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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."
Graduate students are generally lazy and entitled. Grad student offices are generally places where very little work actually gets done. The grad students are too busy talking among themselves or watching Youtube videos. If they're going to be lazy and take advantage of the system, they ought to pay taxes on the benefits they receive.
Those next generation "scientists" are invaders, shitty smelly hindu-chimps who came to infest america and take middle class jobs.
Do you want a shitty smelly hindu-chimp to take your land?
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It's not a complete loss. You can still research new ways to flip hamburgers at McDonalds. They called this "trickle down economics" in the 80s. You've just been trickled on.
You people fell for the Trump/Clinton charade. Don't start crying about it now.
Without these waivers, you would have to work like the rest of us. Instead, you get free education.
Fuck you, whiny children. Get a job.
Now, the universities will have to raise the pay, and they can't deduct the waived tuition on their taxes, which I'm sure they've been doing. Thieves.
Good, the universities' system of indentured servitude needs to be called out. Either the tuition is part of their pay, in which case it needs to be handed over to the student, or it's not, in which case, they're working for less than minimum wage and need to be paid appropriately. This shit was unethical when coal companies did it in the Appalachians, it's just as wrong now when the ivory tower does it.
It's doesn't levy a tax. It stops pretending that when a large business (a university) gives you something valuable that other people have to pay for, that it isn't compensation.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
Hmm if only I got $47000 tax free, then I could say I only earn $33000 a year as well.
I have see nothing wrong with this. If you canâ(TM)t afford college, get a job.
And this becomes a non-issue.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
So anyone who doesn't work for the university but goes there has to earn $80,000 a year and pay taxes on it. Really, there should just be a tax deduction for paying tuition instead. I thought there was already, but I could be wrong, so they still shouldn't need to pay taxes on that. Depends how they write that.
A tuition waiver has a value. You are trading work for a reduction in your tuition costs. The summary says these students may be receiving 80K in tuition waivers in addition to 33K in compensation. If those same students were working at a job that paid them $113,000 per year, everyone would be saying they need to "pay their fare share".
That said, I think that tuition should probably be tax deductible - which would make the tax on tuition waivers a moot point.
If they taxed the scholarships of football player, that would get a lot of people's attention.
Just FYI, any time you are given something of value, it is income. Someone lets you live in their house for free? Income. Someone writes off a debt instead of collecting it? Income. Someone waives a fee they normally charge? Income. A friend gives you an interest-free loan, or even just at below-market interest rates? The IRS has tables to calculate how much income you are required to report. I'm kinda astonished that these tuition waivers weren't always taxed, since everything else is.
There is an exemption for gifts, up to $13,000 per person per person per year. (not a typo) They must be bona fide gifts with no strings or conditions.
See that "Preview" button?
So, these people should get free handouts and not pay taxes on the money they get while the rest of the country has to pay taxes on every dam cent given to them as a gift? And you think that leveling the field so that it is equal and 'fair' isn't right?
Must be millenial liberal as there is intelligence shown.
It's provided for in tax changes all the time. People have made multi-year plans based on assumed income and expenses, and even if a change is justifiable, abruptly making the change sinks the whole thing.
If someone's two years into a graduate degree and has to abandon it because of an unexpected $10,000 cost, that's two years and 2x$88,000 down the drain. Not good policy.
When you're in graduate school for a doctorate it lasts 4 years plus. Typically, you're only taking actual classes for the first 1.5 to 3 years. After that, it's more like an apprenticeship than school. You're signed up for "classes" that don't have lectures, tests, writing assignments, or etc. It's a way to give you academic credit, on paper, for the process of conducting research that the university makes money on. That, and a way to claim people who are acting in every way as apprentice employees are students.
So: an institution pays itself money to cover the privilege or working for it, and you expect people to pay taxes on that? And we're supposed to trust the institution's assessment of what it provides is worth, considering that almost nobody pays for it out of pocket? You realize that the entire reason for nominal tuition being as high as it is is because it allows the schools to enact Price Discrimination, so they can get more money from students who they assess to have more, right?
What Mr. Rousseau is speaking of is called bartering.
Bartering is a Taxable transaction.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Or, the university that's using tens of hours of their time every month as staff paid for with free tuition could ... start compensating them for that time with actual money, or lower tuition to a rational level for everybody and stop playing games by charging huge prices for some, and giving it away to others. A change they could make instantly, at any time.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
must pay tuition to work = Minimum wage violation.
What about that angel or taxing at the employee rate tuition rate.
...race theorists, gender identitfiers, Beyoncé experts, diversity officers, marxist theorists, political "scientists", and other telephone sanitizers.
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
Then be honest. The vast majority of the middle class takes the standard deduction, which doubles under the "R's" tax plan.
This tax is a great idea, because there are zero jobs for college graduates with advanced degrees. Students need to understand that their return on investment will be negative, they will be ruining their career prospects by attending grad school, and a tax will help to disincentivize self destructive behavior.
Do not ever be a graduate student unless you want to be unemployable for the rest of your life.
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.
student athletes and unforeseen consequences with this.
I can see Minimum wage violations
laws about Company scrip (must live on site and must take classes) you get them for free but are locked in and taxed at the full retail rate.
Being forced to pay for stuff (IRS sees as income) you can't really make full use of (you must miss class for teams games / other needs)
disability employment discrimination / disability employment accommodations issues (under IRS rules student athletes seen as employees getting an income)
workers comp issues (under IRS rules student athletes can be seen as employees getting an income)
they are seen as employees by the IRS and they use that to make unionize pass the northwestern case was close but what the IRS says may push it over the edge
We are all special little snowflakes that want to pay the least amount of taxes possible but want to have a massive Federal Government that does stuff for you. Sorry reality doesn't work that way. Start demanding that your Government shrink -- Military and Social. At some point, someone is going to need to hit the minus sign.
