https://actionnetwork.org/letters/grad-students-may-be-taxed-on-income-they-dont-even-get
FIRST LETTER SENT
I urge you to oppose any tax bill that eliminates the tuition wavier provision which allows graduate student employees to afford an education.
The tax bills currently moving through Congress threaten support for graduate students, colleges and universities, and tax fairness. The House Republican tax plan (HR 1) would force graduate student employees to pay hundreds (or thousands, in my case) of dollars more in taxes by treating the value of their tuition waivers as taxable income, leading to a tax bill graduate student employees can’t afford on the salary of a graduate research or teaching assistant.
If graduate tuition waivers were taxed, in-state graduate student employees at the University of Colorado Boulder, for example, could be taxed on an additional $22,000 of income (and that amount doubles for out-of-state and international students) while receiving the same income they currently make. That number increases for graduate student employees at private institutions with higher tuition, and will hurt grad student employees across the country. This would simply put graduate school out of reach for all but the wealthiest students, and would significantly harm our institutions’ missions of providing high quality undergraduate education and world-class research.
Graduate employees, in addition to preparing for careers in teaching and research, are on the frontlines in college classrooms and laboratories every day, helping undergraduates succeed and performing ground-breaking research. Even with a graduate assistantship and tuition waiver, too many of grad employees are forced to go into debt to do this important work and obtain a graduate degree.
Support graduate students, colleges and universities, and tax fairness – oppose any tax plan that eliminates the tuition waiver provision for graduate student employees and that cuts other education benefits.
SECOND LETTER SENT (12/01/17)
I urge you to vote NO on the current tax bills. If these bills pass in their current form and I am unfairly taxed on income I never received (i.e., graduate tuition waiver), I will be forced to withdraw from the PhD program at CU-Boulder and can no longer help people and communities in Colorado and across the United States learn how to live more safely with wildfire. That would be a double tragedy.
I urge you to oppose the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which is a massive redistribution of wealth to the already rich at the expense of educators, first responders, homeowners, union members and our local communities. This bill is bad for our public schools, bad for our communities and bad for a majority of Americans.
The tax bill would replace one system that is unfair to the majority of Americans with another. It would hugely cut taxes to big corporations and hedge funds while making the poor and middle class pay more.
This bill takes away deductions that have reduced the tax burden for homeowners and working families. For example, the House bill would eliminate the $250 tax deduction used by the 99.5 percent of educators who spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on their classrooms and their students. Millions of middle-class families would see their tax burden increase under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
The bill would also repeal the century-old state and local tax deduction for individuals. However, in a slap in the face to working families, corporations will still be allowed to take this deduction. Overall, the proposal would hurt property values and every community that uses tax dollars to invest in essential services like schools, firefighters, police and sanitation.
It is clear that the purpose of eliminating deductions that help middle-class families reduce their tax burden is to fund tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, which the vast majority of this tax plan’s benefits go toward. This bill’s preference for the wealthy over the middle class and communities is blatant. While undermining unions and state and local government services by eliminating those deductions, it does the exact opposite when it comes to big corporations, hedge funds and the already wealthy: It reduces the corporate tax rate by 15 percent; helps hedge funds and others reduce their true tax liability by paying a much-reduced “pass-through” rate; weakens or repeals the estate tax for the wealthy so they can pass on their inheritances tax-free; and keeps all sorts of loopholes, like carried interest, that Trump promised to get rid of when he was campaigning.
We’ve seen this plan before, in Kansas, where Republicans slashed taxes for the wealthy and corporations and shrank government, promising it would usher in an economic boom. It didn’t. The five-year experiment caused state revenue to plummet, the deficit to explode, and painful spending cuts to be made—including cuts decimating public schools.
A bill that undermines public services and raises taxes on millions of middle-class families, all to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, does not deserve your support. I urge you to reject the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
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