Home/SALT Parity

Avoiding Tax Hikes in the Big Beautiful Bill

The Main Street community needs the Big Beautiful Bill to succeed. Absent congressional action, taxes on pass-through businesses of all sizes will go up sharply.  The same applies to most families. So the Main Street Employers Coalition supports efforts in both the House and the Senate to extend the sunsetting provisions from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Comparing the two approaches, the House bill is more friendly to small- and family-owned businesses.  It increases the Section 199A pass-through deduction to 23 percent and its disallowance of Pass-Through Entity Taxes (PTETs) is limited to Specified Service Trades or Businesses (SSTB)

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2025-06-18T21:40:52+00:00June 18, 2025|

In Defense of SALT Parity

House passage of the big reconciliation bill is a welcome development for the millions of Main Street job creators otherwise facing a massive tax hike next year. S-Corp enthusiastically supports the measure, but one question remains — why does a bill designed to prevent tax hikes on small and family-owned businesses raise taxes on many of those businesses instead?

To recap – the House-passed bill would limit SALT deductions for millions of pass-through business owners of so-called Specified Service Trade or Businesses (SSTBs), imposing an $80 billion tax hike on these businesses even as the C corporation down the street

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2025-05-29T09:49:23+00:00May 29, 2025|

Tax Nerds Gone Wild

Main Street supports the tax bill adopted by the Ways and Means Committee this week, but not all the bill’s provisions are worth keeping. The House provision limiting SALT deductions on pass-throughs is a good example of why the “experts” need close supervision.  These provisions are hopelessly complicated and will hurt members of the very Main Street business community this bill is supposed to help.

First, some history. The TCJA imposed a new $10,000 cap on individual SALT deductions. It did not cap the SALT deductions of business entities, so corporate SALT (C-SALT) and any SALT paid by pass-through entities

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2025-05-18T13:45:34+00:00May 15, 2025|

Business Community Rallies Against B-SALT Proposals

The closer we get to a real tax bill, the louder the opposition to a possible B-SALT cap becomes.  That’s a good thing, because the threat is real.

First, an explainer – lots of folks are talking about C-SALT (state and local taxes paid by corporations) deductions these days, but that’s a misnomer. There is no separate corporate policy regarding SALT deductions. If Congress caps C-SALT, it caps deductions for S corporations and other pass-throughs too.  It’s the same deduction.  So forget about C-SALT and talk about B-SALT instead, because we are all in the same boat here.

On the B-SALT front

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2025-04-29T17:29:06+00:00April 29, 2025|

The C SALT Loophole

Last month, the Bipartisan Policy Center put forward some suggestions on how to address the pending sunset of the State and Local Tax (SALT) cap, including rolling back the pass-through “SALT Parity” laws we helped enact in 36 states.  A couple of thoughts.

Pass-Through Parity

First, the SALT cap played a big role in our efforts to ensure pass-through businesses were treated fairly under the TCJA.  The SALT cap raises huge amounts of revenue ($100 billion-plus per year) and about 20-30 percent of that is paid on pass-through income.  For comparison, that’s about half the total revenue impact of the

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2025-01-16T19:22:08+00:00January 16, 2025|