In his editorial last Sunday, What?? Did Republicans really say that?, Tom Moran expresses shock that Republican candidates for Congress are blaming Democrats for not eliminating the $10,0000 limitation on the deduction for State and local taxes (sometimes called “SALT”) contained in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, 115–97, 131 Stat. 2054.((This law did much more than limit the SALT deduction; it also increased the standard deduction and reduced the tax rate for many. I suspect that for many taxpayers those two items led to a reduction in tax owed even without the unlimited SALT deduction. You cannot just assume that the fact that a taxpayer’s SALT liability exceeds the $10,000 limit means that that taxpayer was detrimentally affected by the law.)) Moran presents opposition to the SALT limitation as protecting the middle class from New Jersey’s high (especially property) tax rates.
I think that argument is backwards. As I said before, “[the SALT deduction] is of course not a property tax break at all, but a federal income tax break.” The best way to protect the middle class against high property taxes is to reduce them (which won’t last long without controls on spending).
Over the years NJ.com has published numerous opinion pieces opposing the SALT limitation, very often in the guise of news articles. Moran’s piece is actually labelled as an opinion, and the basic opinion he is expressing is that voters should vote for Tom Malinowski rather than Tom Kean (which of course is a position he has every right to say).