I try to keep track of what is going on as well, and can read legalese quite well, but the tax code literally makes my head spin. The professor I had for S-Corp Taxation had something he used to say about the tax code that I wish I could remember, but it was something along the lines of it being written badly on purpose so that the IRS could interpret it anyway they wanted. (he was joking of course).
It doesn’t make my head spin, but then I used to be counsel at the IRS national office and literally spent a good part of most work days reading through the code, regs, and proposed legislation. I also read a lot of other statutes and regs now as my practice involves more than just federal tax law. It may surprise a lot of people that federal tax legislation, as dense as some of it is, is generally better written than a lot of other stuff Congress and particularly state legislatures put out. The reason is that Congress has a professional staff in the joint committee on taxation that helps to write the legislation and advise members on tax issues. The joint committee on taxation is unique in Congress in having a specialized staff that serves both houses in drafting on legislation on a single subject area. There are three other joint committees, one more of a policy body, the joint economic committee, and the other two are institutional support, the joint committees on the library and printing.
I have been fielding questions from clients all week and most of them are NOT happy.
So far my clients are at least not unhappy. Some will not see much change in their bottom line, and some others will benefit significantly from the bill. So far none of them are significantly worse off after these changes.
I have also been trying to run the numbers in various scenarios and I don't think what's being published so far, as far as scenarios is concerned, is very accurate.
The problem is that few taxpayers actually match the scenarios that the media come up with to illustrate the effect of the legislation. Every taxpayer’s situation is a bit different so I dislike the media accounts that make sweeping generalizations about who benefits and who doesn’t based off just a few hypothetical scenarios.
The results for families with children are not very promising at all.
A lot depends on the details of all their finances. Certainly larger families that had lots of itemized deductions will feel the loss of the personal exemptions and cut back on deductions more acutely. The question for them is whether the other provisions, like larger standard deduction, etc., will make up for that, and that will vary from one taxpayer to the next.
