Washington Examiner

Schumer’s response to coronavirus: Tax cuts for the rich

By Tim Carney

July 15, 2020

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There have long been many competing visions of the Democratic Party, but Chuck Schumer has had the most coherent one: a party of the rich and well-connected that combines high tax rates with generous loopholes and large subsidies. This is how Democrats create their version of the complex rigged game that attracts and enriches their party’s donors.

Schumer is relentless in trying to realize this vision, and a pandemic is a perfect opportunity for it. Congress will consider another bill to aid families, workers, and businesses harmed by the coronavirus and the lockdowns, and so, of course, Schumer is lobbying to stick in a special tax cut for the wealthy.

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“Restore full SALT,” Schumer demanded on an immaculate, sprawling front lawn of one of these million-dollar homes.

SALT is the deduction for state and local taxes. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Schumer and the liberal media derided as a gift to wealthy people, curbed the SALT deduction, capping it at $10,000 per family.

“If I become majority leader,” Schumer promised in the wealthy suburb of New York City, “one of the first I will do is we will eliminate [the SALT cap] forever.”

“One of our highest priorities,” he said of the coronavirus relief bill, “is to keep the House provision that gets rid of the cap on SALT…. We need to cushion the blow of this virus,” Schumer said. “The SALT cap hurts people affected by the virus.”

Mind you, the SALT cap didn’t affect anyone who takes the standard deduction, which is almost everyone in the country, except for a minority of wealthy people. Curbing the deduction also didn’t affect anyone whose state and local taxes were below $10,000. So when Schumer lobbies hard to remove the cap on the SALT deduction, he is lobbying to cut taxes for a small number of high-income people in high-income states—typically people who also have very large mortgages on their very expensive homes.

The left-leaning Tax Policy Center finds that “Repealing the SALT Deduction Cap Would Largely Benefit High-Income Households.” Specifically, “Nearly 95 percent of the benefit would go to the top 20 percent of households and about half to the top 1 percent.”

Schumer’s vision has long been to turn the Democrats into the party of Wall Street, hedge funds, and the One Percent more fully. Making a tax cut for the One Percent his No. 1 priority in an election year is a great way to send the message: wealthy, heavily educated people who wade the lake of success, join us, vote for us, donate to us.

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