The U.S. House voted Friday to permanently extend the individual tax cuts in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act from 2017, giving many Republicans a chance to tout the law as they prepare to leave Washington to campaign.
According to The Hill, Republicans in blue states, including New Jersey, opposed the measure because it would make permanent the 2017 law’s $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction. The measure passed 220-191, with three Democrats voting for it and 10 Republicans against it.
“House Republicans, with the support of Trump, want to make the tax cuts permanent both because they think it’s good policy and because they think it will benefit them politically,” writer Naomi Jagoda said. “They see it as a way to highlight strong economic numbers and to force Democrats to go on the record about extending tax provisions that benefit middle-class taxpayers.”
I agree with the findings of the Republican National Committee poll that Bloomberg reported on last week that found that most voters think this tax law helps corporations and the wealthy more than middle-class families. It unfairly rewards the ultra wealthy across the nation while providing relatively little if any benefit to middle-class families when you factor in rising inflation, housing costs, fuel costs, tuition and interest rates. This law severely punishes the vast majority of wage earning residents in donor states like New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California and Illinois whose federal income tax dollars help to subsidize states like Kentucky, Alabama, West Virginia, New Mexico and South Carolina that receive more federal aid dollars than their residents contribute as a percent of their total federal income tax contribution. Like it or not, the federal government needs tax revenue to fund a variety of programs that benefit the citizens of the nation as a whole including social security, the military, infrastructure, agriculture, veteran benefits, education, interest on the federal debt, medicine and healthcare. There is a finite limit as to how much federal spending can be cut before we seriously weaken the backbone of the country as a whole and balloon the deficit burden for our ourselves and our children. The ultra wealthy can easily afford to pay a much greater percentage of their income in federal income taxes to offset the disproportionate tax burden on the rest of us Americans without impacting their quality of life or ability to care for and educate their families.