PBS NewsHour 5/6/25
Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R – NY): What I will say is, if we can triple or quadruple that SALT deduction, which is currently at $10,000, it would cover almost all middle-income middle-class families, families with earning roughly $400,000 to $500,000 and less.
Let’s repeat that, a family with a half million dollar a year income is “middle-class” to at least some Congressional Republicans.
Facts first. In Congresswoman Malliotakis’s home state of New York, per most recent data, the Middle-Class annual income range is $56,385 to $169,156 (with most under $131,566). Even in the canyons of Manhattan, $400,000 or $500,000 is high-income.
A simple chart of annual family income data…
Middle-income Range Upper Middle Median
ARKANSAS $41,351 — $117,546 $ 91,425 $58,773
ILLINOIS $54,468 — $163,404 $127,092 $81,702
IOWA $48,765 — $146,294 $113,784 $73,147
KANSAS $48,426 — $145,278 $112,994 $72,639
MISSOURI $45,947 — $137,840 $107,209 $68,920
Here’s the Line Between Middle Class and Upper-Middle Class in Every State | Nasdaq
I think this Pew report, noted by NASDAQ, is in the ballpark. Here in our part of America middle-class seems to mostly mean families with annual incomes from around $45,000 to the neighborhood of $70,000, with some stretching that to low six-figures.
The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) crunched numbers for Missouri and the other states not long ago. They assumed 20% of families were lower income, 60% middle income and 20% high income. They concluded that a fifth of Missouri families struggled to survive on less than $20.900 annual income. The middle went from $20,901 to $129,800 and above that is easy street. [ITEP.ORG]
That ITEP report also looked at the effective tax rate – income, sales and other common taxes – for each group. Ironically, the poorest Missourians paid 9.8% of their income in taxes (because they insisted on spending most of their money on food, utilities and other taxed items) while the richest 1% of their neighbors paid 5.7% in taxes. Since investments, real estate and yachts aren’t taxed, well, that helps the rich a lot more than the poor.
The Missouri legislature has an answer for this inequality: they’ve sent House Bill 594 eliminating Missouri’s Capital Gains Tax to the governor. This knocks a few hundred million dollars a year off the state’s General Revenue – which mainly pays for education and health care. Better, it reduces the onerous high tax load on the richest Missourians.
Anyway, back to Washington and New York. As Congress works to make permanent the Trump 1.0 tax cuts a significant number of Republicans want to tack-on an increase in the federal tax deduction for State and Local Taxes paid [SALT]. Our friend quoted above wants the give-away to jump from $10,000 to $30,000 or $40,000, reducing the tax load on those half-million a year “middle-class” families.
I don’t expect you to remember all these numbers. Please understand that Republicans work for a rich people, not the rest of us.
Glenn Koenen