[A New York Times] piece by Erin Rousseau, a graduate student at M.I.T., detailed an insidious little virus buried in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, just passed by Republicans in the House. The law would repeal section 117(d)(5) of the tax code, which gives graduate students who work on campuses a tuition waiver.
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It would increase such students' taxable income from the area of $33,000 to over $80,000. In most cases, that would add about $10,000 to their annual tax burden.
Getting already-struggling students to cough up $10,000 more would pay for the big-ticket item in the Trump tax plan: a reduction in the corporate tax rate.
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The reduction in the top corporate rate is more or less totally symbolic already. It's a fraud. The biggest and most successful of our transnational corporations already pay virtually nothing in American tax as it is, usually by moving profits to offshore havens.
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Since those funds can't come from companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon, new ways have to be found to siphon money out of a working population already stretched to the limit.
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This will add to miseries many will suffer once they get out of school, when they will be saddled with huge debt burdens, from which there is no escape.
Which brings us to the irony of the Times headline about how “the House Just Voted to Bankrupt Students!” [...] "There is no bankruptcy!" says Alan Collinge, of StudentLoanJustice.org.
Collinge's point is that student borrowers are unique in their inability to declare bankruptcy.
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While the President of the United States can declare bankruptcy six times over, and the Fed can spend as much as $29 trillion bailing out companies who trashed the economy in 2008 [...] , broke ex-students cannot ever get out from under their debts.
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Another way the new tax bill would squeeze the student [...] is by killing the student loan interest exemption.
Many students are allowed a deduction up to $2,500 to cover interest on their student loan payments. [...] [M]any students before long are so overcome with fees that they are reduced to only paying interest, and never touching principal.
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Twenty different states now have laws that allow the government to revoke the drivers' licenses of people who default on their student debt. Killing the interest exemption for student borrowers would likely send many ex-students and/or their families over the edge.
Matt Taibbi
Add to that the many women who claim he kissed them without permission, and I see a pattern that could be the sign of someone weaned too early, longing for his mother's breast. Do you suppose that's why when he's talking his mouth is a perpetual sucking instrument?
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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