‘Millionaires don’t need a new tax break as the federal government spends trillions of dollars to fight a pandemic…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., suggested on Monday that Democrats would try to roll back a portion of President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law in Congress’s next coronavirus relief bill.
When asked what steps Congress would take to provide Americans with additional financial relief in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Pelosi told the New York Times that retroactively reversing the 2017 tax law’s $10,000 cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction was one option Democrats were considering.
The SALT-deduction cap prevents the tax code from subsidizing higher state taxes, which is why many of the liberal states, such as New York and California, opposed it.
Reversing the SALT cap would largely benefit high-income taxpayers, according to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and hurt lower to middle class Americans—the group that Congress needs to be assisting right now.
“This is a nonstarter,” Grassley said in a statement. “Millionaires don’t need a new tax break as the federal government spends trillions of dollars to fight a pandemic.”
A full repeal of the SALT cap would reduce federal revenues by nearly $77 billion, according to a congressional Joint Committee on Taxation report last year. Meanwhile, Americans earning $1 million or more per year would earn an additional $40 billion in benefits, the New York Times reported.
Pelosi argued any change would be “tailored to focus on middle-class earners and include limitations on the higher end,” but Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., pointed out that any additional benefits middle-class workers gained from a SALT reduction would immediately go towards subsidizing “wealthy individuals in high tax states and municipalities—like the Speaker’s home in San Francisco, California.”
“The ink is hardly dry on a $2 trillion-plus emergency package,” Toomey continued.
“It’s far too soon to know whether and of what nature additional legislation is needed,” he said. “If we determine that another measure is necessary, it should not be the vehicle for Speaker Pelosi’s partisan, parochial wish list.”