How to Help Clients Calculate Their Tax Cut

When clients ask for an estimate of their likely tax cut, you can direct them for a fast answer to a website designed by three Ivy-League professors.

According to GiveItBackforJobs.org's calculator, a single taxpayer with an adjusted gross income of $200,000 might save $5,476 in taxes. A couple with $300,000 might save $7,656.

Yale’s Jacob Hacker and Daniel Markovits and Cornell’s Robert Hockett created the calculator and website to allow visitors to donate their tax cuts to charity.

Hacker, who teaches political science, reports that more than 93% of American households experienced "substantial economic shock" in the eighteen months from March 2008 to September, 2009, according to a Rockefeller Foundation-supported study he headed.  Risk of economic hardship has become the norm, Hacker found, affecting even upper-middle class families. 

Nearly seven in ten households saw their earnings substantially fall or their nondiscretionary expenses substantially rise, most often for medical needs or assistance to family members.  Twenty-three percent of households reported a drop of at least a quarter of their annual household income.

While public concerns about job security rose dramatically as the economy weakened, worries about other risks to economic security—debt, retirement savings, medical costs, health insurance, and even housing stability— were already as common in 2007 as they were in the depths of the recession.

According to separate opinion surveys, concerns about retirement savings and medical costs did not diminish at all between the summers of 2009 and 2010, and concerns about the job market declined only slightly.

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