Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Who has $1 million in mortgage interest?

TV news is beginning too, at long last, offer some some specifics and comparison between the House and Senate tax reforms.  The Senate will allow deduction of $1 million mortgage interest.  Wow, that' one helova mortgage if the yearly payments run $1 million.  Jeez, I'll bet that would pay the mortgage on the Empire State building.    The House would only allow a half a million.  Either amounts of mortgage interest will pay a mortgage of $20 million or so.  That's one mighty fine house.  I skim the "Mansions" section of the Journal on Fridays.  They show some very fine houses there, but you can get into one of them for maybe $4 million.  Which gives a mortgage payment like $200K.  I'm thinking the only people paying $1 million mortgage interest are professionals in the real estate business, like president Trump used to be.  In short, this is tax loophole for real estate wheeler dealers.  Me, I would kill the mortgage interest deduction completely. 
   I paid mortgage interest on my house for years.  It was like $10K a year.  That was a nice deduction, until I finally paid off the mortgage, and the extra $12K standard deduction proposed in the tax reform will do me more good than a mortgage deduction, now that I don't have a mortgage anymore. 
   Another strange bit of tax reform information.  Somebody, Congressional Budget Office perhaps, claims that killing the "individual mandate" (tax/fine on individuals who don't have health insurance) will SAVE $380 billion over ten years.  How does killing a tax/fine save money??  Taxes raise money, killing them looses money.  Perhaps "they" think huge numbers of people won't buy taxpayer subsidized health insurance without the tax/fine to encourage them, and thus the taxpayers won't have to pay to subsidize them?  And "they" get their numbers from where?  And we believe them.  Right.

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