The Beth Medrash Govoha Department of Government Affairs has provided the following update on the nationwide effort to save the Qualified Tuition Benefit that is so crucial to Mechanchim and which has a cascade effect on mosdos and all parents:
This evening, multiple sources are reporting that the House elimination of the Sec. 117(d) Qualified Tuition Reduction was not included in the GOP Tax Reform Deal. This benefit for mechanchim and school employees has been protected in the final deal.
Eliminating Sec. 117(d) would have caused the loss to Rebbeim, educators, teachers and their families of hundreds of millions of dollars each year, financially devastating the North American Yeshiva system. This threat has now receded and our network of activists are staying on top of this to see it over the finish line.
We daven for the continued financial viability of our mosdos, and of every tuition paying parent.
This update is given with the caution that the actual bill language has not been released yet, and nothing should be considered final until the bill comes to the House and Senate floor for a vote next week. In the meantime, the reports that QTR is solid are very encouraging.
On another note regarding the tax bill, Agudath Israel made a strong effort to garner grass-roots expressions of support for QTR and for a new provision introduced by Senator Cruz that would have allowed parents to use 529 accounts for K-12 tuition. It is not yet known whether that 529 provision has been included in the final deal. More updates to follow as additional details emerge.
In a further encouraging development, other provisions that would have been unfavorable to mosdos have also been removed. In particular, a House provision to end the use of tax-exempt bonds by nonprofit organizations was removed. Had this succeeded, it could have significantly increased costs for mosdos embarking on capital projects, but Baruch Hashem this too did not survive in the final deal.
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One Response
Given the huge salaries our institutions give their teachers, they will all qualify for “need based” assistance. Meanwhile their own taxes will fall due the increase in the child tax credit and the doubling of the standard deduction. A possible danger is that the new tax law might result in many affluent donors having less incentive to make charitable contributions, but that is probably less of a problem for our community than most secular communities.