++And other tax questions from Vox readers, answered. +
++On the Money is a monthly advice column. If you want advice on spending, saving, or investing — or any of the complicated emotions that may come up as you prepare to make big financial decisions — you can submit your question on this form. +
++This month, we’re answering four reader questions about taxes — and to ensure that we’re giving the best advice, I’m teaming up with Caitlynn Eldridge, an Omaha-based CPA who has spent her entire career focusing on tax prep, including two years with Deloitte Tax Services. You can read more of Eldridge’s advice in our CPA Q&A, but let’s start with these four common tax questions. +
++I moved into a new tax bracket. How should I manage that, and what are the things I should be aware of? +
++ND: Okay, I feel like both you and I know the answer to this one, but it needs restating. +
++(We didn’t actually restate this, but if we had, it would have gone something like this: When you move into a new tax bracket, only the amount of money that falls within the new bracket gets taxed at a higher amount. If you are a single person whose income went from $90,000 to $100,000, for example, according to the 2023 tax brackets you’d pay 10 percent tax on the first $11,000 of your income, and then you’d pay 12 percent tax on the next tranche of income up to $44,725, then 22 percent on the next tranche up to $95,375, and 24 percent on the last chunk of your income. You’re really only paying higher taxes on $4,625, in this example — and that number could be even smaller depending on your deductions and credits.) +
++CE: Yes! You have to pay a new percentage on every dollar in the new bracket, but nothing else has changed! +
++ND: The old money still gets old taxed! +
++CE: I still have clients who come to me and say, “I don’t want to make any more money. I’m paying too much in taxes!” We don’t have a 100 percent tax bracket, you’re still making money, go enjoy! +
++What should I do if I haven’t paid my taxes in previous years? I’m lost on how to remedy this. +
++CE: When you’ve fallen behind on your taxes, that’s when it’s time to get somebody to help you. It’s going to cost you to have a professional come in, but you’re going to want some handholding as you go back and file. There’s a decent chance that if you were a W-2 employee, you might not owe any money. You might even get a refund! But if you do owe, the IRS is really good about it. There are payment plans, maybe you can find a family member to give you a low-interest loan, and we can work with the IRS. They’re not showing up at your door, you’re not getting arrested, we have time to work things out. That said, we need to get something filed so you can move on with your life. +
++(We should have mentioned that there is a point at which you can get arrested for tax evasion and other forms of tax fraud, so be aware that you can’t just put off paying your taxes indefinitely. Also, you may be charged penalties for late filing and missed payments — which is why it’s a good idea to get caught up on your taxes as quickly as possible.) +
++ND: And just to reiterate — if you’re 18 and you have a part-time job, you need to pay taxes. If you’re in school and you have a scholarship, you’re probably paying taxes. +
++CE: Yes! Even if you’re 16, if you’re working, you’re going to owe. If you drove for Uber Eats, that’s income. The IRS doesn’t distinguish between part-time jobs and gig economy jobs and full-time jobs. If you’re making money, you have to report it. That said, you have to make over whatever the standard deduction is for the year before you might end up paying any taxes [beyond what is deducted out of your paycheck], and if you have a scholarship, you have to earn more with your scholarship than what you’re paying in costs for it to be considered income. +
++My partner and I decided not to get legally married, and we have a son. How do we decide who claims our son for taxes? +
++ND: I don’t know the answer to this one, which is why I’m very glad you’re here. +
++CE: In this case, since it sounds like the letter writer and their partner are on good terms, they get to decide. I’d lean toward the person with the higher income, since they might see the bigger benefit, but this is where we can use tax software to figure things out. If this person claims the child as a dependent, what will their taxes look like, and if the other person claims the child as a dependent, what will those taxes look like, and which one is better? When we’re getting along, we get to make the decision. We don’t have to go through the IRS tiebreaker rules. If we get to the point where we’re not getting along and we’re not communicating, then we start asking questions like, “Who did the child live with for the majority of the year?” +
++I got married and we bought our first house this year. Everyone keeps telling us we’re going to have a big refund. Is that true? I’ve always done my own taxes, do I need a tax professional for this eventful year? +
++ND: Is this the year to go pro? +
++CE: Totally do it yourself. The house, typically, would have been a big deal when more people itemized their deductions. Ever since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) came into effect, the standard deduction became so high that it’s very, very rare to see anybody itemize. Not only did the standard deduction go up, but we also capped itemizing our taxes for state purposes. Honestly, the fact that you bought a house won’t have that much of an effect on your taxes, so you’re just going to pull up that software and your status is going to be married filing jointly, most likely, and you’re going to put in your W-2s and take the standard deduction. The software can definitely handle that for you. +
