With battles over school closures, vaccine mandates and curricula, you might think the president of the American Federation of Teachers has enough on her plate. But Randi Weingarten is now lobbying hard for a tax break whose benefits would go mostly to the wealthy. She wants Democrats to restore the deduction for state and local taxes in their giant tax and spending bill.
That’s not how Ms. Weingarten is selling it. “SALT is a way of delivering for the middle class,” she tweeted last week. At a press conference Wednesday outside the Capitol with the Bipartisan SALT Caucus, the teachers union chief repeated this theme.
But in tying that deduction to progressive spending at the state and local levels, participants gave away their real reason for wanting the SALT deduction: It encourages higher state and local spending on teacher pay and pensions. As New York Rep. Tom Suozzi admitted, “We’ve chosen in our states to tax people to do progressive policies.” Which is why Ms. Weingarten was right there beside him.