WASHINGTON — The U.S. House will push to restore the property tax break you may have lost under President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law.

Democratic lawmakers huddled behind closed doors Thursday and agreed to do away with the the $10,000 cap on how much people can deduct state and local taxes on their federal tax returns.

The lawmakers agreed to find other revenues to pay for restoring the full deduction rather than further increase the deficit. A final bill, though, has yet to be written.

“We did come to a very reasonable and fair solution,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.

Pascrell, D-9th Dist., said he expected that the House could vote on legislation before going home in December.

Other participants at Thursday’s meeting included three lawmakers from New Jersey: Reps. Josh Gotheimer, Tom Malinowski, and Mikie Sherrill.

The focus was on ways to get enough congressional support to eliminate the deduction cap, which Malinowski, D-7th Dist., called “a deliberate hit at New Jersey and at the ability of states like ours to fund state and local government.”

Pascrell has introduced legislation to get rid of the cap and make up the revenue by restoring the top tax rate to 39.6 percent. Sherrill has proposed raising the cap to $12,000 for singles and $24,000 for couples, the amount of the current standard deduction. Gottheimer proposed closing tax loopholes that only benefit wealthy Americans.

“We’ve been exploring almost every avenue to stop this punishment toward our state,” said Sherrill, D-11th Dist. “What we’re looking at now are what are the details, what is the strategic plan, how do we get majority support for this.”

Trump and congressional Republicans capped the federal deduction for state and local taxes, a mainstay of the Internal Revenue Service code since the first income tax, in order to fund a tax cut that studies show largely benefitted corporations and wealthy Americans.

The measure increased the federal deficit by an estimated $1.9 trillion over 10 years while providing little juice to the U.S. economy, the Congressional Research Service said.

“The tax revision favored higher-income taxpayers, in part because most of the tax cut benefited corporations and in part because the individual income tax cut largely went to higher-income individuals,” the CRS said in May.

The tax law did, however, disproportionately affect New Jersey and other high-tax states, most of which send billions of dollars more to Washington than they receive in services.

“We must fight back against the moocher states who stuck it to us last Congress,” Gottheimer said.

Republicans branded the state and local deduction as a giveaway to the rich, even though 860,000 New Jersey households affected by the cap made $75,000 to $200,000 a year, according to Internal Revenue Service statistics.

Polls show that the tax cut remains unpopular with Americans, and Democratic victories in the states most hurt by the new law helped the party win control of the House last November.

Trump has expressed a willingness to revisit the deduction limits but Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has quashed such talk, instead calling for making the $10,000 cap permanent and eliminating the federal inheritance tax, which falls only on the richest 1 of every 100,000 estates.

None of those affected by the estate tax are family farms or small businesses, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive research group.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.

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