While President Joe Biden is eyeing massive tax hikes, it seems his party’s leader in the House of Representatives has other plans.
According to Fox Business, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is pushing for a tax break that “would disproportionately benefit wealthy Americans.” The Democrat leader in the House reportedly wants to remove a cap on deductions people can claim for state and local taxes (SALT).
Thanks to a Republican-backed tax overhaul signed into law by former President Donald Trump in 2017, SALT deductions are currently capped at $10,000, reports note.
Higher taxes for thee, deductions for me
Along with Democratic representatives from New York and New Jersey, Pelosi is seeking to strike the deductions limit as part of President Biden’s proposed $2.25 trillion infrastructure package.
“Hopefully we can get it into the bill,” she told reporters Thursday, according to Fox Business. “I never give up hope for something like that.”
The California Democrat has long been a proponent of allowing high deductions for state and local taxes, even arguing that the Trump-era cap was “devastating” for residents of high-tax jurisdictions like hers.
But critics contend that raising the deduction cap would force Americans in other parts of the country to subsidize the big-government policies of blue states. Isaac Schorr wrote in the pages of National Review in December 2020 that an “unlimited SALT deduction is not only regressive, but selectively so.”
“It’s manifestly unfair to South Carolinians and Iowans who are then forced to pay more in federal taxes than their counterparts in New York only because they chose to forgo certain social services available to New Yorkers,” Schorr charged.
The National Review contributor concluded that if blue state residents are upset about paying too much in state taxes, then they should elect Republicans rather than expect others to help foot the bill.
A rift in the making?
As reports note, Pelosi and her fellow congressional Dems’ push to cut high-income earners a break could even lead to a rift with the White House.
Though the Biden administration hasn’t explicitly come out against the proposal, Press Secretary Jen Psaki sounded less than enthusiastic on Thursday when pressed on where the president stands.
“If Democrats want to propose a way to eliminate SALT — which is not a revenue raiser, as you know; it would cost more money — and they want to propose a way to pay for it, and they want to put that forward, [then] we’re happy to hear their ideas,” Psaki said, according to Fox Business.
The post Pelosi seeks to reverse Trump-era cap on SALT deductions first appeared on Conservative Institute.
No comments: