One of the biggest tasks before Congress this year will be to ensure President Trump’s historic 2017 tax cuts don’t expire.
An Op-Ed by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis. As published in the Staten Island Advance
One of the biggest tasks before Congress this year will be to ensure President Trump’s historic 2017 tax cuts don’t expire, something that would hurt our families, our economy and result in a $4 trillion tax increase on American families and businesses.
In the years following the implementation of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), our country saw millions of jobs added to the economy, record-low unemployment rates for women and minorities, large wage gains and lower federal taxes for more than 140 million families.
As a member of the House Committee on Ways and Means – the oldest and chief tax-writing committee in Congress – I recently met with President Trump to discuss strategies to help our economic recovery from the lingering effects of COVID (and the Biden Administration’s bad economic decisions). We agree that we must help provide relief to senior citizens, tipped workers and middle-class families struggling to get by, particularly in high tax states like New York.
As someone with aging parents, one of my top priorities is preserving Social Security and reducing how much our senior citizens pay in taxes on their benefits. By making more of their Social Security income tax exempt, we will be helping struggling seniors keep more of their hard-earned money, a roof over their head and food on the table.
And while we work to take care of our seniors, it’s also important that we support young families with the expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC). President Trump doubled the CTC from $1,000 to $2,000 as part of the TCJA. This pro-family provision alone has benefited millions of families with the exorbitant cost of childcare and other expenses.
Additionally, we must help New Yorkers with additional tax relief through the State and Local Tax deduction (otherwise known as SALT), while the elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax and doubling of the Standard Deduction benefitted middle-class taxpayers across the country. The 2017 TCJA placed a $10,000 cap on how much New Yorkers could claim through SALT, however, President Trump has agreed to work with us to increase the deduction so more families from Staten Island and Brooklyn can benefit.
As a New Yorker, President Trump understands that we are being taxed to death by Governor Hochul, Mayor Adams and those who control our State Legislature and City Council but refuse to cap the property tax levy and cut personal income tax rates like President Trump and Congress did at the federal level.
Of course, none of this matters if we are not a healthy and secure nation. Right now, the lion’s share of our country’s active pharmaceutical ingredients are produced overseas – predominantly in Communist China – putting our national security and public health at risk. That’s why I’ve introduced legislation to bring our pharmaceutical supply chains home, incentivizing manufacturers to onshore their facilities, to not only reduce our reliance on foreign nations, but protect Americans from life-threatening drug shortages and promote American jobs.
President Trump’s TCJA laid the foundation for historic tax relief and economic growth, and with our new Republican trifecta in Washington, we can – and will – build upon its success to create jobs, boost wages, restore fiscal sanity, and once again make America prosperous, affordable and secure.