I’m late to this story, but it’s no less weird for my tardiness. Per the New York Times:

As lawmakers prepare for another round of fiscal stimulus to address economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested the next package include a retroactive rollback of a tax change that hurt high earners in states like New York and California.

A full rollback of the limit on the state and local tax deduction, or SALT, would provide a quick cash infusion in the form of increased tax rebates to an estimated 13 million American households — nearly all of which earn at least $100,000 a year.

The cap on the SALT deduction was a neat little rope-a-dope that Republicans inserted into their 2017 tax cut package. Prior to its passage, filers could deduct more than $10,000 in state and local taxes from their overall sums to the IRS. Needless to say, this mostly benefitted wealthy people in blue states where taxes are highest. Capping SALT allowed the GOP to claim it was paying for its tax cuts. It forced West Coasters and New Englanders to feel the full effect of the tax-and-spend policies they’d long advocated. And it put Democrats in a serious bind. Pelosi and friends’ main line of attack against the Republican bill was that it would disproportionately avail the rich. Oh yeah? said Republicans. Then surely you won’t mind if we raise their taxes a little.

No doubt California bigwigs have been melting down Pelosi’s phones ever since. Indeed, late last year, the House voted to repeal the cap, only for the Senate to decline. Now, under cover of pandemic, when stimulus is urgently needed, Pelosi is trying again. Cue Senator Chuck Grassley: “Millionaires don’t need a new tax break,” he said. That must have felt good for a Republican to say. And he does mean millionaires: as Ramesh Ponnuru notes, only about one in 17 of the tax returns that claimed the deduction were for households making under $75,000. So while undoing the SALT cap might be stimulus, it would mostly help those who need it least. And with the GOP still running the Senate, with economists jeering from the sidelines, it seems unlikely to go anywhere.

There are plenty of takeaways from this curious episode. We might observe that Pelosi has truly internalized Rahm Emanuel’s adage not to let a crisis go to waste. We might unearth another dictum, the old political science saying that “place matters,” and note that Democrats’ largely coastal and well-off districts are finally catching up with them. We might also take stock of the ongoing class realignment in American politics, as the rich and suburbanites trend Democratic while the working class continues its (shaky) allegiance to Donald Trump.

We might do all that, but I’m content instead with a third maxim: “Read my lips, no new tax cuts.” Seriously, enough. In good times, the conservative economic program stretches the idea of scarcity, advocating that economies grow so the poor can pull themselves up, rather than assuming a set pot of money that must be redistributed. And right on. But we aren’t in good times right now. Scarcity is the reality—horrifying, life-altering scarcity. We are about to much poorer and the only question is for how long. Amid such calamity, every tool needs to be serviced, including (unfortunately) government spending. Those expenses must be paid for as much as possible, lest we borrow even more and squeeze even tighter the already hard-up young.

That means the rich need to do their part. Just ask a nutritionist: too much salt can kill you.