Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders just rubbed a little SALT in President Joe Biden’s sore spot.
The Vermont lefty, who runs the Senate Budget Committee, on Tuesday rejected a proposal to give wealthy blue-staters a big tax break.
“The top 1% would pay lower taxes after passage of the Build Back Better plan than they did after the Trump tax cut in 2017. This is beyond unacceptable,” Sanders told reporters.
He was referring to the income-tax deduction for State and Local Tax, known by the acronym SALT. Until Donald Trump came along Americans could deduct the amount they paid for state and local taxes from their federal income tax.
This primarily benefited residents of high-tax, Democratic-run states.
Trump’s 2017 tax package capped this deduction at $10,000. According to The Washington Times, the current federal tax system allows people to deduct local property taxes and state income or sales taxes, but not both.
“Moderate Democrats have been angling to restore the tax credit ever since [2017. Some have even threatened to oppose Mr. Biden’s social welfare bill unless it restores SALT, the Times reported.
The paper quoted Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, who recently said, “We will continue to work with House and Senate leadership to ensure the cap on the SALT deduction is repealed. No SALT, no deal.”
Sanders replied no deal.
“The truth is that in high tax states like New York and California, housing is enormously expensive … I think we should deal with that,” Sanders said, according to the Times.
“To the degree that it impacts the middle class [and] part of the upper-middle class. But what we should not be doing is exempting, is repealing the SALT for people who own mansions and for billionaires.”
If the alleged moderate Democrats in the House pass Biden’s scaled-down but still exorbitant $1.75 trillion social welfare plan with a SALT component not to Sanders’ liking the Senate would ditch it, the Times noted.
“At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, the last thing we should be doing is giving more tax breaks to the very rich,” Sanders said.
“Democrats campaigned and won on an agenda that demands that the very wealthy finally pay their fair share, not one that gives them more tax breaks.”
The SALT provision may be deal-breaker for Biden’s dream bill.
Two dozen not-so-left Democrats want the SALT cap gone, and if it’s not, that, with full GOP opposition, is enough to torpedo Biden’s bill in the chamber where Democrats hold a slim three-vote majority.
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