More Charts: The Child Tax Credit and the End of the Medical Expenses Deduction

The Republican tax bill eliminates deductions for a bunch of odd things: tuition debt, mortgage interest, alimony, medical expenses, state and local taxes, gambling losses, tax prep expenses, moving expenses, and a few others. Several of these are obviously designed to punish blue states especially hard. I suppose the gambling thing is a sop to evangelicals. Alimony is…hard to figure out. Ditto for moving expenses and tax prep. None of these are going to raise much money, so I’m not sure what the point is.

But there are two sizeable ones worth looking at. The first one is the bill’s expansion of the child tax credit. Netted together with other changes, this benefits families with lots of children. Here’s where those families live:

No surprise: red states tend to have a higher percentage of children who will qualify for the tax credit. Once again, the tax bill is biased in favor of red states.

But then there’s medical expenses. This is a little tricky to figure out, but I wanted to test my intuition that this actually hurts red states more than blue states. The deduction for medical expenses helps families with big out-of-pocket costs as a percentage of their income, so I used Urban Institute data on average spending among those with the highest medical expenses. Note that “top 10%” refers to those with the highest medical expenses, not to well-off people in general:

This time it’s red states that suffer the most. This makes sense, since red states have higher levels of uninsured residents and, often, higher medical costs thanks to less competition in rural areas.

So why is this deduction being killed off? It seems like it came out of nowhere, and it’s not as if the tea party has been outraged by it or anything. One possibility is that a deeper dive would show that it’s mostly poor people in each state who have big medical expenses, and who cares about the poor? Another possibility is that this is some kind of subtle attack on Obamacare that I can’t quite get my hands around. Or maybe I’m not using the right data to really see what’s going on here. It’s mysterious.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate