I am not a financial expert by any means but i would like to understand if the new tax bill will be good or bad for the professional gambler. By "pro poker player" lets assume they make around 40k-80k a year playing live cash games.

From my understanding just the increase in standard deduction alone will mean paying less taxes as most cash game grinders don't have that many deductible expenses to itemize. As far as i know you can't deduct meals or mileage if your only traveling to one casino.

As it stands now i believe pro gamblers pay around 20-25% income taxes. Can anyone give me a general idea if this figure will go up or down based on the current proposal of the tax bill?

Bad.

No one here cares about poker players and how much tax they have to pay.

Good/bad as in the national debt is just simply not a thing right?

Short term (2-6 years): You'll probably have a negligible difference in your overall tax bill.

Medium term (7-12 years): You'll probably have a modest increase in your overall tax bill.

Long term (13+ years): National debt will increase such that the US will need to spend moderately less or tax moderately more than we are now, or some combination thereof.

The more significant question is, how will we pay for these tax cuts? Pretend you've just spend $5,000 remodeling a kitchen, and took out a loan for this. You justify this partially by saying that perhaps a couple times a year you'll throw a tupperware party in your nice new kitchen and maybe make an extra $25 each time you do so because your guests enjoy the nice new kitchen.

Only except for a kitchen, the thing you're paying for is the opportunity to have your tax burden changed per my list above. And instead of tupperware parties, you have the possibility that extra cash in (largely rich) people's hands will cause the economy to grow a little bit faster. You are still on the hook for the $5,000, in addition to the pros and cons of the change in tax burden.

Spoiler alert: it's almost impossible to spin this as anything positive for anyone remotely within the middle class.

Thanks for the response. Well its quite frightening when you put it like that. Never a fan of pushing off problems for the future.

$5k for a kitchen remodel?

What is this, a kitchen for ants?

Fine--installing new bright lights in their living room.