Must-Read: Laura J Keller, Ben Steverman, and Charles Stein: Inside Wall Street’s Towers, Traders Grouse Over Trump Tax Plan

Must-Read: If you are neither a plutocrat nor an activist seeking validation of your ethno-cultural grievances, you are not of concern to today’s Republican Party. We’re looking at you, the entrepreneurial and enterprising white upper-middle class who were both Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan’s core supporters: Laura J Keller, Ben Steverman, and Charles Stein: Inside Wall Street’s Towers, Traders Grouse Over Trump Tax Plan: “Many are figuring out greater benefits will go to billionaires. One, sipping a Bloody Mary, vows to quit the Republican party…

…Wall Street traders who rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year or more eagerly awaited a Republican overhaul of the U.S. tax code. Now, many are huddling with accountants and concluding the real gains will go to billionaires and other captains of the industry. Those in trenches—the merely wealthy—are grousing. Atop their list of worries: New limits on deductions for mortgage interest and state and local taxes… will cost them thousands of dollars annually while depressing the value of their homes… chop local tax revenues and erode the quality of schools and other amenities…. Most spoke on the condition they not be named. Many were self-aware enough to realize they won’t garner sympathy. One trader, sipping a Bloody Mary on a morning flight to somewhere more tropical, said he’s going to stop registering as a Republican. En route, he sent more than a dozen text messages ripping the tax bill. A pair of hedge fund managers said they’ll stop donating to Republicans they’ve long supported. One of them said he spent weeks berating a politician who’s taken his money, arguing the tax bill is too tilted toward corporations, rather than individuals who should get more relief.

“My clients are hard-working young professionals on Wall Street. I don’t have a lot of good news for them,” said Douglas Boneparth, a financial adviser in lower Manhattan who counsels people throughout the industry. Most are coming to terms with it. “I don’t think anyone is going to be surprised by the economic reality.”… The biggest source of pain in the tax bill is its limits on deductions. It eliminates the deduction for unreimbursed employee expenses, for example, and caps at $10,000 the deduction for local and state taxes. Homeowners can still deduct mortgage interest, but the cap for new loans would be $750,000, down from $1 million. The median asking price for a resale home in Manhattan is almost $1 million….

Manhattan’s army of salaried financial professionals are in a niche where the benefits thin out. They’ll still get goodies such as a higher threshold for the alternative minimum tax, and a drop in the top marginal rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent. But, along with losing key deductions, they’re explicitly barred from a new 20 percent tax deduction aimed at business owners. Like doctors, lawyers and other service professionals, they can only get the full pass-through break if they own their own firm and earn less than $315,000 for a married couple, and half that for single taxpayers…