Key 2018 Tax Changes

Thursday, January 4, 2018

The Pass-Through Deduction

The new tax code makes a big change to the way pass-through business income is taxed. This includes income earned by sole proprietorships, LLCs, partnerships, and S corporations.

Under the new law, taxpayers with pass-through businesses like these will be able to deduct 20% of their pass-through income. In other words, if you own a small business and it generates $100,000 in profit in 2018, you'll be able to deduct $20,000 of it before the ordinary income tax rates are applied.

There are phaseout income limits that apply to "professional services" business owners such as lawyers, doctors, and consultants, which are set at $157,500 for single filers and $315,000 for pass-through business owners who file a joint return.

Includes rule to prevent abuse of pass-through tax break: If the owner or partner in a pass-through also draws a salary from the business, that money would be subject to ordinary income tax rates.

But to prevent people from recharacterizing their wage income as business profits to get the benefit of the pass-through deduction, the bill would place limits on how much income would qualify for the deduction.

Tax experts nevertheless have warned that this kind of anti-abuse measure still presents taxpayers with a lot of opportunities to game the system, and favors passive owners of a business over active owners who actually run things.

The Estate Tax Exemption

The estate tax already applied to a small percentage of households. Essentially, the 40% estate tax rate applied only to the portion of an estate that was valued at $5.6 million or more per individual, or $11.2 million per married couple.

However, the new tax law exempts even more households by doubling these exemptions. Now, for 2018, individuals get a $11.2 million lifetime exemption and married couples get to exclude $22.4 million. As you can probably imagine, this won't leave too many families paying the estate tax.

Corporate Tax Rates

So far, we've discussed individual tax reform, but the most dramatic changes made by the bill are on the corporate side.

For starters, the bill lowers the corporate tax rate to a flat 21% on all profits. This is not only a massive tax cut, but is a major simplification as compared to the 2017 corporate tax structure.

The global average corporate tax rate is about 25%, so this move is designed to make the U.S. more globally competitive, which should in turn help keep more corporate profits (and jobs) in the United States.

In addition to these changes, the corporate AMT of 20% has been repealed.

 

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