Last year's tax reform put a cap on that, which is highly inconvenient to people living in high tax, high income or high property value states like California, New York, etc.

From the article:

> The I.R.S. warning comes in response to states, like New York, that have looked for ways to blunt the impact of a new $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction, known as SALT. The cap, which was included in last year’s $1.5 trillion Republican tax overhaul, hit predominantly Democratic, high-tax states hardest since it limits the amount of state and local sales, income and property taxes that residents can deduct from their federal taxes.

The tax reform hit many places hard. You can only deduct the first $10,000. Every suburb of NYC has an average property tax of over $10k, plus most people pay state income tax. These people are doubly impacted by the higher standard deduction, which makes it difficult for all but the wealthy to deduct.

Not sure I follow. The wealthier have higher incomes and higher property taxes due to buying more expensive homes. The $10,000 cap hits them even harder.

If you live in New York, New Jersey, California, etc, a large percentage/majority of homeowners are impacted by the $10k cap.

But you need to clear $24k in deductions (as a married couple) to even take that deduction.

The average homeowner loses, as they can’t cross the threshold, and every marginal state/local tax dollar costs 15-25% more than it did before.

The 2017 standard deduction for married couples was $12,700 (compared to $24K in 2018). So the average homeowner also gets an additional $11,300 tax free. Granted so do non-homeowners.

I don't think the "average homeowner" would complain that they can't take as big of a homeowners deduction when the net result is they are exempting a larger portion of their income regardless.

Not following your latter point: isn't the flat rate for the higher standard deduction progressive?

Not really.

It’s subsidizing sparsely populated states that either don’t need to or don’t care to provide the state/local services that populated places need.

What does population have anything to do with it? It's based on income. The fact that more densely populated places have higher per capita service costs is the problem.

The deduction is capped at $10k starting in 2018.