When Reps. Nicole Malliotakis, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota and Andrew Garbarino from New York join other Republicans from places like New Jersey and California in traveling to Mar-a-Lago tomorrow, they must push President-elect Trump to redeem his campaign promise to lift the unfair cap on the deduction for state and local taxes, called SALT, that punishes New Yorkers. It was then-President Trump’s big tax cut that passed in 2017 that almost wiped out the deduction, where federal filers could write off what they were paying in property taxes and income taxes. The deduction was only saved from complete elimination when moderate Maine Sen. Susan Collins stepped in with a $10,000 cap. While better than nothing, $10,000 is only a pittance in New York, where typical property taxes in the suburbs may run double that. And then add in the income tax paid to Albany (and income taxes paid to New York City and Yonkers) and that’s a lot of extra money being sent to Uncle Sam from ordinary folks, billions every year. It was a clever political move by Trump and the Republicans in 2017 to target the SALT deduction, as the impact was felt most in high income states that didn’t vote for Trump or send many Republicans to the House and Senate. Think New York, New Jersey, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland and Connecticut. Some states, like New York, sued, but we said that was useless and the courts, of course, dismissed the legal challenges. The SALT cap was imposed by Congress and had to be lifted by Congress. When the Democrats won back the House in 2019, they voted to repeal the cap, but the Senate never agreed. When the Dems also took the Senate and the White House in 2021, the urgency for repeal faded, so the harmful cap remained. Those first two years under Joe Biden should have been the time for repeal, but it never happened. Meanwhile, some Democrats, then and now, actually want the SALT cap to stay as is, as removing it would benefit the very rich like Mike Bloomberg. There’s an easy answer to that: limit the deduction to the $200,000 for joint filers as proposed by Lawler (or some similar number), which would help regular people, or just put a means test in place, say restricting the deduction to people with incomes under $500,000 or $1 million. Either approach, or both, will allow for full restoration of the valuable SALT deduction for most filers, while not extending it to the billionaires and others in the 1%. The ultra rich won’t miss the money, but it’s something big for people of typical means. Now the SALT issue must be addressed as the Trump tax cuts (and the cap) are expiring this year. Because the House GOP margin is so tiny, the New York Republicans have tremendous leverage to make sure that their demands are met. And it was Trump himself who said on the campaign trail this year that he wanted to “get SALT back.” All the elements are there: a timeline of expiring tax laws, the pro-SALT caucus among House Republicans  and the returning president’s own promise We look forward to the lifting of the SALT cap this year.