The SALT deduction used to serve as a kinda-sorta cost-of-living adjustment for the federal tax code. Tax brackets don't consider cost of living, so taxing some

The SALT deduction used to serve as a kinda-sorta cost-of-living adjustment for the federal tax code. Tax brackets don't consider cost of living, so taxing someone earning $200k in CA the same as someone earning $200k in, I dunno, Nebraska, isn't exactly fair. But since higher-CoL areas tend to have higher taxes, the CA earner at least got to deduct the enormous state taxes they paid from their federal return. The TCJA capped the SALT deduction at $10k for married filers, which is an absolute joke to anyone who pays taxes in CA or NY. But that cap goes away in (I think) the 2025 tax year. I don't think CA has to do anything but wait out the clock and make damn sure that its representatives stonewall any legislation to extend the SALT cap. And yes, I know that econonmists absolutely love the SALT cap because it's a tax on non-poor people. But the point of the tax code is not to extract every last penny from non-poor people -- it's to make sure everyone is contributing fairly to a well-run society at all levels. If you want states to be the laboratory of democracy, that's fine, but you can't do that by penalizing states that have high taxes in order to pay for services that the federal government doesn't provide. And that's precisely what the SALT cap does (and was explicitly intended to do).