MI property tax credit home value

[feenberg]

See http://taxsim.nber.org/out2psl/860

PE gives this taxpayer a property tax credit of 1900, which presumes that the taxable value of the home is <$165,000. See line 9 of MI1040CR.
How does PE impute the home value? I am worried that basing the imputation on income or property tax risks adding a multi-thousand dollar notch to the calculation but I have no solution.

The same issue exists for Minnesota.

BTW - I ran PE on both FreeBSD and Linux, and the Linux version returned results as if the value of idtl was 2 rather than 5.

Mysterious.

[PavelMakarchuk]

Thanks Dan — on home value imputation: PE reads assessed_property_value directly from input, and it defaults to $0 when unset (as discussed on #872 — no imputation from income or property tax, no notch). The eligibility check is one-sided: mi_homestead_property_tax_credit_eligible returns assessed_property_value <= $165,000 per MCL § 206.522 and MI-1040CR line 9. With the default $0, the test always passes for TAXSIM emulator runs. Same applies for Minnesota's M1PR homeowner test — but PE doesn't currently implement the MN M1PR homeowner side at all (only the renter side is in flight at policyengine-us#7956), so the notch concern doesn't bite there yet.

Risk of the $0 default: filers with assessed_property_value > $165K get a notch — they'd be denied the MI credit despite paying property tax. For microsim runs sourced from survey data (CPS/ASEC), home values are populated and the notch is real but rare. For TAXSIM-style hypothetical filers, the default mostly produces "best-case for the credit" outputs. Open to switching the default to an income- or proptax-based imputation if you'd prefer — but agree any imputation creates a different kind of notch, so we left it at $0 explicitly.