The Trump administration is trying to figure out how to pay for tax cuts, and one of the ways it’s considering is getting rid of the mortgage-interest deduction for homeowners, Politico reports.
Unlike rent payments, the interest for a mortgage payment can be deducted from taxable income. It’s a major benefit of owning a home, and critics have pointed to it as a huge driver in American inequality.
At a White House roundtable, led by National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, featuring people in the real estate industry, the topic came up. One attendee told Politico that the tax break was on the table as the administration works on taxes, something Cohn had told Congress before.
As Matthew Desmond, author of “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” wrote in May, it’s actually one of the main entitlement programs in the United States. “But by any fair standard,” Desmond wrote in the New York Times, “the holy trinity of United States social policy should also include the mortgage-interest deduction – an enormous benefit that has also become politically untouchable.”
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