Why the new 12000 dollar standard deduction for single, and 24000 for joint in the new tax plan is

[marybourg]

66. And in my mind it's been an "exemption" all these years.

When it changed, neither my spouse nor I were old enough to take it, so I guess
I paid no attention. When I did start to take it -for just my spouse, at first - I guess I must have assumed I was taking the extra "exemption" I had learned about so many years earlier.

I was just remembering that when I did my first return when I was 16 in '58, it actually was on a postcard. My parents' wasn't, but mine was. Maybe I was just claiming a refund of my withholding. Returns were amazingly simpler then. I remember when we sold our first house, in '73, there was not even a form to report it. You reported it on a line for misc. income, then attached an "explanation" on a plain sheet of paper. If you bought another house of equal or higher price, you could roll the old basis into a new one, to be adjusted at the eventual sale, but if you didn't buy a new house, as we did not, you paid CG tax. Later, there was a "one time" exemption of , I believe, $250,000, so you had to decide if you would take it "now", even if you couldn't use the whole amount, or save it until you really could use up that large an exemption. That change, and the subsequent one, to the provision we have now, I clearly remember, but exemption to deduction. . . .