Democrats campaigning against a popular tax cut to take back control of Congress in November may seem like an ill-advised move. Yet, they’re doing it anyway.
Enter Sean Casten, Democratic candidate for Illinois’s sixth congressional district.
Casten is running against incumbent Republican Rep. Peter Roskam, and is pitching voters on reforming the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act that passed in December 2017 with a specific emphasis on reducing the tax burden on the wealthy and top one percent.
In a post on Medium, Casten is advocating for restoring the state and local tax, or SALT, deductions, which were capped at $10,000 under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
“This will have a disastrous impact on many local families,” Casten wrote. “In fact, the Tax Policy Center has calculated that our Sixth District of Illinois has the 12th highest percentage of taxpayers who claim these local tax deductions of all 435 congressional districts.”
The fact of the matter is the SALT deductions, before they were capped, allowed the wealthy and especially those in expensive housing to deduct a lot more from their taxes. A restoration of this special tax break for the rich will not help middle and lower income classes, that’s shifting the tax burden to them.
Capping SALT deductions at $10,000 actually prevents wealthy taxpayers from deducting everything in their possession, thus keeping the tax burden fixated on them. The likelihood that middle and lower income families will go past the $10,000 cap is actually pretty slim, considering they bring in less income and own less property than the wealthy and top one percent.
According to U.S. Census Bureau data, Illinois’s 6th Congressional District isn’t exactly on the brink of poverty. In 2016, the median household income was estimated to be over $97,000 and the mean household income was over $125,000. Additionally, just 3 percent of all families and almost 5 percent of all residents in the district lived below the poverty line.
For a purple district like Illinois’ 6th — which Hillary Clinton won by 7 percent in 2016 — Sean Casten doesn’t seem to get how taxes work. Sure, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act isn’t a perfect bill — no bill is perfect — but Casten’s fighting a battle he can’t win.
