The House Ways and Means Committee is marking up legislation this week to repeal the 2017 tax law’s cap on the federal deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) and offset the cost by returning the top individual tax rate to 39.6 percent.

As a new CBPP analysis explains, repealing the SALT cap would overwhelmingly benefit high-income households, since most low- and middle-income taxpayers don’t face the SALT cap.

The top 1 percent of households would receive 57 percent of the benefit of repeal, and the top 5 percent of households would receive over 80 percent of the benefit, while the bottom 80 percent of households would receive just 4 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center (TPC).

In addition, paying for repeal by raising the top rate would use up a source of progressive revenue that would no longer be available to fund other, more critical priorities.

More modest proposals to modify the SALT cap offer a superior approach; such proposals can be designed to exempt the vast share of taxpayers from the cap and at far less cost.