> Most other people making $20-30k (ones that aren’t privileged enough to be in grad school) will get a tax cut.

As will people with estates in the 11 plus million range, large corporations, and pass through entities. It's very easy to cherry pick to set one struggling group (grad students) against another (people making 20-30k), but that ignores who the primary beneficiaries of the bill are.

> that ignores who the primary beneficiaries of the bill are.

The outrage about rich people getting taxes breaks is uninteresting because it's impossible to give a tax break to someone who doesn't pay taxes. As the US has a fairly progressive tax structure, any changes to the system will primarily affect the rich.

> it's impossible to give a tax break to someone who doesn't pay taxes.

That's, of course, completely untrue in a world where refundable credits are a thing. Tax bills are not limited to non-negative numbers.

(Also, lots of non-rich people pay taxes, even if you only mean personal income tax.)

> That's, of course, completely untrue in a world where refundable credits are a thing. Tax bills are not limited to non-negative numbers.

I'm pretty sure that is actually the case in the US tax system. A US taxpayer's tax burden cannot be less than 0. It doesn't have to be that way, but to make it so requires a more fundamental change to the US tax system.

Nope, there are several refundable tax credits which can take total income liability below $0; the Earned Income Tax Credit is the best known , but there are several others.

https://www.irs.com/articles/refundable-vs-non-refundable-ta...

>That's, of course, completely untrue in a world where refundable credits are a thing. Tax bills are not limited to non-negative numbers.

Tax breaks and one's total tax obligation are two different things.

>(Also, lots of non-rich people pay taxes, even if you only mean personal income tax.)

A lot of people think they pay taxes, but they don't. And we'd need to define rich to really reach an agreement on the truthfulness of that statement. According to the CBO [1] (table 1 on page 31), households in the lower three quintiles of income are not net tax payers at the federal level. The gap in what they pay and what they receive in services is large enough that it offsets state and local taxes.

Reviewing the table I referenced above, I would agree that lots of non-rich people pay taxes. But the majority of non-rich people do not.

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-...

Let's say a person makes most of their income from exporting equipment to Europe. Are you going to subtract the value they receive from the US Navy protecting shipping lanes?

What about the value the owner of a retail store gets from the interstate system?

Only counting direct benefits in this calculation is absurd.

This is too simplistic to be real. Would you say the same if the tax break was "anyone earning over $500k pays no taxes of any kind"? After all, it primarily affects the rich, and that's to be expected.

Of course I'd not say the same, that's a very different situation than across the board reductions.

In a country where 47-50% of tax returns have zero income tax liability, and 60% are not net tax payers, a new policy that lowers the tax rates across the board, but has a floor of zero, will obviously only affect those who have actually pay taxes.

Another question I would be interested in hearing an answer to is why is everyone so concerned about tax breaks for the rich? Since the federal government doesn't operate on a balanced budget, the only motivations I can see are greed or spite. Greed because people are afraid they will not get services paid for by someone else, or spite because they think it's unfair that someone has more than them.

In case you haven't been following the news, the recent tax bill was passed under a rule that limited the impact it was allowed to have on the deficit. Therefore, in order to make tax cuts for the rich not cost too much for the bill, they've included changes that remove funding from services or that raise taxes from the not rich. It doesn't matter whether the government as an abstract operates on a balanced budget or not, this particular bill is a (roughly) zero sum one. If you didn't know that, you should really do some more background reading.

> is uninteresting because it's impossible to give a tax break to someone who doesn't pay taxes

Friedman was really into negative income taxes.

Anyone who has a job pays FICA taxes. They could easily have lowered those for low income people, but they didn't.

What are you talking about? Lower class people are only able to afford grad school because of tuition waivers. By taxing them as income, only people who are able to pay out of pocket will have access to postsecondary degrees that grant higher incomes.

Only a small minority of lower class people ever go to grad school. Overwhelmingly, it’s a tax break that benefits the kids of upper middle class and wealthy families.

This statement is true (yours):

> Only a small minority of lower class people ever go to grad school.

But so is this one (mine):

> A vast majority of graduate students are from low-income backgrounds.

