Ok that may be true but why should they be allowed to deduct it? They are not a business owner (unlike the landlord). Its like allowing people to deduct 10% of everything they buy from Amazon because they are paying a part of Amazon’s warehousing costs.

I'm not advocating for renters to be able to deduct a piece of the underlying property tax. I don't think it makes sense to have property tax as a federal deduction at all.

In general, I'm not sure how great it is that we favor home ownership over renting in our tax policy. My bigger issue is being able to deduct mortgage interest but not rent. Mortgage interest is essentially rent on money, so I've always thought it'd be fair to make rent (or a percentage of it at least) deductible as well. Or, even better, eliminate the mortgage interest deduction entirely.

Full disclosure, I'm a homeowner. Fuller disclosure, my home is paid off, so it's easy for me to say these deductions shouldn't exist. I would gladly give up the property tax deduction if that additional revenue was used for something other than cutting taxes for the wealthy, though.

OK, I see your point with mortgage interest interested being deductible.