I notice that someone downvoted this comment as trolling.
Really? Wanting to abolish the income tax is trolling?
It is fascinating how many people are the willing accomplices in their own financial slavery.
This is what happens you elect billionaire assholes as president, who have no agenda and loyalty but to their other billionaire asshole friends.
The entirety of this tax bill is cutting corporate taxes, cutting taxes on the wealthy, and essentially giving short term relied or tax hikes to the people with less money under the bullshit excuse that cutting corporate taxes and tax on the wealthy this will somehow benefit everyone else. There is NO EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE trickle down economics has any benefit for anybody except the wealthy.
All you dumb fucking morons who voted for this ass clown thinking you'd see some benefit? Boy are you stupid fuckers in for a surprise. They're going to raise your taxes, cut your healthcare, and pretend like somehow this is intended to improve your lives.
The entire system of economics the Republicans adhere to is a complete lie and a scam. And anybody who tells you it works and improves lives is either an outright bullshit artist, or too fucking stupid to have even a basic grasp of economics. The so called Austrian School of economics is basically greedy assholes trying to put some mystery math of how looking out for their own interests is somehow supposed to benefit society as a whole. It's a complete fucking lie.
Face it America, you've elected a crooked con man, who is appointing billionaire assholes to oversee your state institutions, when all they have in mind is tearing those apart so they can profit from it.
America is a fucking joke. The problem is you somehow expect the rest of the world to fund your avarice and bullshit. Build your wall, and then do us the courtesy of dying en masse, killing one another, and hopefully taking out some of these rich assholes while you do it.
You deserve this kind of tax plan. I'm afraid there is no sympathy for what America does to itself ... we simply don't care if America lives or dies.
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.
But the laws of economics cannot be thwarted by any propaganda; eventually, the chickens come home to roost. The higher education debt bubble will implode, many universities will go bankrupt, entitled professors will be competing to sweep floors, and the really smart people will have gotten away from the academy and learned how to make money some other way. Be one of the latter people.
https://jamesaltucher.com/2011/01/8-alternatives-to-college/
Many years ago I sat through numerous college courses that taught that taxes were perfectly acceptable. This wasn't just in one course. This was in numerous courses, ranging from economics to political science to environmentalism. There were economics, political science and environmental science graduate students working as teaching assistants who would tell us during tutorials that taxes are a great way to control behavior, to generate funding for government programs, and to protect the environment. Anyone who dared question this narrative was ridiculed and looked down upon.
So in some ways it's kind of surprising that they'd now be so against taxes. They were just perfectly fine with taxes when it was corporations or other individuals that were being taxed. These graduate students even encouraged such taxation! But now that they're the victims, suddenly the taxes they were promoting have become unacceptable!
On one hand I would hope that this is a huge wake-up call to these graduate students. But knowing how academics operate, I fully expect them to take the hypocritical stance of fully supporting taxation when they aren't the ones paying, but then complaining without end when they're the ones who are subjected to taxation.
70% of my wealth is stolen from me by the government. If we simply stopped redistributing wealth and let each person purchase the services they desired we'd all be better off. I don't need an education, but I do need security services. I don't need education services for children I don't yet have, but I'll be more than happy to pay my own way for said services should and when I'm ready to have kids. Government needs to be disbanded. We've been made dependent on government handouts explicitly because government has stolen the majority of everyones wealth. People don't understand all the ways the government steals from one another because they hide ones actual income and through hidden taxes and fees. From car registration fees to sales/VAT taxes which may not even be publicly advertised to a buyer. From increased rents from property taxes to property taxes. Governments tax employers 15% on top of what they show you on your pay stub to hide just how much is actually being stolen from you. Taxing corporations is just deceptive because those taxes just get passed onto customers which ultimately reduces ones actual wealth!
I'm against the use of my wealth to fund overseas wars. If I had the choice of contracting my own security services I'd definitely not be getting one that wastes resources on overseas wars. I am already very generous with what wealth I've got and would have more of it if taxes were eliminated to fund worthwhile projects like feeding, housing, and educational services for the homeless and others down on there luck.
but you are not billed full price company car by the IRS and that cost pulls you under min wage.
Under this you are forced to buy something to do your job your cost $0 income by the IRS $$$$$ and that income is more then your pay.
Let's say Mcdonalds give workers free high cost uniforms to there works that they must use and they do get to use them out side of work so the IRS sees them as income. The uniforms have a list price of $8K-$12K /year = a big tax bill for some makeing around $15K a year pre tax.
and open a big can of worms by makeing them W2 employees.
If an employer gives an employee $20,000 in salary as actual money, the employee has to declare that as income and pay applicable tax on that. If the employer gives the employee a car worth $20,000 the employee has to declare that as income and pay the same tax on it. If the employer (the university in this case) gives the employee x amount of free tuition that they would otherwise have to pay for, why shouldn't that be taxed?
This will make TU more attractive. I wonder what the TU mascot is. Probably a pussycat.
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.
Thereâ(TM)s nothing wrong with this.
""No money from the tuition waivers actually ends up in our pockets" (so it shouldn't be taxed).
Pretty sure if you get something of commercial value, it should be taxed.
If I give you a trip to Tahiti, that's not something in your POCKET, but most certainly it's taxable, particularly if it's compensatory.
Sounds like people are sad that loopholes are being closed.
-Styopa
I guess this is because they are actually asked to perform work in return. They work and receive a benefit, though in a near barter fashion. But, there are already other forms of income that don't involve work that get taxed - such as winning the lottery. It seems like a very minor step to go from this to taxing scholarships and then public education support in general. Those going to state universities generally pay a lot less than the private ones. I can really see this administration say that it isn't fair that the gift of public education isn't taxed and that that puts public institutions in unfair competition with the private ones.
