TRUMP RESPONSE: Why don’t you allow revenue-generating fracking in your state?
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose tax-and-spend vision for the Empire State recently was felled by a $2.3 billion budget shortfall, begged President Donald Trump to revoke a $10,000 cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions.
Cuomo said the SALT provision in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was causing an exodus of wealthy New Yorkers to areas with lower rates, according to Politico.
“You’re hurting the economic engines of the nation,” he said on a radio show Tuesday following his White House visit.
Cuomo appealed to fellow Democrats that repealing the tax reform should be their No. 1 priority. “This should be right at the top of your list,” he said. “If the Republicans ask for the time of day … the Democratic Congress should ask for reform for this SALT tax provision.”
However, Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley told the subscription-based Politico Pro that appeals to change the cap were a nonstarter.
Earlier law provided for virtually limitless tax shelters—such as campaign, super-PAC and nonprofit contributions—which allowed elite 1-percenters in blue-state enclaves to avoid paying their “fair share” in income tax.
Democrats, who have embarked on an all-out blitz to force Trump to turn over his personal tax filings, no doubt suspect that he was a beneficiary of such loopholes during his days as a Manhattan real-estate mogul.
But rather than reverse the overhaul, Trump suggested Cuomo might reconsider some of his revenue-killing liberal policies, such as dialing back a 2014 ban on fracking for natural gas or approving fossil fuel pipelines.
In his recent State of the Union address, Trump touted the fact that the U.S. for the first time in its history had become an energy exporter.
“The President discussed economic growth opportunities for the State of New York, including helping lower energy prices throughout the entire Northeast by allowing low-cost, American energy to thrive with fracking and pipeline systems,” Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere said in a statement.
Like New York, ultra-liberal California has been dealing with the mass-migration of its wealthy tech moguls from pricey regions like Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area to more affordable areas like Nevada (although hardly offsetting the in-bound migration from Tijuana).
While Trump may relish the Schaudenfreude of seeing his political adversaries lose their cash cows, however, there may be unintended consequences to his efforts: California’s limousine liberals are not checking their politics at the door as they flee.
Nevada and neighboring Arizona were the only two 2018 Senate races in which Democrats were able to oust incumbent Republicans, due largely to the demographic shifts.
And other states once solid in the red column, such as Texas, are tilting increasingly purple, in part as the result of their own economic prosperity and favorable tax laws.