The following article by Mary Papenfuss was posted on the Huffington Post website December 21, 2017:
We’ll be filling out our tax returns next year on a postcard — not.
Ivanka Trump’s victory boast on “Fox & Friends” about her dad’s new tax measure included a couple of gaffes.
She spoke Thursday about Americans filing under the new law in April. In fact, the new law won’t kick in until 2018, and taxes for that year will be due in April 2019.
She also boasted that the new tax law is so simple that the “vast majority” of Americans will file on postcards, which experts deny. The GOP initially touted the plan with postcard props to underscore the new law’s “simplicity.”
Ivanka Trump’s gaffes prompted Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin to blast her “cluelessness,” calling the first daughter and White House adviser a “walking advertisement for the danger of nepotism.”
Single taxpayers and couples with no children can already file with a single-page 1040EZ form, which could conceivably be reformatted on a postcard.
“You can file with the EZ form, but it’s probably not in your best interest,” Mark Steber, a top tax officer at Jackson Hewitt Tax Service, told NBC News. “I do not envision a scenario where our society is so simple and so standardized that … 100 million-plus Americans will pay a fair amount of tax and be equitably treated with nine lines.”
Senior researcher Joseph Rosenberg at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center told the Los Angeles Times that for “some taxpayers [the new law] will be a little simpler, for some it will be more complex, but overall it will be familiar and folks won’t think of it as some drastic change. On net, it’s not going to be any simpler.”
The first daughter said she was “really looking forward to doing a lot of traveling in April when people realize the effect that this has, both on the process of filling out their taxes ― the vast majority will be doing so on a single postcard — but also having experienced the relief that will be starting as early as February,” she said.
The White House insisted to CNN Money that Ivanka Trump was actually referring to April 2019. “This is silly. She was referring to the following April,” said an emailed statement.
The White House insisted to CNN Money that Ivanka Trump was actually referring to April 2019. “This is silly. She was referring to the following April,” said an emailed statement.
When Twitter users pointed out the first daughter’s goofs, she dodged the criticism.