...I'm a Canadian, and I went to graduate school in Canada in the late 1990s.
My scholarship was taxable income.
My fellowship was taxable income.
My work as a teaching assistant was taxable income.
My tuition was tax-deductible.
And there were additional deductions for being a full-time university student.
On a net basis after tax, I lived a comfortable student lifestyle. Since then, scholarships & fellowships became tax-free, but the full-time student deductions were eliminated.
I'm amazed that tuition isn't deductible in the USA.
forces you live in their house for free to work there is more like what is going on and the list cost of that free room is just as much or more then your pay rate.
The list cost needs to come down to be in line with the pay or it's like the old company store days.
need no stinkin' education!!! Make America Great Again!!!
I went through my graduate studies in the 1970's by working multiple jobs
And I am not the only one doing so
What are they complaining about?
Just because you get into graduate school does not mean you get all the perks you want
Work at it, snowflakes, and stop complaining !!
This might be a strained analogy but here goes. Instead of charging $50,000 and giving a $50,000 waiver for which they will be taxed, why not charge a tuition of $1 and give a $1 waiver. They can pay the extra 25 cent tax on the dollar and call it a day. What is the benefit to the school of charging $50K if they are going to waive it?
Maybe the homegrown ones wouldn't be flipping burgers for a living if we didn't. But hey, it's more fun to look down on them because you're angry they went to grad school than it is to address the problem. Nothing like getting the working class to fight among themselves to keep those profits maximized.
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What this really shows is that the Republicans and their wealthy donors don't give a shit about the USA.
This is changing.
There's a new group loosely called "populists", which are being elected under the guise of Republicans at the moment. These are the ones who put the welfare of the citizens ahead of everything else.
Looking at the Alabama special election is really interesting right now. In the primaries, Judge Roy Moore was a populist and avid Trump fan who went against the establishment favorite Luthor Strange. Strange outspent Moore by a wide margin... and lost. Now we see the senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, would rather see a democrat win than have Moore elected(*).
That is a truly amazing situation to see from a Republican party, one of those "take a moment and let it sink in" bits of information.
McConnell has been sitting on roughly 400 bills in the Senate, refusing to bring them to a vote, so he's one of the main problems we've been seeing in government. He's losing control and political power, and there's been calls for him to step down.
If Moore wins the election (About 3 weeks) it might signal a tidal wave of populist candidates running on the Republican ticket - against any and all attempts to prevent it.
There's also the double standard thing. McConnell demanded that Moore leave the election, and told Moore that even if he won he would be immediately ousted from the Senate. All based on accusations, many which have been shown to be fraudulent. Then Al Franken was accused with photographic evidence and... crickets from McConnell.
We'll see how it goes, but either way the voters seem to have had enough of establishment bullshit, and are starting to clean house.
Expect a lot of sturm and drang as the corruption is slowly found and ejected.
(*) It boils down to whether an *accusation* of impropriety is enough to knock a candidate out of an election. You can easily see how this might be abused, and indeed in Moore's case it certainly seems like the accusations are specious.
1. Since it actually increases yearly taxes on almost all graduate student, usually at or near zero, the tax plan is not universal tax reduction or a rate cut.
2. The tuition waiver at most should only apply to credited lecture or student instruction hours, not supervised lab and research hours
3. The tuition waiver should be assessed at value or cost basis, not nominal, hyperinflated tuition values, even if super rich kids do pay that muchundiscounted. e.g. instead of Ivy rates over $1000 per credit hour, some national rate or actual labor cost basis should apply, say capped at $100-$200 per hour.
Otherwise increased taxation is greatly adding insult to injury on this already f*ked up education system's exploitation of parents and students that actually work.
It there still a separate tax-free treatment of scholarships (gifts)?
Here tuition is tax deductible, scholarships and grants are tax exempt and most if not all of your TA pay counts as a scholarship.
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.
ZOMG. Plus infinity Insightful.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Government: such a good idea, you have to be forced at gunpoint to pay for it!
Do you really think there would be no roads, security, or medical care if it were not for government? Do you realize that is a myth invented by ancient kings and modernized by Thomas Hobbes?
If you want better stuff at lower prices, PRIVATIZE:
https://mises.org/library/case-privatization-%E2%80%94-everything-0
A lot of the university "goods" are intangibles at fake, overhyped suggested retail prices, instead of the actual, highly discounted prices that most students pay after "scholarships" or other aid. Some sort of national cap price should apply. Or simply wait for the market to re-arrange the student choices of preferred "good" schools' tuition policies.
Most universities are greatly overpriced and featherbedded, IMHO.
I cannot believe the audacity of these fools. To set one of the greatest nations back so far over the next several decades, how absolutely deplorable. The rest of the world will outpace us in creativity if we neglect to educate our populous. We will become wage slaves to Chinese hedge funds and Arabian gas wells. How is this a delightful future? Why are all these chumps smiling and happy, driving the Arrow of Freedom into the ground? They better pray Righteousness sleeps long, because when she wakes up there is gonna be hell to pay.
Translation: I think robbing rich people is just fine because in my faux sense of moral superiority, it is totally okay to hurt people and take their stuff if it is for something I think is worthwhile.
To the extent that tuition waivers are granted in exchange for work by the recipient, they should be considered taxable income. In current practice, the waivers are little more than a tax dodge.
If nothing changes except the tax status of waivers, then yes, grad students will get screwed. But the change (if it happens) will not occur in a vacuum.
"Full price" tuition is like sticker price on a car or the asking price on a house. Hardly anyone pays full price. Every year, tuition rises by some ridiculous amount, with a corresponding increase in the average amount of "financial aid" for each student. When someone like George W. Bush applies to Yale or Harvard with more money than brains, they find room for him somehow -- at full price of course.
