Op-Eds from Mike

Families and seniors in New York’s Hudson Valley are facing an affordability crisis brought on by sky-high state taxes courtesy of Albany politicians, record inflation due to reckless federal spending and sagging retirement and savings accounts due to a struggling market.

Making all of this even worse is the $10,000 cap on your ability to deduct state and local taxes on your federal income tax return. The limitation on your State-and-Local Tax — commonly called SALT — Deduction was passed into law back in 2017 under a Republican president and Congress, and then the Democratic President and Congress that followed did absolutely nothing to fix it — despite their promises to do so.

Enough. It’s time for bipartisan action that puts hardworking taxpayers first.

There is no question that families need relief now. Under the current law, individuals can file for a federal deduction on state and local taxes up to $10,000 while a married individual filing a separate return can only file $5,000. A marriage penalty that adds insult to injury. It’s why I’ve introduced the “SALT Marriage Penalty Elimination Act,” which would let married couples filing individual returns deduct the full $10,000 while those filing joint returns would be able to deduct $20,000.

Our region already pays some of the highest property taxes in the nation; and yet last year’s Inflation Reduction Act doubled the size of the IRS, spending $80 billion to hire 87,000 new IRS agents and employees. Defenders of that measure said that the new audits would be focused on millionaires and billionaires, yet according to the IRS’ own data, the top 25% of all income earners already pay 89% of all income taxes.

Eventually you run out of high income earners to audit. Already the lowest income earners are audited at a rate five times higher than anyone else. We should be focused on providing tax relief, not making the lives of tax-paying families and seniors on a fixed income even more difficult.

My new legislation will be the first in a package of bills, known as the Hudson Valley Affordability Pact, that I will be championing in Congress to reduce the tax burden on Hudson Valley families. I remain committed to a full repeal of the SALT cap and will be working with my colleagues in both parties to get this done.

The bipartisan coalition of members from the northeast supporting this legislation highlights our commitment to providing the tax relief that families and seniors in our communities need. By working across the aisle, I am hopeful that the SALT Marriage Penalty Elimination Act will become law in this Congress.

I ran for Congress as a bipartisan problem solver committed to action, not idle talk. I am hopeful this legislation will be a step in that direction and that New York families, long treated as an ATM by the federal government, will get to keep more of their hard-earned money.