Grad students fear portion of tax plan
Hundreds of UC Berkeley graduate students gathered at Sproul Plaza on Wednesday to loudly protest a piece of the Congressional Republican tax bill that they say would push many of them into higher tax brackets and jeopardize their education.
The students joined a coordinated walkout at college campuses across the country to oppose the GOP proposal
that, for the first time, would consider waived tuition as taxable income. Universities often grant tuition waivers to attract doctoral students, mainly in the sciences, and allow them to pursue research while working as teaching or research assistants.
“This tax bill will be catastrophic,” Vetri Velan, a Ph.D. student in physics, told the crowd. “If you’re a teaching assistant, your taxes will go up $1,400,” said Velan, who analyzed how the bill would affect students. “Many of you might decide to end your education.”
The provision — which critics have labeled the “ghost tax” because students never actually see the tuition that would be taxed — is part of the House version of the $1.5 trillion tax overhaul bill, not the Senate version.
The tax bill is moving through Congress along party lines. On Tuesday, the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, told the New York Times that he believed the Senate and the House would align their versions and that the tax overhaul would pass.
“There are some areas where we are taking different approaches that will be worked, and can only be worked out, in a conference,” Brady said.
At UC Berkeley, Velan warned the students that even though the Senate version doesn’t have the tuition tax, “anything goes” when both chambers negotiate.
Student Fiona Ruddy took the microphone and urged everyone to “make sure you call, tweet and shame your representatives — especially if you’re from Michigan and purple states.”
Sam Kohn, a Ph.D. student in physics, told the crowd that just because California is represented by Democrats who oppose the GOP tax plan doesn’t mean there isn’t something the state’s senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris can do.
Calling out the senators’ local phone numbers, Kohn told the students to phone them that afternoon and urge them to get the senators to slow down Senate business. Kohn got them to repeat en masse what they should say when someone picks up the phone:
“I want the senator to withhold consent on everything in the Senate until this bill is dead!”
The crowd repeated the message three times.
One of the students attending the rally was Randi Evans, a doctoral student in performance studies who is a parent and the first in her family to pursue a graduate degree.
She said that instead of being taxed on her current annual income of $20,000, she’d be taxed on an income of $60,000.
“This bill would make my husband and me go into a higher tax bracket,” Evans said. “I feel upset because I’m from a working-class background, and it would make it prohibitive to pursue my education.
“I don’t know if I’d have to drop out.”
UC President Janet Napolitano and student Regent Paul Monge, also a graduate student at UC Berkeley, issued a joint statement this week opposing the proposal to tax tuition waivers.
“Tax reform should not be borne on the backs of our hardworking graduate students,” the statement said, noting that graduate students “further groundbreaking research, mentor the next generation and contribute to the economy.”
Such students “deserve congressional support,” they said. “Not a tax hike.”
“This bill would make my husband and me go into a higher tax bracket . ... I don’t know if I’d have to drop out.” Randi Evans, doctoral student in performance studies at UC Berkeley