Glaeser: Scale back the mortgage interest deduction

Harvard University economics professor Edward Glaeser argues for scaling back the home mortgage interest tax deduction:

REDUCING THE national debt is a great test of our political system. ... Yet last week’s eminently sensible preliminary report of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform seems to have brought forth not careful consideration but flights of fury. In particular, the possibility of reforming the home mortgage interest deduction has generated a torrent of ire. While one option mentioned by the report was to eliminate all tax deductions and credits, the more detailed Wyden-Gregg option is to limit the mortgage deduction to exclude second homes, home equity lines, and mortgages over $500,000. Lowering the upper limit on the home mortgage interest deduction should appeal to progressives, who want less largess for the wealthy, and to small-government conservatives, who dislike public paternalism. Unfortunately, the demons of discord seem to have prevented either group from embracing the reform.

The Democrats are haunted by a blue leviathan that calls for massive government transfers for any vaguely middle-class interest group. That monster was working full force last week as progressive pundits argued that capping the mortgage interest deduction at $500,000 would be deeply unfair to middle-class homeowners. Apparently these writers think that the middle class is full of people with million-dollar mortgages. According to the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finance, the median mortgage owed by a family in the top 10 percent of the US income distribution was $200,000. The median price of an existing home sold in September was $171,000. Research by economists James Poterba and Todd Sinai finds that even among households earning more than $250,000, the average mortgage is $300,000.

If liberals defend the home mortgage deduction as a vital bulwark for middle income Americans, then they are ignoring the fact that the home mortgage interest deduction is one of the most regressive parts of the tax code. Poterba and Sinai’s research finds that the average benefit created by the deduction for home-owning families earning over $250,000 is 10 times larger than the average benefit reaped by families earning between $40,000 and $75,000. Progressives also typically worry about global warming, and that concern should lead them to oppose any tax policy, like the mortgage interest deduction, that encourages Americans to build bigger, more energy-intensive homes. ...

Tea Party libertarians should fight the deduction, opposing any use of tax policy to try to manipulate the way we live. Why is it the government’s business to try to bribe us to buy bigger homes and take on more debt? ...

Reforming the home mortgage interest deduction is a good place for both parties to start getting serious.