Actress Jenna Fischer criticized the tax bill for taking away the $250 tax deduction that teachers get for buying school supplies, but had to apologize when she discovered the deduction had been preserved. Her apology defended teachers, most of whom spend far more than $250 to supply their classrooms.
Conservatives lashed out at her for not realizing the $250 deduction was retained.
She tweeted:
”Thanks for your tweets! I had some facts wrong. Teachers surveyed by Scholastic in 2016 personally spent an average of $530 on school supplies for students. Teachers who worked at high-poverty schools spent an average of $672. The tax deduction was capped at $250.”
Classy.
Ah, those highly paid teachers, always looking for tax breaks. Not equal to the breaks coming to the 1%, of course.
Nice to see an actress who knows the score.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here’s Joe Kloc’s summary of the tax bill from Harper’s Weekly:
Three days before Christmas, US president Donald Trump held a signing ceremony for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which will provide middle-class households with an average tax break of $900 and will give the top one percent of earners an average savings of $90,000, an amount greater than the income of 70 percent of Americans. “We did a rush job,” said Trump, explaining that he wanted to sign the bill before Christmas so that he would not be criticized on the television news he reportedly watches for up to eight hours a day. Trump signed the bill into law with a large black marker; said that the press had given him “no credit” for signing more legislation than any other president in “the history of our country,” which he had not done; and added that he had some “beautiful pens” on his desk that he wanted to give to the boom-mic operators in his office, whose industry-wide average income in 2013 was about 0.3 percent of the additional annual tax savings the president is expected to receive. Trump, who has said the bill was “for the middle class” and would cost him “a fortune,” flew to his private club in Palm Beach; told a table of members that they “all just got a lot richer” from the tax bill, which allows corporate sales agents to take deductions for bar tabs; and traveled to West Palm Beach, where he played golf at one of his private courses and then visited a local fire station. “How’s your 401k,” Trump asked a group of firemen, who under the new tax law will no long be able to take deductions for the cost of cleaning their uniforms. Trump tweeted that companies had begun “showering their workers with bonuses”; a spokesperson for Wells Fargo, whose CEO made 527 times the average salary of a US bank teller in 2016, said the company would raise its minimum wage from $13.50 to $15 per hour; the CEO for AT&T, who received $16.1 million in stock awards and $5.7 million in non-equity incentives on top of his $1.8 million salary in 2016, said the company would give 200,000 employees a $1,000 bonus; an AT&T spokesperson confirmed that the company planned to lay off at least one thousand workers; and the former director of the Puerto Rican budget office said that the tax bill would raise the price for companies on the island manufacturing high-end goods, an industry that employs 75,000 workers and has an annual market value of about half the estimated cost of repairing the 200,000 homes damaged by Hurricane Maria. “MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!” tweeted Trump, who in the 1980s banned Christmas trees from the lobby of one of his Manhattan apartment buildings as part of an effort to drive out longstanding elderly tenants and replace their homes with a luxury tower. “Business is looking really good for next year.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I understand that $250 deduction is not subtracted from the tax you owe. It is subtracted from your taxable income. If your taxable income is 20-percent of your net taxable income, that means you saw your taxes cut $50, not $250.
To make it really count, that $250 should be subtracted from the total tax you owe after doing your taxes.
You are correct, Lloyd.
Last year my wife spent over $800 in her classroom. The push to expand charters here in New Haven and across CT is only going to make it worse. And they still want teachers to perform tasks that were previously stipended position.. Is that what they mean by doing more with less?
Yes, George. The orientation of districts across the country is to do a lot more with a lot less, to get something for nothing, and to ask for volunteerism more and more and more and more.
The unions are nowhere to be found on a state and national level, but local unions, if they are decent, will rise to this occasion for the time that they can actually viably exist before Janus.
How will more charter schools in Conn, make it worse? If public schools have fewer students (because parents opt-out, and move their children to non-public schools), it would seem that the public schools would have fewer students. (And retain the same per-pupil funding).
By public schools having fewer students, you should deduce that there will be fewer supplies needed, for the lower student population.
If they are losing pupils, they are losing funding. Public schools are losing funding but their fixed costs remain the same plus they are left with the more challenging kids with special needs than the “miracle” charter schools.
