Will they ever take away the Mortgage Interest Deduction? (US)

[amarinth]

@Grumman

It takes a special kind of idiot to want to increase the cost of not foreclosing on your mortgage in this economic environment.

@Simplicio

I’m kinda skeptical that there are a lot of people making 250k a year who are so close to not being able to make their mortgage payments that the lack of this particular write-off would make the difference one way or another.

The people you are worried about are not the ones who are worried about making the mortgage. The people you’re worried about are the ones for whom strategic default is looking better every day. In some areas, property values are still sliding. Homes are going deeper and deeper underwater. For some people who can easily afford their mortgages, financially, it makes more sense to get foreclosed on and take the credit hit. The deduction isn’t really all that big of a deal, but it is one more thing keeping those people from saying “screw it, I’ll rent.”

[Northern_Piper]

@John_Mace

Can you give us more details? What was it, and how was it phased out? What effect did it have on the housing market?

Here’s an article on it: Spur growth – dump mortgage deduction: America’s favorite tax break is ready for the trash heap. Don’t believe it? Ask a Brit.

In the 1980s, Britain had its own version of the mortgage deduction, known as MIRAS, or “mortgage interest relief at source.” With the top income-tax rate at 60 percent (25 percentage points above ours today), the MIRAS break mattered a lot.

Then in 1988, Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s finance minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, changed the rules. He pulled the top tax rate down to 40 percent and cut back on MIRAS. Property values dropped as much as 20 percent – for a while. The fact that interest rates were heading up at the time made the pain even worse.

Yet Lawson’s successors persevered, hacking away at what remained of the mortgage break throughout the next decade. And in 1999 Gordon Brown, the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, did away with MIRAS altogether.

By then this last outrage was scarcely noticed. Partly that’s because there was little left of the relief, but it was also because housing prices were rising smartly. And they have continued to rise. The numbers from Nationwide, a building-trade group in Britain, show that home prices have tripled since the MIRAS experiment was launched in the late 1980s.

[Northern_Piper]

@Johnny_L.A

We should keep it. Removing it would make it more expensive to buy a house, and I believe home ownership is good for the economy.

But there’s no evidence that it does increase home ownership rates. Mortgage interest isn’t deductible in either Canada or the UK, but the rates of home ownership are about the same as in the US, hovering around 68% as set out in this wiki article.

See also Fareed Zakaria’s article last year in Time:

It costs the government $130 billion a year, encourages people to take on too much debt, inflates the housing market and has no real effect on homeownership. Canada has no such program and has the same rate of homeownership that the U.S. does. Margaret Thatcher began the phased elimination of the British mortgage-interest deduction, and the rate of homeownership actually went up.