After a week of meetings and discussions, Republicans still haven’t settled on how to handle the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, which allows filers to deduct up to $10,000 in taxes paid to state and local governments. Democrats are guaranteed to attack SALT limits imposed by Republicans as an attempt to raise taxes on residents of blue states, which hold enough swing districts to decide control of the House.
“I don’t think there’s any magic number where it’s not a fertile attack line for Democrats, so at a certain point SALT members just have to take yes for an answer,” Bracewell’s Liam Donovan told NBC News. Donovan said the cap is likely to end up above $10,000 but well short of the $100,000 pro-SALT members appear to want.
“To me, the best way to indemnify yourself politically is to make the number as big as possible but with an income phase-out,” he said. “Hard to attack Republicans if you can’t claim it hurts middle class families. The poster child is ostensibly the cop or firefighter who has a big property tax bill, which is a relatively cheap and easy problem to fix.”
