The Tax Foundation has launched a Bush-era tax cuts calculator at www.MyTaxBurden.org, which allows taxpayers to compare their 2011 federal income tax liabilities under three scenarios: if all the Bush-era tax cuts expire completely at the end of this year, if they’re all extended into 2011 or made permanent, and if President Obama’s budget is adopted, which includes a combination of expirations and extensions.
Check it out here: http://www.mytaxburden.org
Although this is just a tax estimator, it purports to show how you will fare under the three potential scenarios described above.
The mission of The Tax Foundation is to educate taxpayers about sound tax policy and the size of the tax burden borne by Americans at all levels of government. From its founding in 1937, the Tax Foundation has been grounded in the belief that the dissemination of basic information about government finance is the foundation of sound policy in a free society.
I do not know if this is an accurate source or not since I haven’t seen any real commentary on them from conservative bloggers, so perhaps we should do some testing of our own. I was tipped off to this tax calculator by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy and I suspect since their focus is on limited government, free markets and strong traditional families that the MCPP is at least fairly conservative in nature.
So with that in mind, I went to the calculator and answered the few questions the calculator presented to me and ran the numbers. According to the results, if the Bush Tax Cuts are allowed to expire completely, my estimated tax burden would go up by about $1,200. However, according to the calculator if the budget proposed by Obama goes into effect which leaves some Bush tax cuts in place and drops others, my current taxes would go down by about $1,200.
Which for some reason leaves me feeling somewhat uneasy about the accuracy of the calculator. Isn’t it strange that the difference between the three scenarios is almost exactly $1,200 dollars in either direction? Why do I not feel more confident that Obama’s plan will cost me less money than Bush’s plan? Could it be that with Congress planning to spend almost $2 Trillion dollars to fund Health Care Reform, additional bail-outs, and covering the mortgage fiasco, I’m just a bit skittish about believing anything that sounds too good to be true from the current crop of legislators?
Go and try the calculator yourself and then come back and post your results in the comments section. Don’t post exact numbers, but try some different earnings scenarios and report on how your results vary.
I’m very curious to know how your situation fares and whether you have high confidence in this tax burden calculator.
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