Me too. Why should people get a tax bonus for getting a loan? There shouldn’t be anything in the tax code that applies differently to different persons
Eh, the problem isn't in what it was supposed to do or whether it's the right thing to do in the long run, but in the immediate consequences of removing the deduction.
The effective payment for a mortgage goes up by 20-30% depending on tax bracket. House prices will fall by 20-30%. A bunch more mortgages will be underwater, a bunch more families will have trouble making their payment. So more folks will be out of their houses at about the same time their pension funds take a big hit because the mortgage-backed securities they bought go under. Things are bad enough now, and you want to make them worse?
There's lots of stuff in the (income) tax code that applies differently to different people? Well actually no, there's not. There's stuff that applies to different choices by different people. If you chose to buy muni-bonds, you don't pay tax, while if I chose to buy XOM bonds, I do pay tax.
Other than a poll or head tax (forbidden by the Constitution), what tax is not affected by personal choice?
Then we’ll need to eliminate the deductibility of interest paid by companies on debt. Otherwise it’s yet another way of favoring corporations over private individuals, and we’ll see housing aggregated and consolidated in the same way family farms have been displaced by factory farms, and family-owned companies swallowed up by larger companies with diversified ownership.