Graduate School Taxes

Education taxes in the United States can seem complicated, especially since the standard tax forms and publications aren't the easiest to navigate, and often schools and employers don’t provide general help even when the majority of their students will have very similar situations.

If you keep the basic concept of an income tax in mind, though, it should become easier to figure out:

Any and all money you receive from someone else is taxable and must be reported as such unless otherwise specified¹.

I will go through the 4 most common income categories for a graduate student, with the assumption that that the reader has never filed taxes before, and provide information on free tax filing programs.

Disclaimer: I have no formal tax training. I’m just a moderately intelligent graduate student who has dealt with this for a few years and read the relevant documents.

Constructing a ‘Fair’ Income Tax

When it comes to taxation, what is fair? What is not? In thinking about economics, it occurred to me that a simple discussion of how we got the income tax system we have today would be pertinent.

"The Death of a Tax Collector" and Other Republican Bedtime Stories

You don’t have to be an economist to know that tax cuts, especially for the wealthy and for corporations, can only produce a small short-term benefit to the economy, if any benefit at all. It’s actually common sense, but sometimes common sense takes a back seat to the back pocket, and public good to personal greed.