To listen to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, the 2017 Republican tax overhaul that limited state and local deductions to $10,000 was a devastating blow. The rich would flee, the middle class would suffer and blue state budgets would bleed.
Perhaps this will come to pass over time, but so far, there are almost no signs of it.
New York, in fact, saw revenue rise $3.7 billion in April from a year earlier, thanks to a shift in timing of taxpayer payments, a stock market that rallied through much of 2018 and a decade-long economic expansion that’s pushed national unemployment to a 50-year low. Similar windfalls arrived in New Jersey, California and Illinois -- states that, like New York, had warned of dire consequences from the law.
And it turns out that tax refunds across the U.S. in 2019 -- those once-a-year checks from Uncle Sam that people use to pay credit card debt from Christmas or buy a washing machine -- were roughly the same size as a year earlier. In all, about 64% of American households paid less in individual income tax for 2018 than they would have had the Tax Cut and Jobs Act not become law, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
“Any comment that says this is an economic civil war that would gut the middle class is overblown," said Kim Rueben, the director of the State and Local Finance Initiative at the Tax Policy Center. "If there’s going to be any effect of the SALT limit on the ability of some states to have progressive taxes it’s too early to know that yet."
Taxable Income
In some ways, the $10,000 limit on state and local tax deductions -- SALT -- is saving states money by lowering their borrowing costs. That’s because investors seeking to reduce their tax bill are plowing a record-setting amount of cash into municipal bonds, driving interest rates lower. The extra yield that investors demand to compensate for the risk of holding Illinois general-obligation bonds, for instance, has fallen to the lowest since May 2015, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
States are also benefiting from a broader tax base because the law eliminated some exemptions and limited deductions, like mortgage interest. Since states that levy income taxes use federal adjusted gross income or taxable income as the base, they have more income to tax.
Still, the nerves of Democratic governors and their budget officers frayed in December when income tax collections plunged by more than 30 percent from the prior December. Cuomo was quick to call the tax law “politically diabolical” and an act of “economic civil war” against the middle class.
Then April came.