++A user revolt has only made Congress more determined to ban TikTok. But it’s not over. +
++This week, congressional offices on Capitol Hill were inundated with phone calls and social media posts begging them to reconsider an audacious bill currently moving through Congress: a potential ban on TikTok. +
++The social media app told its users to call their members of Congress in protest of the new bipartisan bill, arguing that a ban would infringe on their constitutional right to free expression and harm businesses and creators across the country. +
++Teens and the elderly alike reportedly pleaded with congressional staff, saying they spend all day on the app. Creators posted on TikTok urging their followers to do the same. Some offices decided to temporarily shut down their phone lines as a result, which meant that they couldn’t field calls from their constituents about other issues either. +
++++@anthonyallistair + ++#greenscreen #tiktokshutdown #tiktokban #tiktokshutdown2024 #popculture #creatorsoftiktok #breakingnews #usa #fyp +
+♬ original sound - #Californiaguy +
+Lawmakers in both parties didn’t take kindly to the impromptu lobbying frenzy. Some characterized it as confirmation of their fears that the Chinese-owned app — which is already banned on government devices — is brainwashing America. The overrun phone lines were merely “making the case” for the bill, US Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote on X. +
++Indeed, all 50 members of the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce voted Thursday to advance the legislation, which would require TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest from the app within 165 days or else it will be removed from US app stores. +
++That sets up a vote on the House floor next week. The White House has backed the bill from the beginning, reportedly providing technical support to legislators when they were drafting it (even as President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has started using TikTok for voter outreach). +
++In other words, this bill isn’t just grandstanding. It has a real chance of becoming law. +
++That said, there’s the crucial question of whether it would survive legal scrutiny. A federal court recently overturned a Montana law that sought to ban TikTok. Though legislators sponsoring the US House bill argue that it is narrow in scope and would not amount to a total ban on TikTok that would violate the First Amendment, some legal experts believe otherwise. +
++“In my view, this loaded gun is a ban in all but name, and banning TikTok is obviously unconstitutional,” said Ramya Krishnan, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “This ban on TikTok is materially the same [as the Montana ban] in all the ways that matter.” +
++Can Congress ban TikTok? +
++The constitutional law here appears straightforward: Congress can’t outright ban TikTok or any social media platform unless it can prove that it poses legitimate and serious privacy and national security concerns that can’t be addressed by any other means. The bar for such a justification is necessarily very high in order to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights, Krishnan said. +
++Lawmakers argue that the bill under consideration isn’t actually a total ban. Rather, it would enact a new authority to ban apps in “narrowly defined situations” when they are controlled by a foreign adversary, New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the ranking Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, said before the committee Thursday. He compared the bill to historical efforts to prevent foreign ownership of US airwaves due to national security concerns. +
++“It is no different here, and I take the concerns raised by the intelligence community very seriously,” he said. +
++Other House lawmakers have criticized TikTok for attempting to portray the bill as a total ban. +
++But legal experts say that an indirect ban may still be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Civil society groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy and Technology wrote in a recent letter to federal lawmakers that jeopardizing access to TikTok — ”home to massive amounts of protected speech and association” — also “jeopardizes access to free expression.” There are also arguably less restrictive and more effective means of protecting any national security interests at stake in this bill, they asserted, considering the Chinese government could continue to access Americans’ data in other ways. +
++“This bill would functionally ban the distribution of TikTok in the United States, and would grant the President broad new powers to ban other social media platforms based on their country of origin,” they said in the letter. +
++Many experts believe it is unlikely that the government will be able to meet the high standard to prove that TikTok poses privacy and national security concerns that can’t otherwise be resolved, said Kate Ruane, director of CDT’s Free Expression Project. Lawmakers have publicly cited concerns about the Chinese government using the app to spy on Americans and to spread propaganda that could be used to influence the 2024 presidential election. +
++Though TikTok has repeatedly insisted that it has never shared user data with the Chinese government nor been asked to do so, a former employee of ByteDance has alleged in court that the government had nevertheless accessed such data on a widespread basis for political purposes during the 2018 protests in Hong Kong. And in December, TikTok parent company ByteDance acknowledged it had fired four employees who accessed the data of two journalists while trying to track down an internal leaker. +