If universities had to charge the same price to every student in an identical program, and students had to think twice before signing up for vast amounts of debt, the free market would balance at some point lower than current prices.
Thanks largely to government "help", far too much money has been pumped into higher education. University spending (public and private) continues to grow in the absence of any restraint. Students can always borrow more money next year because the government will borrow more money to lend. As a result, tuition rises faster than inflation every year, but the quality of the finished product is pretty much the same.
We have a similar problem with health care. For many years, employees sought better and better health care insurance, because employers paid most of the cost and employees received the benefit tax-free. As taxes and health care costs both grew without restraint, the value of employer-provided health care increased as well, fueling a vicious cycle. Every year, the cost of health care increases far beyond the rate of inflation because insured people are effectively discouraged (if not blocked altogether) from price shopping for their insurance or health care services.
Before Congressional Democrats butchered it, early drafts of the Affordable Care Act tried to encourage more competition for both insurance and health care services. By the time the law was finalized, lobbyists "fixed" it, preserving the sacred status of health insurers, health care providers, and big pharma. To this day, vast amounts of government "help" accomplish little more than inflating the health care bubble and taking care of lobbyists.
In some ways, taxing tuition waivers and student loan interest can be considered the Obamacare of higher education. If the tax dodges go away and loan interest is taxed as well, maybe it's time for students to set a limit on the amount they are willing to pay for tuition. Rest assured, universities will not allow their seats to remain empty. If supply and demand forces them to lower their operating cost to survive in a price sensitive environment, so be it.
Students should be outraged at the prospect of paying high tuition, borrowing money at high interest rates, and paying high taxes on top of it all. I understand their anger. But asking government to keep inflating the bubble is a big mistake and not sustainable. Such "help" will only make things worse.
I've worked out a deal with Tesla, wherein I will work in the Tesla plant assembling cars for 9 months, in exchange for a brand new, $100K Tesla automobile... Should I pay taxes on that $100K Tesla?
That's exactly what universities are doing with graduate students, but somehow their graduate school tuition is tax-exempt.
Are the two really that different?
The issue isn't the value of the waived tuition, it's the low compensation the schools pay the graduate students.
Ken
Government and their subsidies (read: redistribution of money they robbed from someone else) is what has caused tuition to skyrocket.
https://fee.org/articles/the-student-debt-crisis-is-the-predictable-consequence-of-subsidies/
It is simply a matter of economics.
If rich people are so great, why can't I download a pizza for free? How come some Harvard educated supergenius hasn't invented a blockchain to generate free food? Instead we have Facebook. Zuck that! I can't eat a Facebook.
The Good Old Boys don't like people with too much schooling. That leads to belief in climate change, a multi-billion year age of the universe, and people who make decisions based on facts.
It's a lot cheaper for those in charge to bring in university graduates than to educate them here. Isn't this tax bill a disincentive?
Inheritance is income... it now won't be taxed. The heirs receive a huge windfall AND the assets in Estates have their base stepped up - completely dodging capital gains tax. But lowly Grad Student will be taxed on something they never see and pay taxes in the realm of 30% on a poverty level income.
If this doesn't piss you off you are not paying attention.
America does not need to produce graduate students. The companies can just hire H-1B and L-1 workers. They will work cheaper also.
How can an American student financially compete with tech workers that pay $8000 for a graduate degree.While a US graduate has $80000 is student loan?
On bad rugs like Donaldâ(TM)s. Only queers and ass clowns voted for The Donald.
Reminds me of an Edward Abbey quote: The new conservatives are neither new nor conservative - but as old as Babylon and Evil as Hell.
Perhaps the universities, which are in many cases hoarding billions of dollars of tax-free endowment money, should actually PAY the grad students for research work that they're doing? Doesn't that sort of sound like what the endowments are intended for? Or perhaps the graduates should leave the university cloister and go experience the real world in some manner other than spring break. Take a gap year between graduation and starting an advanced degree, so that you don't have 25 year old PhDs who have ZERO real world experience.
On a related note, I would propose requiring all candidates for political office to have as many years working in the private sector as they have in government. Bernie Sanders, for example, has almost no actual work experience other than being on the government teat.
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.
This sounds like these are gimmick programs anyways, $50,000 for a education is a waste of time to begin with. Guarentee those costs won't exist if they have no students.
US tax code is about 72,000 pages... its complication upon complication. And not helping the situation is that "income" is a complex concept that is very hard to describe. Its similar to profits in that it is implied to be a remainder. Some gain minus some loss... leaving an income. And what counts for gain or loss is arbitrary.
Making it worse, what is and is not a gain or loss changes depending on context, how much money you're making... and a whole series of other issues that have given rise to all kinds of professionals that do little more than navigate the tax and regulation code.
It won't be simplified because the only compromise we have at this point is to make it so complicated that smart people can get what they want and dumb people get screwed.
That is the current compromise.
A better one in my opinion would be to simplify the code and offer a tax rate we can all generally agree is reasonable.
Sadly what happens when we simplify is that people start rubbing their hands together to jack taxes up now that the system is too simple to evade. Thus loopholes spring into form immediately... and we're back to complexity. Leaving the tax happy people nailing stupid people and the smart people skipping out on the whole thing.
There is no better solution. Literally what we're doing now is as good as its going to get. The tax happy people won't stop being silly... so make it complicated and at least the smart people can evade it.
Its sad... but all other attempts at compromise have failed.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
There are PLENTY of situations in the tax code where people get non-cash benefits and have to report the value of those benefits and get taxed on those values even though they never see the cash. Adults are not supposed to be suprised by this. The GOP are trying to vastly simplify the tax code eliminating all sorts of deductions that are only available to special little groups, in order to allow most people to be treated identically and file simple forms without needing tax accountants and lawyers. In trade-off, the code will have larger personal deductions EVERYBODY gets and many fewer carve-outs that allow elitists to pretend they'd "happily pay more" while they actually dodge taxes.
