Tax Reform's Third Rail: Mortgage Interest

Policy Backgrounder | Taxes

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No. 139

Friday, February 16, 1996

by Bruce Bartlett

Notes

  1. Dave Skidmore, "'It's War!' Cry Realtors Over Mortgage Idea," Washington Times, May 31, 1995.
  2. Roger E. Brinner, Mark Lasky and David Wyss, Residential Real Estate Impacts of Flat Tax Legislation (Lexington, MA: DRI/McGraw-Hill, 1995); H. Jane Lehman, "Flat Tax Could Cost Owners," Washington Post, July 1, 1995.
  3. James M. Poterba, "House Price Dynamics: The Role of Tax Policy and Demography," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, No. 2, 1991, pp. 152-155.
  4. Lee A. Sheppard, "Should Sales of Personal Residences Be Exempt from Tax?" Tax Notes, March 25, 1991, pp. 1433-1434.
  5. Dale W. Jorgenson and Kun-Young Yun, "Tax Reform and U.S. Economic Growth," Journal of Political Economy, vol. 98, no. 5, pt. 2, October 1990, pp. S151-S193. Allowing immediate expensing of capital equipment and taxing all income only once removes savings and investment from the tax base, making the flat tax a consumption tax.
  6. Edwin S. Mills, "Dividing Up the Investment Pie: Have We Overinvested in Housing?" Business Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, March-April 1987, pp. 13-23.
  7. U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on Taxation, Estimates of Federal Tax Expenditures for Fiscal Years 1996-2000 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995), p. 25.