New York and co. are paying the price for being Deep Blue

NY Post ^ | Jan 02, 2018 | John Podhoretz

[Oshkalaboomboom]

The cold wasn’t the only thing that hammered the Northeast in the final fortnight of 2017 — and we can thank our extreme political polarization for the traumas New Yorkers and New Jerseyans are about to suffer.

On the last night of the year, the Trump administration informed New York and New Jersey that there was no longer a deal with the federal government to help fund the desperately needed new rail tunnel between the two states — a $13 billion hit.

Before that came the signing of the tax bill, whose limitations on the mortgage-interest and state- and local-tax deductions (SALT) are going to hammer upper-middle-class residents in these states and send real-estate values into a downward spiral.

We can argue about the merits of these decisions. Does the unquestionable NY-NJ commuter crisis have a national component obliging the federal government to take an active role? There are strong arguments on both sides.

Should states with high taxes have been allowed to keep their taxes high and spend so much on services not provided to other states by gaming the system through the state- and local-tax deduction?

And was there a public interest in allowing people who can afford million-dollar mortgage payments to deduct the entirety of the interest on those mortgages — or does the existence of that deduction simply inflate housing prices at every level and make home ownership unaffordable?

There are arguments on both sides here. They cannot be easily resolved.

But what we do know is this: Had there been a single Republican senator in any of the high-tax states in America — a senator in New York or New Jersey or Illinois or California or Oregon or Minnesota or Hawaii — the elimination of the SALT deduction would likely not have been included

[Celerity]

Oh, PA has this too. And governor who thinks he can somehow just defy our president too.

It’s all part of the northeast. A vex upon us all.