Efforts to Circumvent the SALT Cap Are Dumb

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The Trump tax bill caps the amount of state and local taxes (SALT) that can be deducted from each person's income for federal tax purposes. Liberal advocates have been trying to figure out how to neutralize this cap through elaborate schemes on the state level. Bruenig argues these schemes are dumb and that it would be much easier for states to simply cut state taxes on the upper middle class while raising them on the very rich. This wouldn't directly circumvent the SALT cap, but it would achieve the same distributive result without all the problems associated with the anti-SALT schemes.