Cruz Fights for More Flexible Education Savings Accounts

Before Congress adjourned
for Memorial Day weekend, Sen. Ted Cruz objected to a new retirement-saving
bill passed by the House because it left out one important reform.

The Texas Republican is standing up for expanded access to personal savings options for family education choice.

In 2017, college savings plans, or “529s,” were modified to allow parents to use money in those accounts for K-12 expenses.

Cruz’s Student Empowerment Act would build on those good reforms by allowing the money saved to go toward home schooling, apprenticeships, student-loan expenses, and education support for students with disabilities.

Named after their section of the Internal Revenue Code, 529 college and K-12 savings accounts allow family members to save and invest after-tax income for future expenses.

Unlike most other
forms of savings that get taxed once when the income is first earned, and then
again when the savings are spent, any earnings on investments in 529s are tax-free.

Expanding the
uses of 529 accounts help parents and students pay for education options
outside the traditional school system, giving Americans more choice in their
education.

For parents who
still want to save and accrue tax-free earnings until college, nothing changes.
It’s just more choice for those who want it.

Last week, the
House passed the Secure Act, a retirement savings bill that that
has some good and bad changes.

Two of the good
reforms are that the bill would increase eligible retirement savings and expand
new families’ access to their 401k to support parental leave for the birth or
adoption of a new child.

The bill also
includes new taxes on middle-class retirement savings and would allow select
community newspapers to use otherwise-required contributions to their
employees’ pensions to instead prop up their own balance sheets, making
newspaper employees’ retirements less secure.

The original bill
that passed out of the House Ways and Means Committee after a unanimous, bipartisan
vote also included the important 529 expansion Cruz is fighting for in the
Senate.

Although the
Secure Act is a mixed bag, the 529 provision was one of the good reforms in the
original bill.

In a last-minute decision, Democrats removed the education provisions from the bill on a party-line vote in the House Rules Committee before sending the bill to the floor.

The Democrats reportedly caved to special interests
representing teachers unions, which object to American families being allowed
to spend their own 529 savings on home schooling.

Now, Cruz is
fighting to have the previously unanimously agreed-upon expansion of 529
accounts put into the Senate version of the bill before the vote.

A similar
amendment was offered and passed the Senate in 2017 as part of the Tax Cuts and
Jobs Act. After a procedural objection by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Ron
Wyden, D-Ore., some of the expanded 529 rules, including those for home-schoolers,
were stripped out.

The Secure Act also included a last-minute addition to repeal the “kiddie tax” reforms included in the 2017 tax cuts that raised taxes on some Gold Star Families and other dependents who receive unearned income.

The Secure Act
makes important reforms to expand some areas of retirement savings, but stops
far short of significantly simplifying existing retirement systems and includes
many counterproductive provisions that could make retirement less secure for
many Americans.

As it stands
under the House version, the bad outweighs the good. Including the expansion of
eligible education savings could tip the scale back to a neutral package.

The post Cruz Fights for More Flexible Education Savings Accounts appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The original story can be found here.