Personal Finance and Investing

Did you really? Yeah, it was great, but at the same time they got rid of the personal and dependent exemptions which would have been $4,150 in 2018 had the TCJA (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, aka "Trump tax cuts&quot not gone into effect. The standard deduction would have been $6,500 for single filers in 2018 had not the TCJA taken effect -- instead it expanded to $12,000 thanks to TCJA, for a net increase of $5,500. So yeah, for someone who takes the standard deduction before and after the tax law change, it looks like an increase of $5,500 - $4,150 = $1,350 in what one subtracts from AGI to get taxable income. Well, that's not bad.

All numbers above are for singles. For married filing jointly, all would be double that. Not an enormous windfall, but certainly noticable.

Oh, and the marginal tax rates dropped from 15% to 12% for the 2nd bracket, and 25% to 22% for the 3rd bracket. (The first bracket remained at 10%).

For me, who itemizes deductions both before and after the tax law change, it was a negative -- because I lost the personal exemption, while the increase in the standard deduction did me no good because my itemized deductions exceed my standard deduction even after the standard deduction expansion. So basically, speaking of 2018, my taxable income increased by $4,150 just from the lost personal exemption.

Each year thereafter, the personal exemption would have increased by the rate of inflation (had it not been "Trumped" out of existence), as does the standard deduction. I'm just using 2018 since it is the first year that the TCJA went into effect.