LeafByNiggle:
No, no, no, no, no ! Besides the wages, take home pay is a function of one thing and one thing only. That is the withholding amount.
No it is not. Take home pay is one’s net earnings, what one has left after taxes. When one likes at their W2, one sees their take home pay.
I see. We are talking about two different kinds of “take home pay.” I am talking about the pay that you see on your paycheck each week or month. That is the only “early evidence” of the tax cut that was available at the time Trump was being praised for his
huge tax cut. If you don’t want to call it “take-home pay” then let’s call it “pay check pay”. So the math goes like this:
PayCheckPay = Wages - Withholding
Taxes = Withholding - Refund (if you overpaid)
or
Taxes = Withholding + PaymentWhenYouFile (if you end up owing).
So when Trump claimed his tax law was so great, people saw a slight increase in PayCheckPay and concluded he was right. This is where you should have jumped in to correct them. Because if Wages stayed the same and PayCheckPay went up, that could only be because Withholding went down.
So now let’s look at Taxes = Withholding - Refund.
Withholding went down and Refund went down. Did Taxes go down? That depends on whether Withholding went down more than the Refund or the Refund went down more than the Withholding. From what most people are reporting, it was the later. Therefore Taxes either stayed the same or went up. Math does not lie.
Your idea would assume that everyone gets a refund.
No, it does not. But what happens to people who do get a refund is an indicator of what happens to people who end up owing taxes. If the huge tax cut was absent for those getting a refund it was also missing for those who owe taxes, which by the way is mostly the very rich.
Do your own homework. Isn’t that what you tell your students?