Don't forget the other hideous provisions, like taxing graduate student tuition wavers as income. This would have doubled, or possibly tripled, the amount of taxes I paid as a graduate student, when I could barely afford rent.

I can't fathom how a rational human being would think this is a good decision, so I can only conclude that it was a craven political ploy to put something obviously horrible in the bill in order to make the merely bad things look tolerable by comparison. The amount of evil in this tax bill is positively cartoon villainesque in quantity.