By Matt Rooney
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Back on July 30th, Save Jerseyans, I asked aloud how much Governor Phil Murphy (D-NJ Umbria) would stand to gain from his taxpayer-subsidized lawsuit to repeal the federal government’s new $10,000 SALT deduction cap.
Our state media ignored the angle.
(Most) New Jersey Republicans refused to challenge the premise that tax reform was a rich man’s boon and a poor man’s burden.
Then, this week, NorthJersey.com published a story titled “NJ suit over SALT deduction would help the state’s richest 1.5 percent the most.”
The average savings for those earning $5 million to $10 million would be $168,000 in the unlikely event that the SALT deduction cap is scrapped. 60% of the tax benefit (almost $2 billion dollars) would got to New Jersey’s wealthiest 1.5% of state residents.
So the Democrats who’ve screamed and snarled about The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Trump/GOP “tax on the Middle Class” have been lying to you. Under tax reform? The average savings to New Jersey federal taxpayers is almost $1,500 for 2018. 60% can expect a $2,740 tax cut.
In NJ-03, where a recent poll by Monmouth University found “three times as many voters expect that their own federal taxes will go up (45%) as say they will go down (13%) because of the new reforms,” the numbers demonstrate that the vast majority of federal taxpayers will win. Bigly. That’s because property taxes there are significantly lower than they are in New Jersey, and better than 50% of NJ-03 residents take the standard deduction which just doubled from $12,000 to $24,000. There are also 48,000 families in NJ-03 who claim the child tax credit which doubled, too, to $2,000 per kid, and thousands who paid individual mandate tax penalties will no longer need to worry (over 188,000 New Jerseyans paid $93.342 million in 2015 alone).
And we haven’t end touched upon job growth!
Congressman Tom McArthur’s NJ-03 Democrat opponent Andy Kim is a critic of the new tax cuts.
That’s his right notwithstanding his own curious personal tax history, but then Kim needs to explain why he wants to raise taxes on MOST of his district, helping primarily the wealthiest people (like his opponent, MacArthur, and Kim’s ally Phil Murphy) and throwing cold water on this year’s hot jobs market. That’s not spin; it’s math.
I wish him the best of luck.
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