Benjamin Franklin wasn’t blustering when he said “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” In fact, taxes siphon far more money away from average Americans than just about any other requisite expenditure. That’s probably a surprise for people whose paychecks don’t reflect pretax income. However, the reality is that groceries and attire — the costs of which all of us routinely complain about — are easily dwarfed by the demands of government coffers.

As CNS News reports, “Americans on average spent more on taxes than on food and clothing combined in 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s new data on consumer expenditures, which was released this month. [Americans] spent an average of $9,562 on food and clothing in 2017, according to BLS. But they spent $16,749 on federal, state and local taxes.”

This is especially noteworthy in the context of last year’s Republican tax reform, which succeeded in alleviating some of this tax demand. Of course, nobody actually enjoys paying taxes — even those wealthy Democrats who claim otherwise. Which is why the tax reform’s curbing of state and local tax (SALT) deductions is so contentious. Despite the Democrat Party’s “spread the wealth” rhetoric, rich Democrats in high-tax blue states like California rely on SALT deductions for wealth retainment. Now that the deduction is capped, wealth retainment is harder to come by.

Hypocritically, SALT deductions essentially mean that lower-income taxpayers subsidize wealthier patrons who take advantage of massive state and local tax write-offs. Last year’s $10,000 tax reform cap addressed this unfair discrepancy. But rest assured: Democrats will attempt to torpedo the cap if they manage to retake Congress, which even a well-known leftist institution suggests is tawdry.

According to The Hill, “The Tax Policy Center, whose director is a former Obama administration official, found that if the deduction cap is repealed retroactively to the start of this year, 56.5 percent of the tax cut would go to households in the top 1 percent of income in 2018. More than 96 percent of the benefit would go to taxpayers in the top fifth of income — those with income of more than $153,000.”

We shouldn’t fault wealthy Democrats for naturally desiring to retain their wealth. But they certainly can and should be faulted for demanding that lower-income Americans redistribute their own wealth while so fiercely reserving their own.