible is something to gloat about.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Republicans, in their current composition, don't like education, don't like people who aren't millionares, and don't like people to be upwardly mobile. We got it.
So, that's one less avenue to university education. The remaining ones are: (a) be frightfully good and get a full scholarship, (b) have rich parents, (c) join the army and try to qualify for a paid-for education.
Everyone else leave for Canada, the UK, or Europe. Don't worry, we'll make good the shortfall with Indians, Chinese, and Europeans in the software and engineering R&D jobs and PhD. classes.
It's not robbing rich people. Maintaining a civilization costs money, someone has to pay for it. Rich people have benefited the most from it, so why shouldn't they pay more?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
No, America is going to collapse because too many of you think this is an adequate riposte to the OP. Whether the result of ideology, stupidity or some toxic mix, this impoverished thinking is what will do for you.
For decades the skills and liars in government, media, and banking have perpetuated the myth that everyone should go to college. Tens of millions of Americans were promised that their degree would lead to a good job.
It was all a pack of lies (to quote the great Phil Collins). College is largely a scam. It serves mostly as an indoctrination center to keep people have thinking critically, and while wasting four years and gobs of money, most graduates walk away with no useful skills.
"largely a scam".... Bogus generalization and demonstrably false.
As a developer, I have worked with many people who went to college, many who did not. Those who attended a good program of study were consistently better prepared for the work. More disciplined, better informed, more confident, better prepared to keep up with the changes to the intellectual environment required to make proper contribution to our products. That has been true in every organization I have worked in from Cable TV through avionics, logistics automation, communication, industrial data acquisition and control. Co-workers with the discipline to get a proper grounding in the theory consistently hit the ground running and are more productive, more flexible, and arrive with a better toolkit for delivering results.
There have been exceptional workers who are just plain brilliant and have learned on the job, and there have been those who managed to get through the course of study while avoiding the getting education part of it, but those are exceptions not the general rule.
On the original subject: Taxing people who managed to get into and be successful in advanced grad programs for the tuition that they would be paying if not for doing the work of teaching or research is a perfect example of short term thinking. It shows a complete failure to understand where improvements in productivity that produce true economic growth come from.
Normally I'd think that neither leftists nor rightists want to discourage people from pursuing graduate degrees. Now I'm not so sure. If only the rich can afford to go to school, then only the rich will profit from the rewards of education. Is this what Rs want?
It doesn't seem to make sense -- one would think that uneducated people cost the system more money than they return. But the more I look at our education system, the more I think that it is indeed the case that the rich want to keep the poor and middle class from getting an education.
This tax bill includes a removal of the ability of teachers to deduct a few hundred bucks spent on school supplies for their work. Talk about going out of your way to make things hard for little gain. Seems crazy to suffer the political penalty for doing this unless they really believe that publicly available education should work poorly.
Definitely not. Trump is, first and foremost, an authoritarian, the exact opposite of a classical liberal. Classical liberals like JS Mill, John Locke, and Thomas Paine provided the inspiration for the American experiment in democracy.
Authoritarians like Hitler, Stalin, and Trump revile free speech, education, science, and empiricism. Divine authority cannot tolerate questioning. It requires unassailable certitude and ignorant compliance from the masses. So we can expect this new wave of Trumpism to make education, especially at advanced levels, a primary target.
After the war on drugs and the war on terror comes the war on science. Congratulations.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /