Tax plan hits students

The U.S. House Republicans’ tax plan takes aim at a surprising target: student workers in higher education (“Trump presses Senate to move on tax overhaul,” Nov. 17). A provision that calls for taxing tuition waivers as income threatens to force doctoral candidates who are not already independently wealthy out of graduate school and to weaken the quality of our universities’ research programs.

Teaching and resident assistants only make perhaps $20,000 to $30,000 a year during grad school, and many are already tens of thousands of dollars in debt from their undergraduate education. Taxing graduate students on the value of tuition waivers, which can be worth anywhere from $12,000 to $50,000 per year, could send our effective tax rate sky high.

Why are congressional Republicans willing to jeopardize our university system by threatening graduate workers with such a large tax hike? A major reason is that they want to find ways to pay for expensive tax breaks for the wealthy.

Keep net neutrality

The Federal Communications Commission should continue and, in fact, strengthen its rules over internet access, or net neutrality (“FCC chairman sets out to scrap open internet access rules,” Nov. 21). The FCC’s attempts to strip the internet of its neutrality are disingenuous, framed as beneficial for citizens, and have even been timed in such a way to keep citizens distracted from the issue.

The internet, however, is not a place for companies or special interest groups to reign supreme; it is a community that belongs to us all. The implications of removing net neutrality are not in the best interest of Massachusetts residents or the nation.

I urge others to fight hard, now and in the future, to maintain a free and open internet.