Flag Maine rent as utilities-inclusive for the property tax fairness credit (#1126) - #1128
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…credit TAXSIM's rentpaid is gross rent that includes heat and utilities. Maine's property tax fairness credit (Schedule PTFC/STFC line 5b/5c) excludes the utility portion before taking 15% of rent, so the emulator now sets utilities_included_in_rent for Maine records with rent; PolicyEngine then applies the worksheet's 15%-of-rent default when no utility amount is given. Scoped to Maine because utilities_included_in_rent also feeds Michigan's home heating credit. Full effect depends on PolicyEngine/policyengine-us#9267, which implements the line-5c 15% fallback. Surfaced by #1126. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Fixes the Maine property tax fairness credit discrepancy in #1126.
Background
For a Maine renter (2022 HoH, $44,452 wages, $17,139 rent), TaxAct's PTFC is $405 but PolicyEngine's is $792.78. The whole gap is Schedule PTFC/STFC line 5b: TaxAct treats the rent as including heat/utilities and backs out 15% before taking the 15% rent-constituting-property-tax rate; PolicyEngine took the full 15% of gross rent.
Per Dan Feenberg (relaying Pavel), TAXSIM's
rentpaidis by convention gross rent that includes utilities, and Maine is the only state where this affects the result.Change
add_additional_unitsnow setsutilities_included_in_rent = Truefor Maine records with rent. PolicyEngine then applies the Schedule PTFC line-5c default (exclude 15% of rent as the utility portion when no dollar amount is supplied), producing the $2,185 countable rent and $405 credit that match TaxAct.Scoped to Maine.
utilities_included_in_rentalso feeds Michigan's home heating credit (reduces the standard credit, gates the alternate credit), so the flag is set only for Maine records to avoid perturbing MI. Verified: ME records get the flag, MI records do not (tests intests/test_me_ptfc_utilities.py).Dependency
Full effect requires PolicyEngine/policyengine-us#9267, which implements the line-5c 15%-of-rent fallback (currently unimplemented in
me_property_tax_fairness_credit_countable_rent). Until the pinned policyengine-us version includes that fix, setting the flag is inert (no behavior change), so this can merge independently; the ME output moves to $405 once the PE-US pin advances.