++But so far, members of Congress have not provided concrete proof for their claims about Chinese digital espionage and seem to have little interest in offering any transparency: Before the committee voted to advance the bill Thursday, lawmakers had a closed-door classified briefing on national security concerns associated with TikTok. +
++“TikTok is Communist Chinese malware that is poisoning the minds of our next generation and giving the CCP unfettered access to troves of Americans’ data,” US Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) said in a statement. “We cannot allow the CCP to continue to harness this digital weapon.” +
++However, national security experts have also questioned the rationale behind a ban. Mike German, a former FBI special agent and fellow at the Brennan Centre for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told Al Jazeera that, like many American apps, TikTok collects data on its users that a foreign government could theoretically use for its own hostile purposes. But those governments could just as well buy Americans’ data on a legitimate open market, where the sale of that data remains unrestricted. +
++And even if lawmakers did provide more evidence of national security concerns, it’s still not clear that the ban would pass legal muster. +
++Courts have already applied strict scrutiny to previous attempts to ban TikTok. A federal judge blocked the Montana TikTok ban — which also imposed a financial penalty on TikTok and any app store hosting it each time a user accesses or is offered the ability to access the app — before it was scheduled to go into effect in November. +
++Montana lawmakers justified the ban as a means of protecting the privacy interests of consumers in the state. But US District Judge Donald Molloy wrote in his ruling that the law overstepped the Montana legislature’s powers and left “little doubt that Montana’s legislature and Attorney General were more interested in targeting China’s ostensible role in TikTok than with protecting Montana consumers.” +
++Former President Donald Trump also twice tried to ban TikTok via executive action, only for courts to strike down his proposal both times. +
++What lawmakers could do instead of banning TikTok +
++If lawmakers are serious about protecting privacy and national security, Ruane said, they should instead pass comprehensive digital privacy legislation. +
++“That would be a better path forward,” she said. +
++Her organization, the Center for Democracy and Technology, has supported a bipartisan bill that passed a committee vote in 2022: the American Data Privacy and Protection Act. It included provisions requiring companies to allow consumers to consent to or reject the collection of their data, to allow consumers to download the data being collected on them and delete it, requiring consumers’ affirmative consent to share that data with a third party, and more. +
++It was the culmination of a decades-long effort to regulate the collection, use, and sale of consumer data, similar to the European Union’s regulatory efforts. It would have tasked the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general with enforcing the law and preempted the patchwork of privacy laws that have been enacted at the state level in the absence of comprehensive federal legislation. +
++However, the privacy bill stalled in Congress and was not reintroduced; Ruane said it’s unclear why. Now lawmakers are moving forward instead with the bill that could ban TikTok — without solving the underlying privacy concerns. +
++“This bill would fail to protect us from the many threats to our digital privacy posed by criminals, private companies, and foreign actors,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Comprehensive data privacy legislation is the solution we need — not bans of certain categories of apps.” +
++A better question to ask than who wins the Oscar: Who benefits the most, win or lose? +
++Ah, the Oscars. Sunday night’s 96th Academy Awards are the night of a thousand stars and a thousand dreams (hello, Moonlight!) — or heartbreaks, if you’re among the losers (sorry, La La Land). The victorious moment can send a career careening to new heights (hello, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck!) or nudge it in exactly the same direction it was previously headed. (sorry to Mo’Nique.) +
++“Winning an Oscar changed my life, but I can’t say it changed it for the better,” Melissa Leo, who won 2011 Best Supporting Actress for The Fighter, said in a 2022 interview. “Post-Academy Award, I was like, ‘Oh, this is so great! So the work is just going to come in now, all these leading roles!’ I began to have expectations, and I had to get over that.” +
++Seldom is a career trajectory a straight line; for every Daniel Day-Lewis whose career remains ascendant after their first win, there’s a Leo, whose unforgettable performance didn’t necessarily translate to a career payoff. At times, the overexposure of an Oscar campaign can backfire; actresses like Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei have had to suffer through years or even decades of backlash for their Oscar wins. The backlash against Diablo Cody for … writing an Oscar-winning script while being a woman … was so intense that it not only wrecked her career for over a decade, but shut women out of winning the screenwriting category for a full 13 years. +