However, this statement is totally false (yours):

> it’s a tax break that benefits the kids of upper middle class and wealthy families.

Many graduate students, especially those in STEM fields (80 - 90%), are poor international students. Their families are already taking on generations of debt in order to give their children a mere chance to emigrate to this country.

The schools don't want to/won't pay the higher stipends required to offset the tuition waiver taxes (for the minority of graduate students who get them), and they don't want to/won't give up the massive cash infusion coming from these students (who don't have waivers) already.

Given the choice between the two, they'll choose the latter (the cash cow) and throw the former (the best and brightest) out with the bathwater, if you'll permit me to mix my metaphors. In the long run, this outcome will be bad for the schools, and bad for the businesses who hire these students once they graduate.

Sources:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/12/new-report-sh...

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...

You're simply wrong. Higher-income college students are far more likely to go to graduate school than lower-income students.

> The percentage of students enrolling in graduate school increases with family income. Among dependent 2007–08 four-year college graduates, 39 percent of those from families in the lowest income quartile, 42 percent from middle-income families, and 45 percent from the highest income quartile had enrolled in graduate school within four years of college graduation. [0]

It's also misleading for you to look only at figures for STEM fields, in which international students are much more highly represented than other fields. I'm not sure why you're using looking at STEM only and using that to prove your point. The NYTimes article you linked says it best:

> "in arts and humanities, the figure [of students which are international] was about 16 percent; in business, a little more than 18 percent."

Providing tax breaks for graduate school does disproportionately benefit the upper middle class and the wealthy.

[0] https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/86981/...

Depends on the field. Students from developing countries are usually not lower class, but, compared to Americans, have much lower income. In many fields, especially STEM ones that actually provide tutition waivers, these students make up significant chunk of the students. There is liberal arts, but tuition waivers are much more rare there.

I’m sure this is what the Trumpists were really after. He is not very friendly to immigrants, after all. And STEM doesn’t really mesh with make America great again mantra of bringing back low skilled manufacturing jobs.

Not to wade into the discussion about who makes what money (we need data, full stop) - but in humanities, students largely do not get the type of tuition waivers that are under discussion.

By ignoring STEM students, you're overlooking the people who would primarily be affected.

A vast majority of graduate students are not from low income backgrounds. Graduate students by definition already have a college degree, and statistically college graduates come from families that make substantially more than he average income.

You're making a poor assumption however. The college graduates that go on to pursue a graduate degree are not randomly selected.

Sure. But aren't they even more likely to be well-off? Are people who can afford to forgo getting a job for 4-5 years after getting their college degree more or less likely to be from a lower-income household?

I'm not certain, but to offer a counter argument, aren't the more wealthy students likely to be content to get a Bachelor's degree of an MBA and move into the workplace? Possibly using their connections to supplement their other qualifications?

What is the poor assumption that s/he is making?

Sorry to clarify, the poor assumption is that the fact that the people going to college being generally wealthier means that the people going to graduate school are generally wealthier. A uniform randomness would be required to determine which students choose to continue advancing which is not the case as those choosing to pursue a graduate degree are being influenced by other factors - how fast they need to begin acquiring income, how lucrative they think immediate employment may be, interests...

I always got the impression that the international students were from fairly well off families by the standards of their home country. After all, they can afford to pay full tuition, even after the exchange rate from currencies like the Chinese RMB.

Yup. The most likely outcome of the grad student changes in the House tax bill would be an even greater shift towards international students from well-off families.

I don't know that I'd say "overwhelmingly". I certainly wouldn't have been able to go to grad school under this system.

Do you know what "overwhelmingly" means? Your anecdote about a single person (you) being able to or not being able to afford college doesn't mean anything.

The other commenter's unsourced "overwhelmingly" claim is silly but so is yours.

Think of my comment as two separate statements. First, "overwhelmingly" is silly. Second, and more or less unrelated, it would have personally affected me. The second wasn't intended as support for the first.

So we should expect grad students, that have no other source of income, to rely on $10-20K a year for rent, food, transportation, and everything else?

No, it's not. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of that word. And you're really asking why we should focus and prepare citizens with higher education?