On the evening of Friday, December 1, 2017, the Senate passed a massive tax bill. Here’s why you should care.

1. We don’t even know what’s in it.

Really we don’t. Don’t come at me quoting Nancy Pelosi's infamous “we have to pass it to know what’s in it” comment from 2010. This bill literally has barely legible handwritten notes, amendments, and updates scribbled in the margins.

2. "It’s too many damn pages for any man to understand." ~Hamilton

Fitting, really, that my dad and I were having a conversation on Thursday about the obscene amount of regulations in blue collar industries. If you’re self-employed, it would be a full time job to keep up all the regulations and changes implemented in any one legislative session, which would prevent you from doing, you know, your actual job. Similarly, the current tax code is already tens of thousands of pages long. This current addendum is another 479 pages long. Coupled with handwritten amendments, it would take someone several weeks and an advanced law degree with a focus in taxes in order to even get through this addendum, let alone the entirety of the current tax code.

3. It’s confusing.

Seriously. A person shouldn’t need an advanced law degree to understand their taxes. The other day, I spent a good hour researching one singular amendment to the tax bill. The current tax code is already convoluted enough. Don’t believe me? Just try and find any one specific bit of information from the current tax code. It’s set up in a way that’s intentionally confusing and hard to understand. Then when you read the addendum and try and locate where in the tax bill the current statute is, and then what exactly this bill will be changing, you’re suddenly confused, frustrated, and you have no more information than what you started with.

4. It will completely change college funding.

First off, the current tax code already taxes scholarships as unearned income. I know this because my school is fully funded through a tuition waiver and scholarships. Any funding that is greater than the direct and immediate amount of school related expenses, that being tuition and fees, is taxable. So this new tax code is particularly horrifying for me. Under the new rules, graduate students are hit the hardest, but undergrads take a big hit too. A common way for graduate studies to be funded is by institutions offering tuition waivers on the condition that the grad student will in turn take up a Teaching Assistantship. Grad students are also then given a stipend for living expenses. Currently, this means that the tuition waiver isn’t taxed, but that the stipend is. Under the new bill, any tuition waivers that are attached to the condition of employment, i.e. Teaching Assistant, are now taxable, along with the already taxable stipend.

5. It was passed sneakily and underhandedly.

Pure and simple, this was passed without regard for public opinion. There were no public hearings, and the bill was passed late on a Friday evening. This isn’t a partisan issue. This isn’t about Democrat versus Republican. This is the government, our Senators, whom we pay to represent us, failing to do their jobs and voting only in their own best interests.

There’s still time to do something. The bill has to pass on the House floor, and then the bills have to be reconciled before they can actually be signed into law. Call, email, even text (RESIST to 50409;

Resistbot is a great tool) to make your opinion heard. I don’t disagree that we desperately need tax reform, but this bill is the wrong way to bring that about.