Consider two food service workers who have been working at a local university for the past three decades. Neither has a high school diploma; each was born and raised a few miles from campus. They have three children currently enrolled in the university's science and mathematics programs. One is hoping to be a doctor, another a physicist and child number three a high school mathematics teacher. Literally, the American dream.
One of the reasons they have remained employees at the university for twenty years is that universities have been able to provide qualified tax-free tuition reductions for their employees. This law has been in the Internal Revenue Code for many, many decades and has historic precedent that in some ways goes back centuries. The couple's gross income is $70,000. Under the House's tax reform package, their taxable income for 2018 will now include the previously free tuition of $120,000. No longer will the tuition be tax free. There is no grandfathering, no transition, nothing to protect the three college students or their parents. And certainly, as the bill is proposed to be effective January 1, 2018, there is no time for their children to search out new scholarships. Obviously, the parents will not be able to pay the income tax that would result from the proposed tax reform. Essentially, their children will need to drop out of college and pursue scholarships beginning in September, 2018. This cannot be what the House of Representatives has in mind.
https://townhall.com/columnists/hankadler/2017/11/13/dancing-with-the-one-that-brung-you--tax-reform-n2408478
This is an important point, and applies to the SALT deduction as well. Many, many people, who made rational decisions to go to college, to continue on to graduate school, or to purchase a house in a high-tax area will have their lives materially damaged overnight by the GOP tax proposals.
When I was in grad school, I would have been one of those people forced to drop out as a result of this bill. I worked, and studied, and saved, and just three years ago bought a house. The job that gave me the income to buy that house happens to be in a high tax state. Now, as best I can figure, my tax bill would go up by about $8000, all at once, due to the GOP bills.
I'm not saying that getting rid of the SALT deduction should be scrapped, but I am saying that the GOP is pretending that their bill won't hurt a lot of people in this country who made good-faith decisions based on existing laws, trusting that they wouldn't be upended overnight, and the government, in enacting these changes all at once, would be acting in bad faith.
