A Lingering Piece of Bad News for 2022 Democrats
There was a sense of deja vu, but then again political issues have a tendency to linger.
The six Republicans seeking the party’s nod in CD-11 were assembled Wednesday night before a group of Chatham Republicans in nearby Long Hill Township and the talk turned to affordability and taxes.
That swung things around to the need to eliminate the $10,000 federal income tax cap on state and local tax deductions, or SALT. All six candidates agreed.
The discussion was quite similar to gatherings of a different type four years ago.
Around this time in the run-up to the 2018 midterm election, multiple Democrats seeking the party’s congressional nod took turns lambasting the SALT cap and calling for its removal.
Now it’s 2022 and the cap is still around.
One lesson here is that many issues simply do not go away.
Another lesson is that this is not good news for Democrats.
In fairness, the Democrats from New Jersey elected in 2018 have fought hard to repeal the cap,
Mikie Sherrill, the congresswoman the Republicans want to oust, orchestrated a Christmas show of sorts on the House floor in December of 2019 – the 12 Days of SALT.
Each day, she highlighted reasons why the cap was hurting many middle class New Jersey homeowners.
The House did repeal the cap, but it went nowhere in what was then the Republican Senate.
More recently, the House again repealed the cap as part of the Build Back Better bill.
But, as we well know, the refusal of Sen. Joe Manchin to back the bill killed its chances in the current 50-50 Senate.
The problem for Democrats this year is that many people don’t follow politics day-to-day. They may be unaware of the history here, or they may not care. Nuances may not count. It’s a bottom line business. Democrats ran to remove the cap in 2018 and they haven’t done so.
The midterm election is still more than eight months away. That gives House Democrats some time, but not all that much time, to find a way to eliminate the $10,000 cap.
The cap came about as part of the Trump administration’s 2017 tax reform act.
In calling to eliminate the cap, none of the GOP candidates mentioned Donald Trump’s role in creating it. How odd.
Democrats often fail to clean up the messes made by Republicans fast enough to please or placate voters, who would better serve their responsibility for citizenship by remembering who created the problem.
Democrats must move expeditiously to reverse Reaganomics and stop climate change instead of repairing the GOP’s latest screw-up because we need big, revolutionary changes, not band aids that tinker with the fringes of society.