In a piece at the National Post Matt Taibbi sardonically lauds the “Congressional Democrats’ heroic fight to save the rich”:
Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, made an inspired plea recently. The Harvard man and Alpha Epsilon Pi brother is a member of the so-called “SALT caucus,†a group of congressfolk threatening to hold up Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill if it doesn’t include a full repeal of a Donald Trump-imposed $10,000 cap on deductions of state and local taxes.
“It is high time that Congress reinstates the state and local tax deduction, so we can get more dollars back into the pockets of so many struggling families,†intoned Gottheimer, one of 32 members of the SALT caucus, which includes 8 Republicans.
observing:
However, the SALT cap didn’t so much go after “Democrats†as “affluent Democrats.†It only applied to people who itemize their taxes, which meant the 90% of Americans who take the standard deduction were unaffected. The deduction raised over $70 billion in just the first year, and roughly 56% of that money came just from the top 1% of taxpayers, living in a few states in particular.
and concluding:
After the midterms in 2018, former CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider said the Democrats were “becoming a party dominated by educated, upper-middle-class, liberal whites,†analysis that was borne out in 2020, when gains among that exact demographic helped Democrats win back the White House from Trump. It would be surprising if they didn’t develop economic policies to match, and the “SALT caucus†is a big step in that direction.
I’ll take Mr. Taibbi’s word for the motivation for the limit on state and local tax deductions—to poke a stick in the collective eye of Democrats, New York Democrats in particular. I think that the cap on state and local tax deductions is good policy even though it makes me pay more in tax than would otherwise be the case. I think that all deductions from personal income should be capped and that the cap on income eligible for payroll tax should be removed or at least raised. Without such caps our federal taxes are mildly progressive; with them they become more so.
Policies need to be evaluated along at least three axes rather than just one. Whether something is supported by the Republcian/Democratic leadership is a wholly inadequate standard for evaluating policy. I try to consider policies along three axes:
- Is it good policy?
- Are the means just, legal, and effective?
- Are the motives for the policy good?
and it is rare indeed for policies to be purely good or bad, effective or ineffectual, well or badly motivated. The world and people are more complicated than that. And beware unwanted and unforeseen secondary effects.
More simply the best policies are good, effective, and properly intentioned while the worst are bad, unjust or illegal, and imposed with bad intentions. Most policies are somewhere in between. Good policies that are just, legal, and effective, but are imposed through bad motives fall somewhere in between as do policies that are good, not particularly effective, but imposed through good motives or policies that are good, mildly effective, but imposed with bad motives.
Good policies are hard. If they were not we’d have more of them.
