Michael R. Strain, Columnist

Get Rid of the State-Tax Deduction Altogether

High-income taxpayers in high-tax states don’t deserve special treatment.

February 28, 2019 at 11:00 AM UTC

Michael R. Strain is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is director of economic policy studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).”

Too late to fly south? — Too late to fly south?
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The 2017 tax law capped at $10,000 the amount of state and local tax payments a household can deduct from its federal income taxes. Previously, people could deduct the entire amount they paid in state and local property taxes, and either the state individual income tax or state sales tax.

According to a Treasury Department estimate released Tuesday, this cap will stop 10.9 million tax filers from writing off these payments from their federal income taxes, with the largest bite felt in high-tax states like New York, New Jersey and California. Though politicians from these states are howling — New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently met with President Donald Trump to discuss his concerns — limiting this deduction was the right thing to do. Congress should go all the way and repeal what remains of it.