@Joe: Anytime a school, which gets its budget based on the number of students enrolled, loses students, it will lose funding. Agreed. When digital photography killed Kodak, Rochester NY lost jobs, families and students. The schools down-sized.
When choice plans are implemented, the public schools which lose students will lose funding. And their “fixed costs” are still fixed. It costs just as much to heat a classroom with 35 students, as it does to heat a classroom with 34 students. Agreed.
When a choice plan is implemented, it follows that (some) special needs students will also leave the public school system. When parents of these students are empowered to seek instruction outside the public system, the public school will lose special-needs students as well. A similar phenomenon will occur, with respect to gifted/talented students. Some (not all) will leave the public system, and seek more appropriate instruction.
taking advantage of a teacher’s desire to actually teach
Let’s not applaud the filthy dogs who run the GOP just yet.
It’s nice that they allow me to deduct the $250, and they may get some attaboys for their great work, but the fact is they have denied the deduction for union dues. Here in fun city, that’s about $1400 a year, a net loss for us. And by doing this the same year they will push Janus, and make us a “right to work” nation, they will discourage even more people from unionizing. This is a net loss for teachers, a net loss for working people, and a net loss for Americans.
Unless they have private jets, of course.
I never felt paying unions dues was a loss because working conditions, pay and benefits improved because of the unions. Not to mention that you had someone at your back dealing with the occasional power mad principal. Unions could really be gutted with the Janus case.
My ex-wife was a union member. She felt that she got a somewhat adequate return on her union dues. Nevertheless, the case to watch is Bain v. CTA. Teachers (at least some of them) are objecting to their union dues being used for political purposes.
Teachers already have the right to opt out of paying for union political activity.
So what? There is always going to be someone that objects to just about anything. For instance, when the CA public school district I taught in from 1975 – 2005 voted for union representation between NEA and AFT, and NEA won the majority vote and became the union for that district. But for the next several decades, the teachers that voted for the AFT never stopped complaining and grumbling.
But what happens once the unions are gone, and the working man will have no voice except when they are allowed, if they are allowed, to vote … but all elections are subject to a barrage of crap to fool and/or depress voters.
How many American’s did not vote in the last presidential election because of all the PsyOp’s propaganda pouring out of Russia and the Alt-Right conspiracy theory generating, lying, fake media machine? In 2016, more Americans registered to vote than at any time in U.S. history but then many of those eligible voters didn’t vote. I blame that on the PsyOps crap coming in a tsunami from psychos like Bannon and Putin.
If we want more balance and honesty in the media, so voters are better informed instead of deplorably fooled and depressed, bring back the Fairness Doctrine and give the FCC very sharp teeth to enforce it. In addition, make union membership mandatory across the country.
Labor unions are democratic organizations. The members vote for the leadership.
Corporations are not democratic. They are autocratic and their only interest is making money.
The case to watch is Janus. They contend all union activity is political, and that it violates their free speech if they aren’t allowed to freeload. By that logic, I shouldn’t have to pay taxes.
What you said. If laws are being passed so freeloaders don’t have to pay union dues, then we should all, also have the choice not to pay taxes.
Wait – Let’s get back to Jenna Fischer. Bravo! Supporting teachers! An actress supporting teachers (compared to the blinders-on charter admirers in cozy Brooklyn and LALAland who bash teachers and schools)! An actress who gets it that teachers in schools in poverty (and parochial schools) choose to spend their own money – and even more than others. And, she cared enough to tweet, got it wrong, owned up to it – just like they teach you in school!
As for the rest of the responses – the hidden time-bombs in the tax law are:
1) local schools, fire, police, and roads that will go underfunded even more because the rich will vote against local and state tax increases now that they can’t deduct them and
2) all those middle class people who will get interviewed when they get a big refund check… this year. (interview those same people in five years when their break runs out but the rich not so much).
If you are a young(er) new(er) teacher and live in a high rent apt. in NJ, and have roommates to get by financially, and don’t own a home and don’t itemize, whatever monies you spend in your classroom are never returned to you via filing taxes; the deduction doesn’t exist. Is that incorrect?