Chris Christie said he would keep in place a cap on state and local tax deductions if he is elected president, declining to roll back a policy that has become a flashpoint for taxpayers in New York and New Jersey.
In an interview with Bloomberg Television's "Balance of Power" Wednesday, the Republican presidential candidate and former New Jersey governor said he supports the deduction limit — also known as the SALT cap — that was part of then-President Donald Trump's tax cut overhaul of 2017.
"I don't think that the rest of the country should be paying for the excessive taxes that we had in New Jersey, and New York, and Illinois, and California," Christie said.
"Because it could be deducted, you didn't feel the pain directly," he added. "What it does is, it encourages people to increase property taxes, increase local and state taxes, and have much less impact on their people — but everybody else in the country is paying for it."
Any changes on SALT provisions, which chiefly affect residents of high-tax states, would have to be approved by Congress.
Christie is challenging Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and has been a sharp critic of his former ally. Christie said that while he might have made the current SALT cap — now set at $10,000 — more generous, he would keep the Trump tax cuts if elected.
Gateway Project
The former governor also said he appreciated President Joe Biden's support of the Gateway Hudson project to upgrade the rail connections between New York and New Jersey, which will get a boost of as much as $7 billion dollars in federal funds.
"I give President Biden credit for that. It was a good move," he said. The project is important not just for New York and New Jersey, he said, but for everyone from Washington to Boston.
As governor, Christie scuttled a similar project — Access to the Region's Core, or ARC — because, he said, it relied too much on New Jersey taxpayers and provided indirect access to Penn Station instead of the "one-seat ride" that the Gateway project would allow.
Christie added that, unlike many other Republicans, he would have supported the bipartisan infrastructure bill Biden signed into law. "There are times when government has to do those things," he said. "There are things I would have done differently but if presented with that bill I would have voted for it."
— With assistance from Annmarie Hordern and Joe Mathieu