++Many of these complicated outcomes boil down to three things that always seem to go hand in hand with the Oscars: sexism, racism, and the toxic combination thereof, misogynoir. Sometimes, though, the Oscars and the subsequent choices of the people who win them are just weird. The ins and outs of Oscar nominations and wins — who gets them, who benefits from getting them, and what happens after you bring home that funny gold statuette — are so complicated that we decided to call in reinforcements to get to the bottom of what it all means. Here, three experts weigh in on what makes the acting Oscars matter, and what the criteria are for a true Oscars success story. +
++The interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity. +
++Katey Rich, Vanity Fair editor and creator of the podcast Little Gold Men +
++Do you think an Oscar win has any type of consistency and impact for an actor? I’m not sure that it does. +
++I think it really depends on who you are and at what point in your career you are. La La Land [for which Emma Stone won Best Actress in 2017] was made because Emma Stone was already a star. She had been in big movies. She was something you could pin a movie like that on. But then she wins the Oscar and immediately goes and gets cast in The Favourite, which leads to this collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos [who directed Stone to an Oscar-nominated performance in this season’s Poor Things]. It kind of gives her this sheen of prestige that she wouldn’t have had having graduated up from Superbad and Crazy, Stupid Love. It kind of helped her level up in this way and be able to exercise her power. Certainly the same for Jennifer Lawrence. She won really early on in her career. +
++But those are also people who already had the attention of the industry, who were already on their way to being stars. They’re young, beautiful women. But then you have artists like Mo’Nique — she wins Best Supporting Actress [for Precious], but she had specific ideas of what she wanted her career to be and really wasn’t trying to climb up a ladder as a result of it. I don’t think winning the Oscar had a ton of impact on her career at all, partly because of her choice, and partly because she did not fit the mold. +
++I think there’s a huge race component to that, but even Melissa Leo had been a character actress for a long time, wins an Oscar for The Fighter, continues being a character actress. +
++I feel like the supporting category is often reserved for one-hit wonders — which is not to disparage those actors but just to describe how we think about the parts that they play. You can give a supporting actor the kind of quirks that you don’t necessarily get from a lead role. That doesn’t necessarily lend itself to career longevity. +
++The one-hit-wonder aspect comes in those categories more for nominees than for wins. Barkhad Abdi who gets nominated for Captain Phillips — everyone’s like, oh, he’s this Somali refugee, he’s breaking out. And then because he’s not someone who Hollywood was going to be able to find a lot of spots for, they continue to not find a lot of spots for him after that. +
++But the winners — I don’t know if it’s a chicken or an egg thing, but the winners can often be more in the “beloved character actor who now gets to be a slightly more beloved character actor” category. Like J.K. Simmons had been “that guy” and then Whiplash [for which Simmons won the Oscar in 2015] breaks him out, and now he’s “that guy” who you recognize but is playing a lot of similar parts. But I bet if you ask J.K. Simmons and his agents, he’s getting paid better. He’s getting better offers. There’s a subtler difference between what you’re seeing as a moviegoer and the differences in their fortunes. +
++Alece Oxendine, director of industry and festival outreach, Columbia University Film Program +
++What do you think the Oscar means, if anything, and has that meaning changed over time? Has it never really meant anything at all? +
++I think that it’s always meant something for different types of people. It’s always been something that was the culmination of your career, but I think the biggest [change] has been because of the 2015 #OscarsSoWhite campaign with April Reign, who really pushed for this new way of thinking about what it means to achieve this if you are from a marginalized community. What it has meant all these years is excluding extremely talented people because of who they are, who they love, who they represent, what color they are, or what country they’re from. So I think this is a bigger question of what are the Oscars than just like, oh, this is a pretty gold statue. +
++It seems like the awards night itself is part of the performance. That means that the campaign trail is also part of the performance, right? The marketing campaign, the promos, the interviews, all of it. +
++Oh yes, it’s a machine. And there are specific companies dedicated to this machine, the companies that help service the campaigns. You can’t buy an academy vote. But in a creative way of getting people excited and talking about these films, watching these films, whether it’s via screenings or having the actors there. That always makes a difference in how the voters feel about the film. +
++The mechanism by which you win the Oscar is almost like a collective group effort. +
++Yeah. Oh, absolutely. That’s why people say I couldn’t have done this without my team. And the team is massive. It’s massive, and it goes so much deeper than you can ever imagine. People really supporting everybody. That’s why people always say — like an actor, especially — doing the campaign is a business in and of itself. +
++I think that’s really interesting, especially when you consider that sometimes this doesn’t actually even yield that much for the actor in the long run. +
