Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
I strongly doubt that the capping of the SALT deduction will hurt taxpayers in high-tax states as much as is being claimed. The reason is that the SALT deduction was already capped for many taxpayers by the AMT, because SALT deductions were not allowed when calculating the AMT base. Even in high-tax states, the loss of the SALT deduction will be more than offset for most by the rate reductions and AMT amelioration contained in the new tax law.