Dumb and Dumber(er): The GOP Tax Plan Will Destroy Graduate Education

Despite earning $23,000/year [as a stipend], you'd pay taxes on $40,520 or $57,914 at a public University [including waived tuition], and despite earning $32,500, you'd pay taxes on $81,440 at a private University. For this last figure, this would result in a higher tax rate than anyone else in the nation pays. These numbers represent increases in taxes of $2,628, $6,193, and $10,650, respectively, on these hypothetical graduate students.

One could hardly cook up a worse provision for killing what is left of STEM higher education and hence technical advance in this country. The article doesn't even mention the point that the waived tuitions are funny-money numbers in the first place, so if students have to pay taxes on them, they are basically being taxed on made-up-numbers to ensure the comfort of schools, thus resembling indentured servitude and even some forms of slavery.

Indeed, we should probably go the other way -- make grad students (up to a certain earnings level) completely exempt from taxes...