Politics

Chuck Schumer Wrote Off $58,000 Last Year Using Tax Deduction He’s Trying To Save

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is likely to personally save tens of thousands of dollars if he is able to defeat Republican efforts to eliminate state and local tax deductions.

Schumer wrote off $58,000 in state and local taxes last year, according to his publicly available federal tax returns. The amount Schumer wrote off is roughly equivalent to the median household income of $59,039 in 2016.

A report from the Tax Policy Center found that eliminating the deduction would save the federal government $1.3 trillion over 10 years, and would hit wealthy taxpayers the hardest.

“Taxpayers with incomes over $100,000 would have the largest tax increases both in dollars and as a percentage of income. Those taxpayers would pay 90 percent of the tax increase from eliminating the deduction, and 40 percent of the total would be paid by just taxpayers with incomes over $500,000,” the report stated.

That includes Sen. Schumer, whose income topped the half million mark last year, according to his tax returns.

Schumer has been a fierce opponent of the GOP plan to eliminate the deduction, which Republicans say rewards blue states with high income tax levels.

“It gives huge tax cuts to the wealthiest and the biggest corporations, and socks it to the middle-class,” Schumer said last month. “Eliminating state and local deductibility is a blow to the wallet of millions of middle-class tax payers across the country.”

He promised to oppose “any bill that tries to deal with the state and local deduction.”

YOU JUST READ ABOUT HOW CHUCK SCHUMER WOULD STAND TO PERSONALLY GAIN FROM DEFEATING GOP-LED TAX REFORM. WATCH NOW HOW CHUCK SCHUMER HAS A HISTORY OF HIPOCRISY.