My experience with grad students is that they tend to be more left-wing politically than many other groups - so they tend to be the sort who are more for big government and redistributive tax and spending policies. Time to live with the policies they end to embrace.
Oh, and the problem might be a tad worse because so many of them loved it when Obama took over the student loans and made it easier for a kid to go so deeply into debt in the first place, which the universities noticed and (predictably) jacked their tuitions in response to all that easy cash in the hands of gullible students who were too young to adequately assess the actual value of the degrees they sought and the huge debt burdens they were so eager to assume. Student debt is WAY up thanks to the tuitions skyrocketing in response to all that easy loan cash in the hands of all those kids who were too inexperienced in life to wisely see the danger. Obama's academia buddies LOVED him for this windfall and the students cheered as they got to attend all those colleges with money they'd never felt the pain of earning - and NOW they are only starting to appreciate that the "free" money was not, and never could have been, actually free.
Wise people do not go so deeply into debt getting a degree that will not in turn boost their incomes proportionally (or better). Any college degree is just an asset like a car or a house into which you invest time and (often borrowed) money. If the degree you pursue won't pay off then you really ought to consider another degree, or a school with a cheaper degree, etc just as you would modify any other purchase plans.
Educated people aren't in their favor come election time.
It's a tax increase that Republican voters can get behind because they can really stick it to "liberal elites" and make them "pay their fair share." If this part of the tax bill becomes law, it potentially cripples advanced education in the US, but those ivory tower eggheads should just go get an honest man's job, anyway.
It's particularly petty and cruel. And the majority of the cruelty is not toward grad students, it's toward the Republican voters. The politicians are trying to take advantage of the worst aspects of their constituents' natures to get them to support damaging the futures of young people and the entire education system. Because poor people should be jealous of the success of others who are moderately less poor, rather than the rich people who are screwing us all.
It's well established that if an employer gives you something, cash or cars or houses or artwork or stock, in exchange for your labor it's generally taxable income.
Yes, there are some twisted loopholes (such as health insurance premiums being paid by the employer generally not being taxable to the employee and some arbitrary level of life insurance premiums not being taxable to the employee), but those are loopholes that should be eliminated just as this tuition waiver loophole should be eliminated.
While it would be nice to eliminate all loopholes at once, that's politically infeasible, so eliminating them one-by-one is probably the best we can do. Just as loopholes creep in one-by--one, they need to be eliminated one-by-one.
Perhaps eliminating this loophole will also help reduce the fantasy level of "tuition" that has arisen in American higher education (perhaps second only to the fantasy levels of "chargemaster" rates in the healthcare industry). If so, this will save billions of dollars a year and make educational institutions actually consider market economics in their pricing decisions.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
MIT's current endowment is $14.8 billion. They can afford it.
http://news.mit.edu/2017/endow...
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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.
The easy fix for this is for the universities to stop charging tuition to people who are actually employees.
For the universities, the tuition does not go to cover research costs, overhead, or teaching costs, it's just an extra fee they charge to launder a bit of money from research to the general fund.
If you do the math on this, a company is allowed to charge a 7% fee on grants, while universities charge tuition instead. $150k grant/contract covers a project employing one fully burdened researcher (grad student or non-PhD industry scientist). On that grant, the company would take $10,500 of profit and the university takes $50,000. If the scientist employed happens to be on a visa, the difference is even more extreme ... because... tradition? I've never tried to claim extra legal costs for employing international scientists on my industry grant proposals, maybe I'm missing out.
Just to be super clear what a rip-off this is for grad researchers, that difference in fee vs tuition is just about the difference in salaries for those two positions. This is one of those rare cases where extra money in the corporate budget goes to the employee.
In any case, if you're a grad student facing this new tax, ask your university regents or trustees why they're charging you tuition at all. You can skip your PI, they're already on board with getting rid of tuition.
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.
This comment I was just thinking about while talking with my sister. ... OK a few times a year.
I am thinKing about a two condo unit. I would use one.
Now I have to think of the 'rules' for the other one.
No pets; clean up costs. I like dogs, still many people can't, or won't deal with their pets.
Loud parties
Two adults; two children. Max. Living in the unit.
Lots more to keep the would be property in order.
When you start down the road as owner you have to impose restriction. I feel already like a little dictator and I haven't bought the property yet. And I am classified as a liberal.
In any case the republicans never clean up the tax base as their supports, the money that gets them elected don't want that. Why the hell any American votes for them I don't understand. It always works against you. Now it is college students. Still the hidden money economy at colleges is distasteful. Pay for the 80 hour work week. I am a professional and have to fill out worksheets; something they too will have to figure out how to do. Pay for the benefits, pay the taxes any non-grad student employer would pay for. Do colleges really need this break? The pay scale will change. The college says '50K' scholarship. They write that off their taxes. The republicans would transfer that cost to students, at a higher rate to! To keep the students the college will either pay a salary or give a bigger grant. They have no long term choice but to keep pulling in the brightest as they want to keep bringing in the brightest. ... some time you settle for what you can get for the next few years.
Hidden economies, many are 'illegal' like drug trade. Get the cash out in the public. Also the idea the next professor of any sort works for 50K, for eighty hours, sort of nineteen dollars a day then has to take loans out for room and board and keep their sanity. Not good. Likely the college is the lender too. They are making money at both ends of the game. I don't like the republican solution. I didn't like Obamacare, it didn't get us national healthcare, but
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.
This would be a disaster for U.S. STEM Ph.D. education.
No, it already is. Maybe this will flush these students out of the programs and universities will start having to actually fucking PAY their """students""" for the 90+ hour workweeks, under shitty advisory, that they're expected to work. STEM Phd education in this country isn't education...it's taking our best and brightest, and hazing them into depression and suicide with next to zero compensation.
That is exactly what America needs. We need to drive out or discourage anyone capable of creating progress in society. That explains why the House and Senate are the way they are. Those guys get big bucks in exchange for either doing nothing at all or doing exactly what America does not need. Maybe if we are really lucky everyone involved in advanced science or technology will go work for Russia or Turkey or Saudi Arabia. That way they will have all the tools required to put America out of our misery. So what chunk of this pie goes to trump?
Nowhere it is written that thou shalt research. We all know that the earth is around 6000 years old. A few also know that the earth is flat.
Welcome back to the dark ages!
It is NOT income.
waiver: the act of intentionally relinquishing or abandoning a known right, claim, or privilege
income: a gain or recurrent benefit usually measured in money that derives from capital or labor
Not having to pay some immaterial thing that should not even exist at first is not income.
The tuition is an expense necessary for the execution of the jobs. Are you paying taxes on the tools for you job? If your company provide you the tools (let's think of a Backhoe loader, for example), have you to pay taxes on it? Are you paying taxes on the training your employer provide you?
Your tax dollars help to support common resources, such as police and firefighters. Tax money helps to ensure the roads you travel on are safe and well-maintained. Taxes fund public libraries and parks.
* Sadly with the rich changing governmental rules, getting tax support for their pet businesses projects, donations to political campaigns with pay-to-play arrangements with PACs, and support for gerrymandering, and with examples of failing common resources (roads crumbling and bridges collapsing)... it is becoming more like taxation without representation for most Americans.
But is it? Like other comments here, the rest of us have the living daylights taxed out of EVERYTHING we do, every penny we make. Why shouldn't they? After all, they don't ALL become Nobel Prize winning scientists who cure cancer or discover the secrets of the Universe. That is the fairness and logic of it. However, I don't believe it should be done. We MUST have a steady stream of scientists to fuel our obsessive need to know EVERYTHING and to know it NOW. And the effect of this is that we will destroy the few Americans who manage to get PhDs relative to the rest of the world, causing the importation of more and more foreign scientist H1B workers. I'm of two minds on this. It may just be an example of self destructive fairness. Or tax greed.
E Proelio Veritas.
I think the tax change is terrible but I also think that the "imputed value" of the tuition isn't really 50k. It's well known that this is the "sticker price" of the tuition and nobody (except foreign students, perhaps) pays that price. I suspect that the *true* value of the tuition is more like 10-20k - that is, this is what the average student actually pays, after waivers, scholarships, and discounts.
Can schools restructure tuition so it's zero for students they now waive it for?
Then, instead of waiving tuition, they don't charge some students. Now, no waiver to tax.
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.
"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.
Yet, at the end of a few years they end up with something others have spent a quarter-million dollars to buy, a graduate degree from MIT, which has value (otherwise why would graduate students take on the work?).
Ken
Actually, now that employee discounts are considered a taxable benefit here
First they are not - it was proposed to tax employee discounts and then shot down. Secondly, even if that were the case it would have no effect. Grants and scholarships are specifically tax exempt and there is absolutely no tuition remission: we pay our TAs (which usually counts as a scholarship) and they pay the tuition out of their salary. So there is no discount to tax.
And then go bankrupt themselves. Congratulations! You've demonstrated why your thinking skills means that debates about university are, for you, academic.
health insurance is only part of the issue we had pre existing conditions and sick people being dropped
Because few students pay the sticker price anyway, I suspect that instead of a $50k sticker prices and $50k waivers, we'll see $1k sticker prices and $1k waivers. What's to stop graduate students from paying cash? I don't know, the schools will think of something. (E,g, grading papers is part of your education. Also, wax on, wax off.)
-Dave
work 40 hours a week doing research for a 30k stipend
work another 40 hours a week to earn a 44k tuition waiver.
spend the tuition waiver to get 40 hours a week of tuition.
I don't believe anyone who says they can concentrate and do intellectual work for 120 hours a week.
feels more like the university just writes down 44k as tax deductable for themselves without actually providing anything worth 44k of value.
It's funny how conservatives always talk about taxes as a disincentive except when it comes to education and labor. "We can't tax investing in the future because that discourages investment ... blah blah." You never hear them connect those dots with labor and education. The day I hear an establishment conservative say, "We can't tax wages because that discourages working," or, "We can't tax tuition, student loan interest, etc., because that discourages education," I'll eat both fucking shoes.
They tout tax cuts as a way to get business going again ... to get businesses to "invest in America." How come they never tout dramatic cuts in taxes on wages to incentivize people getting off of public assistance and into working? Oh no, you can't incentivize human beings. You have to punish them. If a business is on the public's teat, though, we have to throw more money their way to get them off.
... there's no way to know which miscreant injected this atrocity into the tax plan.
Solution: Dump all the House Republicans. All. Of. Them.
If you're prevented from paying your own way, then you can get a graduate degree if and only if youre parents are already well-to do, and can pay an inflated tuition and support you as well.
This mat be an intentional change: in Ontario a former permier got his degrees using provincial grants and loans, and when elected, promptly cut them so other people's children couldn't compete with his.
davecb@spamcop.net
This is likely yet another clickbait tempest in a teapot. Universities are probably benefiting off the tuition waver system and the government wants to remove that benefit. So they're taking this approach away. Universities will use another approach to make sure their graduate students continue to do their thing.
Along with my tuition waiver as a grad student (at the Great Rival of MIT) I also enjoyed student housing for a rather symbolic amount, obviously an emolument that should also have been taxed. WTF get rid of us damn freeloaders.
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.
Two sides see it differently. Why should someone's personal benefit come without taxes?
The House tax bill also sets the capital gains tax rate on inherited property to 0%. No taxes ever for the wealthiest families. Not double taxation. Not single taxation. Zero taxation. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1...
