Been noodling on this myself. Many of the crappy calculators out there are wildly wrong, in favor of Roth. Just crazy wrong. It seems as though there's a conspiracy by the brokerages. Or maybe the IRS to get the tax money now rather than later. I wondered if we were all being played.
But what about these two items
1. what if 20 years from now, the US goes to complete collectivism and tax rates go to European socialist levels? At that point, I think I'd be happy I had a Roth. Who actually believes tax rates in the US will decline over the coming decades? Increase? They are pretty low compared to what our parents were paying.
http://qz.com/74271/income-tax-rates-since-1913/2. RMDs are not required for Roth during the owner's lifetime. If I hit age 70.5 with millions in my traditional IRA, I'm going to be drawing down significant numbers. Probably more than I can spend, and enough to hit 20-25% tax rates by today's code!
Perhaps #2 is an argument for not going whole-hog on tax-advantaged accounts in the first place, but #2 did convince me to start diverting my future contribs to my 401k into the Roth option.