Democrats carry on work to remove tax-break cap

In 2017, congressional Republicans capped a tax break that benefits America’s highest-earning households and people with multimillion-dollar homes. Coastal Democrats have been trying to get it back ever since.

The state and local tax deduction, known to policy wonks as SALT, allows people to deduct payments such as state income and local property taxes from their federal tax bills. The deduction, previously unlimited, was capped at $10,000 as part of the 2017 tax bill, which was former President Donald Trump’s main domestic achievement.

Republicans added the cap to reduce the cost of a tax package that gave more than $1 trillion in breaks to corporations and wealthy families, while increasing the federal deficit despite claims that the cuts would pay for themselves. But the move also struck many Democrats as punitive because its greatest impact was felt by a specific kind of taxpayer: people who live in heavily Democratic areas.

The debates over SALT are a case study in the age-old conflict between constituent politics and national policy. They are also emblematic of how the Democratic Party’s increasing reliance on high-income professionals and suburbanites has complicated its efforts to bridge its progressive and moderate wings.

Almost since the law was passed, lawmakers from hightax states have made various attempts to get one of their voters’ favorite tax breaks back. A bill to restore full SALT deductions was introduced in 2019 after Democrats regained a House majority, but it went nowhere in what was then a Republican-controlled Senate. Proposals to raise or undo the cap have since been discussed as part of the stimulus packages passed during the covid-19 pandemic.

Four states sued the federal government, arguing that the cap is an “unconstitutional assault” on their sovereignty, but they were unsuccessful. And in recent weeks, legislators from high-tax states like California, New Jersey and New York have formed a SALT Caucus to further champion a full repeal of the provision, particularly as Democrats contemplate significant changes to the tax code to pay for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan.

The most vocal of them are from New York state — where voters claimed the nation’s highest SALT benefit before the tax cuts — who wrote an open letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying they “reserve the right” to oppose any new tax legislation, including Biden’s infrastructure bill, that doesn’t include a full repeal of the SALT cap. With slim Democratic control of both chambers of Congress, even a small amount of dissent would be significant.

“I want to get all this stuff done, but no SALT, no deal,” said Rep. Thomas Suozzi, D-N.Y., a former certified public accountant.

BREAK’S BENEFICIARIES

There’s no debate that the SALT deduction goes mostly to wealthier taxpayers. About 85% of its benefits accrue to the richest 5% of households, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington. Were the cap to be repealed, about two-thirds of the benefits — about $67 billion — would go to families making over $200,000 a year.

Exactly how that is distributed is subject to an overlapping crosscurrent of tax policies whose effects vary from place to place. Since the 2017 tax cut broadly lowered taxes, even for residents of high-tax states, the $10,000 cap meant that affluent people in blue states ended up with smaller tax cuts than those in lower-cost red states.

But the political bottom line is that capping a very visible benefit angered the sorts of ordinary affluent voters on whom high-tax states rely — families in a place like Long Island or Orange County, Calif., who might make a six-figure income, own a home and pay tens of thousands a year in state income and local property taxes.

There is political logic in trying to restore the unlimited benefit. Affluent suburban voters helped Biden win the White House, and there is even some evidence to suggest that anger over the lost deduction helped Democrats flip a handful of Republican seats in 2018.

Although the debate affects Democratic districts disproportionately, SALT is less about rote partisanship than about representing voters from wealthy areas with high housing costs. The handful of Republicans who voted against the 2017 tax cuts mostly did so because of the loss of tax breaks like SALT, and today Rep. Young Kim, R-Calif., who is from Orange County, supports a repeal of the cap.

TOUGH CHOICES

There’s also little doubt that the cap falls much harder on blue states. Before the 2017 tax cuts, the average SALT deduction in New York was $22,169 — twice the national average of $10,233 — according to data compiled by the Government Finance Officers Association. It was $19,664 in Connecticut, $18,437 in California and $17,850 in New Jersey.

It’s also true that the cost — about $90 billion in lost revenue if the full break was restored — could imperil other policy choices. The $90 billion is roughly the amount it would take to finance another Democratic priority: expanding the Section 8 housing program, which gives low-income tenants a voucher to help cover the rent, so that it covers the roughly 9 million qualifying families who cannot get vouchers because the government has not allotted enough funding.

Taxes finance the government, but they are also used to shape behavior. Tax breaks encourage people to buy homes and health insurance, send their children to college, save for retirement and give money to charity. An old argument in favor of SALT is that it subsidizes such things as public schools and state health departments. Now, in the aftermath of the pandemic, it is being framed as a way to help high-cost states hold on to high-income workers.

Over the past year, as remote work has untethered millions of white-collar employees, migration out of high-cost regions like New York and San Francisco has surged. Lawmakers and governors pay the necessary lip service to SALT as a middle-class tax break — governors who wrote to Biden urging him to repeal the cap said it would help “middle-class families” — but the fear that high earners might not return has become the larger concern.

“Even if they’re wealthy people, we can’t afford them to leave because they subsidize the cost of government in our state,” Suozzi said.