Do you want ScentCone to doggedly stick to their beliefs about what needs to be done while ignoring any of the merits about what you might say in the future?
Because this is how you get ScentCone to doggedly stick to their beliefs about what needs to be done while ignoring any of the merits about what you might say in the future.
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.
How can anyone argue that inheritance isn't income?
In most cases, the person who died already paid income tax on the principal, and possibly the interest. Therefore inheritance tax amounts to double taxation. However, most estates are not large enough be taxed ($10 million at the federal level).
In other cases, Steve Jobs for example, his income was deferred into Apple stock that he borrowed against. Since he famously had $1 of income, no tax would be assessed under these circumstances. When Jobs died, the stock vested, leaving his family rich without the messy burden of tax. In these cases, inheritance tax makes perfectly good sense.
The bottom line is that inheritance tax does not apply to the poor, and like most laws does not apply to the uber-wealthy. So why should the remaining honest business owners and professionals stuck in the middle pay it?
It is all stupid. Stupid is as stupid does.
The argument is that taxation hurts the rich far less than the poor. Someone with a 100million dollars is not going to miss a few hundred thousand. Someone making 30 thousand will most definitely miss hundreds of dollars.
Keep in mind that most multimillionaires also don't pay the normal tax rate. They make most of their money on investments which are taxed at 15% so they pay a smaller percentage outright.
The reality is that no one wants to raise taxes on anybody. When you need people to lift something heavy you don't select the weakest people you can find when you have strength available. Fixing our infrastructure is going to be a heavy lift.
Instead of calling it a tuition waiver call it a scholarship. Let the professor who is getting the TA award it on a semester or quarterly basis. Pay the tA the stipend as well for the work.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Exactly.... it is obvious that the GOP favors Old Money and Trust Fund Babies and shits on the next generation scientists and engineers and educators.
After the war on drugs and the war on terror comes the war on science. Congratulations.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
"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."
Take your education to Europe, where intellectualism isn't dead. Watch the rest of the brain-drain from afar.
Seriously elite schools (CMU/MIT) charging $50k-$60k tuition when the exact same degree can be had at a good state school for $5k ?
This really sounds like people lamenting a 1% increase sales tax when they buy a Ferrari while a Kia would also get them from A to B.
Factor cost in your decision where to study not reputation/prestige.
Thank you! You finally came up with the solution to getting millenials out of their parents' homes! Having to pay the income tax for the "income" of free room and board is the straw that will break the camel's back!
It's also important why we don't give rich people everything the want such as illegal immigration and visa workers.
Word verification: nothings
Wow, great idea!
This is the perfect way to get schools to start to lower the costs of school.... Lower their damn high tuition rates!
The don't need to lower their standards, just the amount it costs to go to school.... use some of that grant/donation/alumni money in their trust funds, alumni donations, etc... to lower their tuition bill to $100 or so...
Imagine that!
It is NOT income.
waiver: the act of intentionally relinquishing or abandoning a known right, claim, or privilege income: a gain or recurrent benefit usually measured in money that derives from capital or labor
Not having to pay some immaterial thing that should not even exist at first is not income.
The tuition is an expense necessary for the execution of the jobs. Are you paying taxes on the tools for you job? If your company provide you the tools (let's think of a Backhoe loader, for example), have you to pay taxes on it? Are you paying taxes on the training your employer provide you?
There are other areas where similar things are taxed as income.
For example, if you borrow money as a loan, and then cant / wont pay, the lender can write it off as a loss and in some cases use that to offset their tax.
But ALSO, the money they wrote off is counted as income you gained, and you owe taxes on it. This is a common dirty trick for low level deadbeat renters or people who just don't pay person-to-person debt. Where you can't put a lien on something because they've got nothing, you can get a tax write off (in some cases) but you can cause increased tax burden on the deadbeat.
Tuition is just basically the same thing. Someone lends them the tuition in exchange for some labor (no money is passed) but of a value that is much higher than the labor. So, gift tax, or income tax.
This new tax is simply catching up with what goes on all over elsewhere.
If it's a problem, just don't pay the fucking tax and keep doing what you're doing. Don't commit suicide or shoot yourself in the foot because the media tells you there's no hope.
In REALITY, the world these psychotic media-cycle-consuming drones are divorced from, the SCHOOLS will have to pay....obviously it's in their interest to have graduate students....obviously they aren't going to let the entirety of their research operations be scuttled....
This seems to be a move to attack the endowments of these educational institutions, if indeed it has an intent.
Backlash against the neocon think tanks? I'm for it.
Get the colleges to lower their price. What a concept, yes, I know.
Donate your time, and volunteer resources. Just take it off the books. Make sure there is no consideration for volunteering.
Tuition means paying the university for education. But, as a former PhD student myself, I think that a PhD student is more like an employee, who works (and by working improves its qualifications). Tuition fees have no place in such a relation. For instance, in France, PhD students receive a salary, and the small fee they pay to the university is merely meant to cover registration costs. The only remaining problem in the US is that in many cases PhD and MSc programs are tied together (and MSc students do get courses, and pay tuition). They will simply have to separate the two, but it's not complicated.
If that proposal is "fair", than shouldn't student athletes be taxed on their tuition wavers? How about the exceptional merit scholars? And the diversity students? And the poverty students? And what about the fact that the general, domestic, and ordinary student body members fees are subsidized by the out-of-state and foreign students, so tax those subsidies too.
Tax, tax, tax. Didn't the R's claim that that was the worst part of the D's "tax and spend" habits?
No, ScentCone does it on his own accord, by his own admission, he is dogmatic in his partisan bias, hand has zero interest in being fair-minded, thoughtful, or honest.
Completely unrepentant zealotry is his cause.
