Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) said that despite the fact that some Californians could suffer higher taxes as the result of Republican tax reform efforts in Congress, he still supports the plan because he believes it will help the majority of citizens throughout the rest of the nation.
“Why punish the rest of the nation because California is stupid?” Hunter said in an interview with KUSI on Friday, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. “It’s a tough vote for me, but I’m not gonna keep the economy down for the whole country because California has bad government.”
Part of the plan is to remove a deduction for local and state taxes, which affects high-income states like California and New York.
On Wednesday, Gov. Jerry Brown implored California’s Republican congressional delegation to vote against doing away with the deduction, which he called a “horrible idea,” in a letter he addressed to Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA).
Issa shot back at Brown with a letter of his own writing, “As a consequence of your tenure, Californians now must endure the highest sales and personal income tax rates in the entire country. In terms of our overall tax burden, the non-partisan Tax Foundation puts California’s combined state and local tax burden at the 6th highest in the nation. This is in no small part because of the hikes to sales and income taxes you lobbied for and eventually got passed in Proposition 30.”
In July, Gov. Brown passed into law the state’s largest gasoline tax increase in history.
According to the San Diego Tribune, one of the KUSI hosts told Hunter that Californians would “get hosed” by the Republicans’ tax proposal to which Duncan replied, “California, New Jersey, New York, and other states that have horrible governments, yes. It’s not as good for those states.”
The Sacramento Bee reported:
In 2015, federal data shows that more than 6 million people in the Golden State claimed the deduction, worth $112.5 billion. That’s more than any other state, according to the Tax Foundation, a right-of-center tax policy research organization. California is one of just six states, along with New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Texas and Pennsylvania, that together claimed more than half of all state and local tax deduction dollars in 2014, the foundation says.
Adelle Nazarian is a politics and national security reporter for Breitbart News. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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