Jim Roye
Jim Roye
Aug 31, 2018 · 1 min read

The idea seems more like a give-away to the commercial gym businesses than anything else.

If the government has an interest in promoting weight loss and chooses to use the tax system as a means of advancing that interest, then it should do so directly. Have people show up at their doctor’s office once a year and get weighed in and base any tax credit/deduction on the weight they actually lost.

Realistically, very few people would benefit from this bill.

Only 30% of taxpayers itemized their deductions prior to the most recent tax revisions and the Tax Policy Center has projected that the number will drop to less than 10% now that the standard deduction has been raised.

This bill also classifies these expenses as “Medical expenses” so your gym membership would get added to your other medical expenses and you still can’t deduction them unless they exceed 10% of your taxable (AGI) income.

And then on top of those, under the current tax law, your total for all deductions is capped at $10,000.

In the end, only a few thousand (relatively high income) people would be able to take advantage of this deduction and there is nothing that would actually show that any of them showed up at a gym (or used any gym equipment that they bought) at all.

If we want to reward people via the tax system for losing weight, then why not just directly reward people that actually do so?

    Jim Roye

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    Jim Roye