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Tax Day 2019. Payback time for those who didn’t vote for Trump. Passover and Easter are coming.

Shock treatment.

You freaked this weekend.

Your taxes — federal, state and local income taxes — skyrocketed for 2018.

Today, you’ll be mailing big checks to the IRS and your state’s finance department — unless you live in Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming which have no state income tax.

The BIG change at the Federal level was limiting SALT deductions to $10,000. SALT stands for state and local taxes.

In the old days if you paid $12,000 in taxes on your house and another $12,000 income tax payment to your state, you could have deducted the $24,000 from your Federal income and paid less Federal income tax. Now you can only deduct $10,000. That means your Federal tax bill will now be much higher.

This hurts people living in high tax states, like New York, California, New Jersey and Connecticut:

+ First, second and third homes are plummeting in value in New York, California, New Jersey and Connecticut. Keeping those homes just became hideously more expensive — unless you turn them into Airbnb/VRBO short-term rental businesses, or even rent them out full-time. If you own a distant house and want to run it now as a business, you need a competent manager. That management business will boom.

+ People are fleeing high-tax rates like New York and moving to Florida. With the Internet you can work at a New York job from Florida, or a Los Angeles job from Nevada.

+ Building spec homes in no-tax states (like Florida) for fleeing taxpayers has become a lucrative business. The Internet means many people can work at New York jobs in Florida.

It’s now much more expensive to live in blue states and less expensive to live in red states. An example: My son has a job working full-time for a company in a state with medium income taxes. His income taxes rose from around 33% in 2017 to 37% in 2018. Ouch.

You may think this was payback for how people voted in the 2016 presidential election. You could be right.

There are ways to benefit from the new tax rates But it will take a little time to organize our lives differently.

There is good news. The Federal long term capital gains tax has  come down to 15%. For the first time, that really means you should take in tax considerations when you’re deciding to sell. You don’t want to pay ordinary income tax on your gains.

To repeat the point: All short-term gains — those under 12 months — are ordinary income. Next time you panic and sell stocks, try and sell those that you’ve held for more than a year. (And try not to panic.)

More good news: Company Federal tax rate has dropped from a top rate of 35% to a flat rate now of 21%. That’s a huge drop. The hope behind this tax drop was that corporations would use these tax savings to invest in new factories and create new jobs. Obviously some of that has happened since our unemployment rates are lower, but a lot of the freed up money has gone into share buybacks. That’s been good for share prices.

I suspect those share buybacks will continue, adding to my optimism about the stock market, despite its present high level.

After you’ve mailed your checks today, I suggest a long walk in the park, without your cell phone. Leave it at home.

Easy way to check your bogus emails

Check who sent it. If the sender’s email looks weird, it’s spam.

Easter and Passover are this weekend

Hence it’s time to start with the jokes.

+ Matzoh

A Jew took his Passover lunch to eat outside in the park. He sat down on a bench and began eating.

A little while later a blind man came by and sat down next to him.

Feeling neighborly, the Jewish man passed a sheet of matzo to the blind man.

The blind man ran his fingers over the matzo for a few minutes, looked puzzled, and finally exclaimed, “Who wrote this nonsense?”

+ Sermon

Easter Sunday morning, the minister reached into his bag of props and pulled out an egg.

He pointed at the egg and asked the children, “what’s in here?”

“I know!” a little boy exclaimed. “Pantyhose. ”

+ A family

The prospective father-in-law asked, “Young man, can you support a family?”

The surprised groom-to-be replied, “Well, i was just planning to support your daughter. The rest of you will have to fend for yourselves.”

+ Church ushers

A little boy in church watched the ushers pass around the offering plates.

When they came near his pew, the boy said loudly, “Don’t pay for me daddy i’m under five.”

Harry Newton who plays tennis every day, seven days a week. Friends report that regular tennis cures their various aches and pains. It keeps their blood flowing. There are two types of tennis courts — hard asphalt courts and soft clay (also called HarTru) courts. Soft courts are easier on the knees. Hard courts are easier on the brain, because the ball’s bounce is more predictable. Your choice.

5 Comments

  1. Paul Livingston says:

    There are 17 states that are giving illegal aliens free tuition while making
    students who are American citizens pay the full rate of tuition.

    New York lawmakers just voted down a bill that would give kids, whose
    parents died in the line of duty while serving in our military, the
    opportunity to attend college without paying tuition. One week ago they
    voted to give illegal aliens free tuition.

    Does this make sense to you?

  2. gerryb says:

    Before he was elected, Trump warned about the stock market being in a big ugly bubble fueled by the Fed. Now with the market at record highs, unemployment at record lowes, a 22 trillion debt and annual deficits of a trillion plus being adding to it even in a good economy, Trump calls for the Fed to go back to Quantitative Easing (inclined to lower interest rates) policies instead of Quantitative Tightening (inclined to raise interest rates.) He said on Twitter that the stock market would be 5,000 to 10,000 points higher if the Fed hadn’t tightened last year. His irresponsible push to expand the bubble will make the inevitable unwind that much worse. Although I am no Trump fan, I fear a collapse leading into the next election, and it will be framed as proof that free markets and deregulation don’t work. Millennials now make up the largest generation in America, they are increasingly turning away from capitalism and toward socialism and even communism as a viable alternative. According to the latest survey from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a D.C.-based nonprofit, one in two U.S. millennials say they would rather live in a socialist or communist country than a capitalist democracy. Imagine the alexandria ocasio-chavez cabal in control.

  3. Lucky says:

    How nice it is to be a deplorable living in a nice RED state where we pay much lower taxes and support our great, God loving President!