Let’s stop subsidizing mansions!

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:58:00 +0000

With Congress finally starting to have a serious conversation about our revenue crisis, there are obvious reasons to limit the amount of mortgage interest that Americans can deduct from their taxable income.

First and foremost, current law -- which allows homeowners to deduct interest on mortgages up to $1 million -- is extremely expensive for the country. As federal data show, it costs roughly $100 billion a year, making it the third largest expenditure woven into the tax code.

That huge outlay might be justified if the deduction was a widely distributed, middle-class program. But with only about a third of all taxpayers earning enough to make it worthwhile to itemize their tax returns, just a quarter of all tax filers ever actually utilize the deduction. Add to this the fact that the deduction can be used for second homes, and the result is a write-off that mostly benefits the wealthy. In dollar-figure terms, it is a deduction that, according to the Tax Policy Center, saves $5,460 for someone making more than $250,000 a year and only $91 for those making less than $40,000 a year.

Tax the rich!

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:35:00 +0000

In a media-driven nation whose lingua franca is story and whose culture is obsessed with narrative arc, 2012 not surprisingly delivered a television-powered presidential campaign rooted in oversimplified parable. Republicans manufactured the tale of an up-from-the-bootstraps businessman working to defeat a communist Manchurian Candidate. Democrats, meanwhile, told the tale of a grounded, grassroots middle-class populist working to stop a ruthless Gordon Gekko disciple from performing a hostile takeover of the federal government. Both fables were deceptively creative with the facts, often driving the campaign debate into free-association collages of phrases like "you didn't build that," "apology tour" and "Bain Capital." Considering this, one way to read the election result is to conclude that Americans simply didn't want a plutocrat in the White House and that therefore, there is no single policy mandate for the winner.

Salon.com > Tax reform

Let’s stop subsidizing mansions!

Tax the rich!