++Well, it does and it doesn’t. I think the three buckets I see are the Stalwarts. They’re the Meryl Streeps, the Anthony Hopkins, Daniel Day-Lewis, Helen Mirren, Cate Blanchett, Viola Davis. These are super A++ stars. They won multiple awards. The benefit they get after winning an Oscar is like, I am confirmed that I’m the best, I can command any role at any price. I’ll always be assumed to be top-billed. This is Oscar with a capital O. +
++And then the next category I think of is your Rising Stars. These are the breakouts. These are the ones, the first time they ever do a major motion picture, they’re winning. Lupita Nyong’o, Jennifer Hudson, Emma Stone, Jared Leto. I would even include Mahershala Ali in this as well. So they worked hard at what they wanted to do. This is who we’re rooting for. Lily Gladstone, Colman Domingo, America Ferrera, Da’Vine Joy Randolph — that is my personal favorite to win forever. +
++But here’s the problem that they have. They’re going to struggle to command the respect and the money afterward. They’re the ones who take the biggest risk on their future projects, but sometimes it takes time for them to get back to that level. They’re the ones who are most affected by the Oscar curse. +
++And then you have your Comeback Homies, and those are like your J.K. Simmons, your Chris Plummer, even Morgan Freeman. These are the ones who have been formerly snubbed, who’ve had decade-long careers, and they’re finally getting their due, literally finally getting the recognition they deserve. We cheer them on the hardest because they represent us. There’s a sense of the audience that they represent that if they can do it, I can do it too. +
++If I’m on a team and I want the best for my celebrity, how do I push them into the next tier bucket? +
++It’s hypnotism. It’s putting a rune on somebody, a book of spells, that kind of thing. +
++Saying, I believe in you. I believe in your work and I believe you make the right decisions for your next project. Because ultimately it does come down to their decision and encouraging them. +
++Or, well, what’s the old saying? Make a deal with the devil. +
++Michael Schulman, New Yorker staff writer and author of Oscar Wars +
++I thought the actor categories would be the easiest Oscars to quantify. But as I’ve been looking for consistency in terms of what happens to the winners and their careers after that, they’re not very easy to quantify at all. +
++The inconsistency is kind of the theme. Some people have complete upswings after their big Oscar moment, and some people fall prey to the Oscar curse. Every once in a while it doesn’t add up in the way that you think it would. Austin Butler has been doing great since he was nominated last year for Elvis, but that was also a star-making role, so I’m not sure you can separate the two. It’s hard to parse. I don’t think anyone would say that Charles Melton being in the mix this year was bad for him, even though he didn’t get nominated. Obviously, his star’s rising and the Oscar conversation helped. +
++There are so many counterexamples as well. Two that come to mind immediately to me are Anne Hathaway in 2013, when she won for Les Miserables and faced the Anne Hathaway backlash period. And in my book, I also wrote about Halle Berry in 2002. She had this historic win for Monsters Ball, and the next movie she did was Catwoman and she won a Razzie award, and there was a big backlash to her as well. Maybe the theme is that this happens to women. +
++In a way, winning the Oscar isn’t as important as getting nominated or even being discussed. The meta-narratives around campaign season can sort of crystallize an actor’s public image in a way that is or isn’t helpful to them. Also, there’s a big difference between an Oscar nomination or win putting someone on the map and a veteran actor getting the career award, the sort of — +
++The “I’m here to collect my Oscar” award. +
++The Brendan Fraser Comeback Award. Yeah. And that’s also different between men and women because historically, Best Actress winners tend to be younger, and they tend to be ingenues, whereas Best Actor winners are always a little bit older. It’s very rare that you get a young, up-and-coming hot new actor in the acting categories, but that always happens for actresses. I don’t really know why. Maybe it’s just the obvious — that there’s this perception that women peak earlier in their careers than men, which is obviously terrible. And then they come back when they’re 60 or 70, Annette Benning, and have another go at it. +
++So does that mean that the “Oscar curse” is another way of framing misogyny against women in the industry? +
++I think so. There are male Oscar curses for sure. Bradley Cooper might be walking into an Oscar curse right now — he’s sort of in the Anne Hathaway role this year where we’re all going to need a break from him, fairly or not. But there’s certainly a strain of misogyny in how an actress can win an Oscar and then everyone decides they hate them the next day. +
++Some of these people were just going to be on a different trajectory anyway because that’s not what they want. I don’t think we’re going to see Sandra Hüller in the next Marvel movie. She’s going to go back to Germany and be in a play. That’s what she was going to do. But we all know who Sandra Hüller is now, and she probably will have a lot more opportunities to do whatever she wants, and I think she’s going to make interesting, weird choices, and that’ll be great. But I don’t think that she’s necessarily after a big Hollywood career. +
++In the best-case scenario, an Oscar gives you more clout to make the choices that you want in a very constrained industry. But I don’t think that is what happens to everyone. +