I want ScentCone to one day realise how insufferably vile and stupid his political views are, and then to spend the rest of his life curled up in shame. Ainâ(TM)t gonna happen, so Iâ(TM)ll settle for laughing at him instead
So quite why you want to claim it can't be income if it wasn't earned is purely because you have no idea how to argue what you want, but you want it anyway.
Alternatively the large business (university) could just stop overcharging for tuition. If they charged reasonable rates, then the taxes would be very low.
How else would Congress get their pay raises?
Silicon Valley depends on an oversupply of STEM graduates so they can pick the cream of the crop while keeping salaries depressed compared to other professionals in similarly demanding fields. I guarantee the tech companies' lobbyists are already hard at work on this, and I suspect they won't have too much trouble getting this part of the tax bill nixed. This is much ado about nothing.
They have also often contributed the most. Getting rich by ethical means (which, of course, is not all rich people, but that is a separate issue) is a sign that the person has SERVED a lot of customers. Profit is the economic reward for serving the customer and building something that society seems of value. Taxing the rich literally punishes success and discourages innovation and productivity. Now, of course, that does not mean we should tax others instead. Taxation is theft, and theft is wrong, period.
The tuition is part of compensation. If my employer paid me in cars and rent instead of cash I would have to pay taxes. Universities pay their grad students in tuition, which has enormous value, but no one is paying tax for it.
The headline is written like everything is going to stay the same, except grad students will pay more taxes. The truth is that everything is dynamic - and it's more likely that grad students will net the same amount of money and universities will have to pay their fair share. Universities need grad students, which is why they pay them anything at all. Grad students have options, and universities will have to pay them more to retain them.
It's closing a loop hole for universities. Tax loop holes are bed - even for institutions we want to support.
People hate tax loop holes, so people should not be bothered that this loop hole is closed. If collages still want people to do the job, they will be forced to pay more. In the end it will end up a good thing.
College students, who want to be members of the ruling class, are going to end up making good incomes, otherwise what's the point of college? College students who're committed socialists hate people who make good incomes. So, they should welcome this opportunity to begin to pay back that income to which they are not entitled for the benefit of the increased government services they celebrate. Long live equality of outcomes!
It comes out of your check directly and goes to your kids. You get to keep the rest and pay taxes on ALL OF IT! Now, how is this issue so different. The real problem is the cost of tuition, the Fed and State Govts fucked that up, now how do we fix that, give away more money?
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks
They have also often contributed the most. Getting rich by ethical means (which, of course, is not all rich people, but that is a separate issue) is a sign that the person has SERVED a lot of customers. Profit is the economic reward for serving the customer and building something that society seems of value.
Very few people get rich through ethical means. I'd estimate 1%, based upon decades of studying and observing US history, and half a lifetime devoted to lifetime learning.
The vast majority of the new rich are sociopaths who got ahead by screwing others. These people include drug dealers, those involved in other forms of organized crime, hordes of unethical lawyers, corrupt politicians, corporate executives who screw their employees and pollute the environment, high government judges and officials that implement policies in violation of the Bill of Rights, and so forth.
Those who are the children of sociopaths tend to not be nice human beings either - most are sociopaths themselves - which covers most the non-new rich.
The rich are generally not nice people, nor are they deserving of anything solely as a consequence of being rich. A small minority of the rich get ahead by screwing people then turn around and actually do some good for society, but most won't even do that.
Having said all that, socialism - which by definition means the workers control the means of production, a definition few who call themselves socialists actually understand - is not the solution, as 20th century history clearly shows.
Taxing the rich literally punishes success and discourages innovation and productivity.
Not true in the general case. Some specific taxes can have this effect. But the vast majority of innovation and productivity does not come from the rich, who tend to be conservative and anti-innovation. A reasonable progressive tax system does not hurt innovation and productivity - it can actually do a huge amount to help both of these. That depends upon how the money is spent - far more innovation happens when society is reasonably free and stable (but these need to be achieved without excessive government).
Can't recall the last time somebody in Mogadishu contributed something innovative to humanity, or produced much of anything other than death and misery. Disorder does not contribute to innovation and productivity - and preventing it requires taxes.
Taxation is theft, and theft is wrong, period.
Also not true. Taxation is the money you pay to be part of society - it's part of the social contract. If you don't want to pay taxes, then find a desert island somewhere without a government, or move to Mars.
/. has an unfortunate infestation of tax dependents and other degenerates. Naturally, they downvote anyone advocating an end to the looting.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
A blindingly simple solution.
So your idea is that because you act civilized (not robbing and killing people I guess), you deserve someone else's money?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
You are so far off base, I don't even know how to answer. No one 'deserves' anything. At some point we decided that it would be a good thing if society had roads and a way to distribute clean drinking water, among thousands of other things. Even someone living in the middle of nowhere and off the grid benefits from living under law enforcement. This all costs money. Everyone has a right to have everyone else paying their personal fair share towards it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Yeah, except we aren't talking about taxes to pay for roads, drinking water, and law enforcement (mostly funded at the local level). We are talking about taxes to pay for social programs, military beyond any amount of reason, paying off a ridiculous debt, and a whole bunch of wasteful pork. The federal tax and spend system is a jobs and wealth redistribution program.
I'm all for paying for the important stuff in our society but we are well beyond that.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Well then the choice is yours to make a meaningful contribution to government and change where the money goes. Avoiding taxes just screws everyone over.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
How exactly would you recommend making a meaningful contribution to government? Voting? What a joke. My vote is worthless just like yours is. We are at the whim of our D and R overlords who pick who their voters are and not the other way around. We have no meaningful control over spending.
Avoiding taxes helps me today at the expense of the next generation. But screwing over the next generation has been the thing to do since the New Deal. Promise people today tomorrow's dollars.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
No I mean you should get involved in the system, go work at a campaign office. Run for office yourself. Stop making excuses.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.