The San Francisco Bay Area, as America’s most liberal metropolitan area is about to be economically carpet bombed by the President Donald Trump’s tax reform.
American big cities with over 250,000 residents trend 83 percent liberal, according to research jointly published by MIT and UCLA. The Bay Area is the most liberal area in the U.S., with San Francisco and Oakland ranked first and fourth most liberal out of 67 cities.
Pew Research polling found that the reason big cities are liberal is that 46 percent of consistent liberals said they prefer to live in a city, compared to just 4 percent of consistent conservatives. That explains why liberals are about twice as likely as conservatives to live in urban areas, while conservatives tend to concentrate in rural areas. Consequently, liberal big cities vote Democrat and conservative rural communities vote Republican.
A recent Vanity Fair article claims: “Trump Crony Admits Republican Tax Plan Is An Elaborate Middle Finger To Liberals.” According to comments by Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore, liberal Democrats’ strategy of harping on Trump’s proposed tax reforms as raising the U.S. deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next decade has served as a justification to restrict state and local tax deductions (SALT), which will hit liberal blue states like California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts.
California is the most populous state, but only has the fourth-highest percentage of residents that claim SALT deduction at 34.5 percent. But the Golden State’s taxpayers claim SALT at the highest deduction per claimant of any state at $36,802. For many Bay Area liberals, Trump’s tax reform will be like getting a $12,000 increase in state taxes.
Eliminating Obamacare’s mandated requirement to buy health insurance will accelerate the implosion of nationalized healthcare, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates would save $388 billion over the next decade.
Moreover, California’s liberal Democrat-controlled Legislature gamed the Obamacare Medicaid expansion to sign up a stunning 13,465,532 enrollees, about 34 percent of the state’s population, according to the Medicaid.gov. Despite having just 12 percent of the nation’s population, California currently pockets 19.6 percent of all federal spending on Medicaid.
Elimination of Obamacare is estimated to cost California $58 billion in Medicaid funding over the next decade. That means California public employee unions, which are the key to funding the liberal agenda, could lose tens of billions in annual state and federal cash.
Another tax reform measure, requiring parents who claim the child tax credit to produce valid Social Security numbers, is meant to stop illegal aliens, who currently use bogus Individual Taxpayer Identification numbers to obtain the child tax benefit. Requiring real documentation could eliminate hundreds of billions in welfare and Medicaid entitlement fraud.
Peter MacKinnon, president of a big East Coast Service Employees’ International Union, recently admitted that SALT deductions have meant most Americans pay higher federal taxes as a way of “propping up profligate, big-government states.”
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein for decades have brought home the bacon to California, and especially to Bay Area liberals. But tax reform dumping SALT will make it much more difficult for California’s liberal politicians that want to impose high taxes, which fund their union allies’ jobs and pensions.