Trump says he’s open to revising provision in 2017 GOP tax law

President Trump on Wednesday expressed an openness to revisiting a provision in the 2017 GOP tax-cut law that caps state and local tax (SALT) deductions at $10,000.

In an interview with Washington-based reporters for regional news outlets, Trump said he’s “open to talking about” the cap, which is opposed by lawmakers in high-tax states like California, New Jersey and New York.

{mosads}“There are some people from New York who have been speaking to me about doing something about that, about changing things,” Trump said, according to the Stamford Advocate.

But he also defended the reasoning behind the deduction cap, saying “it makes all states the same,” The Sacramento Bee reported.

Congressional Republicans limited the SALT deduction in their tax law, arguing the deduction subsidizes higher-tax states and that capping it would raise revenue to pay for lowering the tax rate for businesses and individuals.

But lawmakers in high-tax states, which tend to vote Democratic, have argued that the cap will hurt their residents.

Most of the House Republicans who voted against the 2017 tax law did so because they objected to the SALT provision. Democrats during the 2018 midterms flipped a number of House seats in districts where many taxpayers have claimed the SALT deduction in the past.

Changes to the SALT cap are unlikely to be enacted in the next two years, in large part because the Republican-controlled Senate is not expected to support such changes. It could also be challenging for Democrats to restore the full SALT deduction since analysts have found that lifting the cap would mostly help wealthy individuals.

A spokesman for Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said the committee won’t revisit the SALT deduction cap while the senator is leading the panel.

“It’s ironic that the same Democrats who criticized the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act for supposedly benefiting only the wealthy are now advocating for a change to the law that would primarily benefit the wealthy,” Grassley spokesman Michael Zona said.

“The SALT deduction is a federal subsidy for states to raise taxes on their residents without political consequence. The answer to the problem is for states to lower their taxes instead of insisting that taxpayers from lower-tax states subsidize their profligate spending.”

– Updated at 2 p.m.