Everybody gets pissed off whenever I say this is a good idea, so maybe you’ll listen to David Cay Johnston:
Imagine you make $50,000 to $75,000. Statistically you would save $75 a month in federal income taxes if you bought a house, the congressional study shows. Now which option would you prefer?
• Pay $300,000 for your house, the median for Sacramento in late 2013, and save $900 annually on your federal income tax by deducting the mortgage interest?
• Pay $200,000 for your house, but without being able to deduct your mortgage interest?
Agree. The wealthy make much more off this deduction anyway. It’s often considered a liberal “sacred cow” — so what price can we extract from the conservatives in exchange for killing it?
Yeah, the time for this deduction has come and gone. Movement into the suburbs has given way to movement into the exurbs at a time when it’s getting more and more difficult to provide anything in the way of municipal services out that far.
If we had an infinite source of farmland and good soil in some magical place, an infinite source of fossil fuels, and an infinite capacity in the atmosphere to absorb the products of combustion of all those fossil fuels without causing catastrophic ruin, why we could keep moving people farther apart, driving fantastic distances, etc.
But we don’t have infinite numbers or amounts of all those things.
So ditch the deduction.