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Comment by ideonexus | Hacker News Reader

I am very confused by "Current Tax System You'd save $0" part. This makes no sense and reeks of snakeoil.

Then I looked up who created this calculator, and it's Maximm Lott, a writer for Fox News who's twitter retweets Republican talking points and is bending over backwards to sell this plan:

https://twitter.com/maximlott?lang=en

This propaganda has no business on HN. If you want a tax plan calculator, use the NYT's.

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The NYT did seem to put more effort into it:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/17/upshot/tax-ca...

At least it looks nicer.

I quite like the no-frills approach of the originally posted calculator. It's kind of refreshing.

Who cares who created it? The calculation is laid out and unless you have an error to present, you're criticism is invalid.

It looks correct to me and is obviously more featured than the NYTs calculator which only allows you to pick ranges and subsets.

This one was off by a tremendous amount for me. From any user expectations POV, the NYT calculator didn’t allow as many inputs, which forced me to accept that it would be ballpark approximation at best. However, the visuals gave me a good idea of which variables (income, itemized deductions) would push me closer to seeing a decrease vs increase in my tax bill.

This propaganda has no business on HN

Aside from visiting HN I also see the stories percolate up my Facebook feed via following https://www.facebook.com/hnbot/, and this story made the cut.

Indeed, a lot of terrible stories, often flagged off the front page, end up being posted by that bot. Given that only a small, small percentage of HN stories get posted to their Facebook feed it is mystifying, and certainly isn't the best of the best. Asking generally to any who know: Is it only if a story has a Facebook-ready sized image?

Is that Facebook account affiliated with Y Combinator and Hacker News?

No idea, and it isn't verified. But it does use the official icon, and has some 130,000 followers so it is fairly mainstream.

Well, there's two things that contribute to what's seen from that bot: what the bot is actually doing, and what Facebook's algorithms end up displaying in your feed, neither of which we have much insight into :(

That means you save $0 compared to current system. (Maybe obvious, but it retains format of the boxes for all the bills.)

You will see the results of the calc are consistent with NYT's, except TaxPlanCalculator.com actually takes you exact info. NYT forces you into buckets -- "married 2 kids" is their only option.

TPC also first out, on Fri night, and budget $0 + server costs!

Are you able to point to where it's factually incorrect? For me, the NYT times estimates were in the same range.

Was the irony in your last paragraph intentional?

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