Well how much more did you earn? SLI starts to phase out at $65K and stops once you make $80K.  This is same as it was last year so Trump’s changes have no impact.  So if in 2017 you made $62K you got to take the full amount but if in 2018 you made $81K you got to take $0.  THat has nothing to do with the tax laws but…

I’m lucky in that my dad’s hobby happened to be having a tax prep business. So I give him my stuff and he does my taxes. All he asks in return is time with his grandkids.... Gonna suck when he stops in 2-3 years.

How did your total taxes change? Refunds are not what matters (although its what we perceive). What matters is how much did you pay. If you got married AND had a kid your withholdings are going to be WAY OFF if you didn’t change them.

Same. I live in NJ, and my tax rate went up 30% (i.e. total taxes paid / total adjusted income) and the vast majority of it was from capping SALT at $10K.  Funny thing is, I’d be fine with that if said money had gone towards funding Univeral Pre-K or Medicare expansion or a 100 other valid things.  I’m less fine since…

Because at some point the tax rate should drop to 0% (at the poverty line it makes no sense to take 15% and then inefficiently return it to them as part of social programs).  So if you have going to have a step for the “really poor” others think maybe there should be an interim step for the “slightly poort” and then…

That makes no sense. If you had so little in terms of deductions, you should have seen a bigger tax cut since the standard deduction is larger. You got less of a refund because you got more in your check. What you need to do is take your total taxes and divide by your total adjusted income. More than likely you paid…

Uh, Tiger was the son of a career Army officer. Arnie Palmer was the son of the polio-stricken groundskeepers of a golf course. So 2 of the 3 most famous golfers ever came from anything but the country club set.

Fair point.  I had started to say something else and then changed it, so it looks like I am disagreeing with his point by agreeing with it.  Dumb on my part.

Why?  The only stupid thing here are the option years.  Everything else is actually a reasonable payment since how little he would have gotten paid.  He had 2 years (2019 and 2020) where he was not even going to break $1.2M total.  Instead he’s going to make about $10M.  He’s probably shorting himself a $5-10M total…

No, he wants to make sure his kids and their kids are set for life. He has made a grand total of $1M playing baseball. And he was only guaranteed to make another $575K. In the end what he did was take an advance on his arbitration years and lock it in.

He’s making him millions of dollars more than he would make in 2020 and 2021. Albies would not have been a free agent until he played 5 more years. So he is giving up only 2 years where he could even sniff the open market.

No it is not. A grounds rule (not ground rule) is a rule specific to those grounds and is usually decided by the home team in advance of the game/season and by definition does not apply to both teams.

So all your years of watching basketball ended about 5 years ago until last night? Because this has been looked at WAY too much since they instituted the review system. The only reason you don’t see it is it has to be a very specific instance (last 2 minutes of regulation/overtime where 1 possession matters, and where…

Yes you can. You either limit the time to review at a finite amount (say 45 seconds), or you limit it to half-speed or faster only, or some other similar approaches.  All of those would fix obvious errors, but would leave the errors no one knew even occurred (like this one).   So Rams-Saints gets fixed but looking at…

Agreed 100%. I played video games on the NES and Sega Genesis but never got into multi-player PC/console games as I aged out just before they got good enough to keep adults playing. My son started talking about it and I said “let me play first” since he was 8 and I wasn’t sure about a game who’s object was to kill or…

Kids, not people. My kids could/would dip almost any meat in ketchup until they were about 7. Then we started getting BBQ sauce and maybe honey mustard.

Why? Right now he gets paid $127K PER DAY to basically work for about 8 minutes (his for PAs).  The rest of the time he gets to work out in a really nice gym, fly chartered jets, go out to eat on a per diem account (on top of the $127K) and stay at a luxury hotel, and otherwise hang out in a really nice clubhouse.

Yep. The perfect price for a beer from the guy working for tips is like $8.25. Its close enough to 15% to say keep the change on a $10 and even if the person isn’t that generous, most people will want the dollar back so while $0.75 isn’t great its still probably doubles what the vendor makes off the base (which is…

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act is 19 1/2 years old, so how is that “currently moving to the right?” Where do most of the current members of Congress sit on this law?

The Democrats have not, in any way, shape or form been moving to the right. That is comical. They may not be moving to the left as fast as the left edge (or even left half) of their “party”, but give me one instance where they are more to the right than a position they held 20, 40 or 60 years ago?