On a single bullet-point page, the Trump administration on April 26 proposed sweeping tax law changes that it claims would be the largest tax cut in U.S. history. Entitled “2017 Tax Reform for Economic Growth and American Jobs,” the sparse document retains few remnants of the tax plan Trump campaigned on last fall, which itself was widely seen as short on specifics.
“There was a kernel of a plan last year, and now that kernel doesn’t even appear,” says Kevin Matz, a partner in the personal client services group at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP, a Manhattan law firm.
Still, much of what is proffered looks to benefit clients of financial advisors. This includes eliminating the estate tax, the alternative minimum tax and the 3.8 percent net investment income tax, as well as lowering income tax rates to 15 percent for businesses and to a maximum of 35 percent for individuals—the latter compares to the current rate of 39.6 percent and the 33 percent rate in Trump’s campaign platform.
But if less is more, sometimes less can be, well, less. Regarding the Trump tax plan, it says nothing about such important planning variables as the fate of the gift tax; the income at which the 35 percent top individual rate would kick in; the types of enterprises that would qualify for the 15 percent business rate; and whether the 15 percent rate would only apply to reinvested profits as Trump suggested while campaigning.
Regarding deductions under the latest proposals, clients’ prospects for benefiting are unclear. For one thing, write-offs are less valuable with a lower marginal tax rate. For another, unnamed breaks that mainly benefit the wealthiest taxpayers would cease.
More disquieting is the proposal to kill off all but two itemized deductions: mortgage interest and charitable contributions. (This departs from Trump’s campaign pledge to limit itemizations to $200,000 for couples filing jointly and $100,000 for single taxpayers.)
Losing the ability to deduct medical expenses “would be a net negative to many of our older clients," says planner Joe Martin, a partner at the Golub Group in San Mateo, Calif. "It would automatically increase their taxable income, and their tax.”
Furthermore, he adds, eliminating the itemized deduction for state and local taxes would largely offset the benefit of the repeal of the alternative minimum tax for many clients. Under current law, an AMT taxpayer loses these deductions. If they’re eliminated along with alt min, clients gain less than if they could deduct these items.
Concern doesn’t stop there. Shrinking the list of what’s itemizable, coupled with the proposed doubling of the standard deduction (read: an increase in free deductions), would effectively reduce the tax savings from the mortgage interest deduction, according to Scott Kaplowitch, CPA and managing partner at Edelstein & Company LLP in Boston.
“Clients would get less value from refinancing their mortgage,” he says. Doubling the 2017 standard deduction would raise it to $25,400 for joint filers and $12,700 for single taxpayers.