And in the process removed most income tax deductions from everybody and lengthened the depreciation timetables on improved real estate, which arguably contributed to the recent collapse of commercial real estate.
In the long run that had no real effect other than a social one. Your small time investor could buy a modest property and use depreciation to totally offset his rents AND his own outside income. In a couple of decades he'd be relatively wealthy from his holdings.
It was a way up for people of modest means ~ but that got cut off. As I recall it was the Democrats in Congress who demanded that modification to the tax rules ~ they also went after Veterans on the "double dipping" issue. Here we had several million men who'd been forcibly drafted into the military for the Nam War and some of them got government jobs later on. The Democrats didn't want any of them to draw both military and government retirements (which meant they wanted to discount your two years draft experience from your Social Security if you ever acquired it). There's an existing tax on military service out there ~ that should be abolished.
Now both of those impacts ~ elimination of accelerated depreciation and the tax on double-dipping went after the wealth accumulation opportunities of folks at the bottom end of the income scale.
Need I say more? The Democrats hate the working poor!