To give you a Bernie Sanders style phrasing,the top one tenth of one percent spends more on booze and women than the bottom 90% put together.

Now seems like a good time to remind Grassley that the current Republican President does his bowel movements in a toilet bowl made of gold.

Jared Kushner started out as a share cropper. It wasn’t until he stopped blowing all his money on cloves and Thai ladyboys that he was able to amass his millions.

people about to inherit over 10 million dollars need to be rewarded because... because... those darn poors are spending every dang penny on hookers and movies!

If it's possible to find a silver lining in this, I'm glad the mortgage deduction is going away. Never understood why we would want to incentivise dumbasses to make 20x leveraged investments that they really have no clue about.

Interesting to see how much this affects housing prices. I live in the Bay Area (high income tax, expensive real estate to start with) and I wonder if it could get hit particularly hard.

Link to the mortgage (interest?) deduction going away? Pretty sure I would have heard of that.

MID is unchanged in the Senate bill.

Oops. I'm a moron.

To be fair, it becomes less useful to a large group of people who will no longer be itemizing.

It's a stupid deduction that probably shouldn't exist, but it seems likely to be quite disruptive to the housing market if it's taken away completely. So maybe this is a half-step towards its eventual elimination.

Man that Grassley really has his finger on the pulse of America.

You'd think that the rich would spend less as a percentage of income but nope not that either.

Grassley must be seeing that IMAX 3D plush recliner + bar + bjs new AMC I've been hearing about. What new innovations will the movie theater companies think of next to keep people in the seats?

A bit of a digression, but it strikes me as somewhat unbelievable how little the bottom 20% spends on booze according to that chart. $195 annually is like one beer every two days per household, or like a half dozen bar nights. You would figure at least 5% of poors would be in the alcoholic range spending like $3000 per year (even that is only like $8 per day) and bringing up the average a lot.

sitting in a trailer buying 30-packs of Natural Ice, just disgusting. get rid of the estate tax!

They need to do away with the AMT if they eliminate SALT otherwise there is going to be a mass exodus from the NY metro area of the upper middle class.

Not sure this makes sense. SALT is the big reason most people are in AMT in the first place, at least on a regular basis. Those people are paying so much in regular tax now that AMT is no longer a concern for them.

One really odd thing is that the Senate bill actually repeals the marriage penalty on tax rates, but virtually no one is talking about it. I get, obviously, why Democrats are not doing free PR for this bill, but it's mind-boggling that the Republicans aren't talking about it. It's like they're so addicted to lying about how great corporate tax cuts are that they are no longer about to talk about popular things the bill actually does.

The way it was explained to me, if they remove SALT but leave in AMT upper middle class taxpayers in high property tax states will take a huge hit in their yearly taxes.

That makes no sense to me. You have to pay the higher of your calculated tax or the AMT. If you have to pay a huge tax that will happen regardless of AMT being there or not. Only if your calculated tax is below AMT does AMT make any difference.

I agree.

I agree but AMT puts limitations on deductions you can apply does it?

Upper middle class fall into the bracket don't they? it kicks in around +270k or there abouts of adjusted gross income.

The senate plan left the AMT in there so they could get more tax revenue, not less.

The way AMT works is that you pay a lower rate structure, but you usually have higher AMT taxable income because some of your deductions get knocked out. You are in AMT if the increase in your AMT taxable income more that offsets the move to a lower rate structure. SALT is one of the big deductions that you lose going to AMT and is a big reason that many people end up paying AMT (myself included). The Senate bill greatly limits the SALT deductions you can take. (I think it maxes out at 10k of property taxes.) So that remaining deduction will continue to get knocked out for AMT, but overall the calculation of regular taxable income and AMT taxable income get closer together, because most SALT becomes nondeductible for both. That means that you're less likely to end up in AMT.

I'm really wondering how big the affect will be. I mean, it's got to cut the housing market of every major city by -- 10% - 15% -- at least, right?

That'll trickle down to the suburbs pretty soon after...

The degree of misery that being poor causes is rarely examined in media, but you can't spend money you don't have.

Exactly. If the new tax bill is going to increase taxes on upper middle income folks in Rara's area so much that it creates an exodus from the area (his contention), by default it means the AMT isn't relevant to their situation and eliminating it does nothing for them.

Losing the state and local income tax deduction means large numbers of people who currently itemize will now claim the increased standard deduction instead. (I've read estimates that as many as 90% of people who currently itemize will be better off claiming the standard deduction, which is why charity organizations are worried.)

This means even if you still can deduct it most people won't be.

But I happen to currently know people who don't even itemize yet somehow believe that paying mortgage interest is helpful! I used to be one of these morons until my accountant told me that in the past I only infrequently itemized, when I always thought I did every year.

Reality may or may not intrude upon how people digest this change.

I don't have links handy, but the surprising thing, and this tends to cross national boundaries, is that drinking alcohol is basically a luxury of well off people. In the US around 10% of the people drink more than 85% of the alcohol, and they are disproportionately well off. Most people in the US, like 2/3, hardly drink. Alcohol costs money, and people without money don't drink much because they can't.