Editors at National Review Online praise one of President Donald Trump’s battles on Capitol Hill.
President Trump has finally begun to lose patience with the House of Representatives’ “SALT caucus.” We welcome this development and hope that other power brokers within the GOP will follow suit. There is compromise, and then there is extortion, and the recent behavior of some Republicans in Congress has begun to resemble the latter. In effect, advocates of a higher SALT deduction have hijacked the entire budget process in pursuit of a self-serving carve-out that has crowded out everything else under discussion. The leader of the SALT caucus, Mike Lawler, has threatened to sink the bill unless his demands are met — even though this would dramatically raise taxes on nearly all his constituents. President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson ought to call his bluff.
Ideally, there would be no SALT deduction in the federal tax code. Because it creates a system in which some Americans pay more than others for the same federal government, SALT is unfair. Because it rewards the citizens of irresponsible states and punishes those in responsible jurisdictions, SALT is perverse. And, because it shields taxpayers in progressive areas from the consequences of their political preferences, SALT incentivizes profligacy, dysfunction, and free riding. Because, in practice, SALT is a national subsidy for the blue-state model, one can understand why the Democrats would favor its extension. But the Republicans? With his characteristic bluntness, President Trump said on Tuesday, “We don’t want to benefit Democrat governors.” And why would he? The Republican ideal of government is Florida, not New York. It would be preposterous if, come 2029, the main legislative achievement of the Republican federal trifecta had been to force Floridians to send cash to New Yorkers, and thereby to save the ailing Democrats from themselves.
