"Democrats are pushing tax breaks for the rich"

Excerpts from a op-ed in The Guardian:

The last time Democrats held the presidency and Congress, the party spent its first year in power enriching big banks that had cratered the economy and then letting public money subsidize the Wall Street bonuses of their campaign donors. The spectacle gave Republicans a political bailout in the 2010 midterms, allowing them to depict themselves as anti-establishment populists challenging an elitist government.

Twelve years later, history is rhyming. Democrats were vaulted into office on popular promises to tax the wealthy, but they are now generating national headlines about their proposal to provide new tax breaks narrowly targeted to enrich their affluent blue-state donors – just as a new survey shows nearly two thirds of Americans see the party as “out of touch with the concerns of most people.”..

Democratic leaders are pushing a regressive proposal to allow wealthy property owners to deduct more of their state and local taxes (SALT) from their federal taxes...

Under current law, the relatively small number of Americans wealthy enough to itemize their tax returns are barred from writing more than $10,000 of their state and local tax levies off their federal tax returns. In 2019, that was just 13% of Americans.

That means the entire SALT debate is about a policy almost exclusively affecting a small number of rich people, who already disproportionately benefit from other tax breaks. And really, it’s about the miniscule number of rich folk who happen to live in specific locales with higher state and local levies, and who pay more than $10,000 of those levies every year...

It shows that while the Build Back Better reconciliation bill would still raise taxes on billionaires, adding SALT deductions to the bill would provide no significant help for the middle class, and would result in big tax breaks for very rich people just below the billionaire stratosphere...

In a nation where 87% of people already make too little to itemize their tax returns and are therefore not eligible for any SALT deductions, Democrats’ whole campaign is designed to confuse and distract from all the data showing that repealing the SALT cap would be a more regressive policy than Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, and would exacerbate racial and economic inequality.

It has been a truism all through my lifetime that "we have the best Congress that money can buy."

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