From WNYC Studios.

I'm Brian Lehrer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Thursday, May 29th.

Here's an always, sometimes, never question for you.

Relevant to national politics right now and very relevant to

New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. It's about the salt deduction, that is deducting state and

local taxes, acronym salt, from your federal income tax. Before 2017, all state and local taxes were

federally tax deductible. The Trump tax changes that year, 2017,

limited the salt deduction to the first $10,000 of state and local taxes. Now it's up for debate again

as part of the big tax cut and spending cut and borrowing bill being debated in Congress that President Trump wants.

The House voted, as many of you know, to raise the cap to the first $40,000 of state and

local taxes.

Reportedly, it might be hard to get that increase through the Republican Senate.

We have Andrew Loutes, associate director for the economic

policy program at the think tank called the Bipartisan Policy Center, which does aim for bipartisan

national policies as much as they can. The salt issue crosses party lines in its unique way,

as many of you in the New York area know, with many New York

area and California Democrats and Republicans working together on this, while others on both the

left and the right oppose the deduction. Andrew, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

Andrew, do you know the origin of the salt deduction like when state and local taxes became

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