This is why I don't give you a job

Re:This is why I don't give you a job by tptacek on Saturday January 07, 2012 @09:28AM (#3437054)

It's not quite that straightforward, is it? State taxes are federally deductible. And virtually everyone in the upper middle class owns a home and takes a whopping deduction on mortgage interest, and property taxes are also deductible.

I'd also push back on "not much in the way of a safety net". I'd like universal single-payer health care, but in the meantime it's worth remembering (a) once you hit retirement age, you very much do get public health care, and (b) retirement age is when you're most likely to incur medical expenses.

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Re:This is why I don't give you a job by caseysoftware on Saturday January 07, 2012 @10:43AM (#3437205)

If he's in Virginia (I was there 9 years), it takes a significant income to have a home. My old one bedroom condo at 835 sqft was 240k in 2005. A single family home in a reasonable neighborhood starts at $300k pretty easily which is easily 2-3x prices here in Austin.

The problem is that salaries in DC aren't double Austin.. they're more like 1.3-1.5x.

Also, once you're about the 50k threshold for income, some of those deductions - like for student loans - start decreasing and disappear.

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Re:This is why I don't give you a job by tptacek on Saturday January 07, 2012 @11:52AM (#3437361)

A $300k single family home is a starter home in the upper middle class.

The only deductions I mentioned --- mortgage interest and state taxes --- don't vanish at $50k.

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Re:This is why I don't give you a job by mattgreenrocks on Saturday January 07, 2012 @12:50PM (#3437537)

This is why I refuse to buy property in the DC metro area. Not a good deal at all. Better to export the salary elsewhere.

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Re:This is why I don't give you a job by burgerbrain on Saturday January 07, 2012 @05:42PM (#3438251)

This places people who have absolutely no desire of ever owning a home (such as myself) at an unfair disadvantage.

Higher taxes because I choose to pay other people for housing for the rest of my life? Huh?

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Re:This is why I don't give you a job by tptacek on Saturday January 07, 2012 @05:53PM (#3438282)

You might just as productively debate the whole concept of the progressive income tax scheme, because the mortgage interest tax deduction is probably the most popular deduction in the code.

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Re:This is why I don't give you a job by burgerbrain on Saturday January 07, 2012 @06:42PM (#3438408)

Although I don't in fact like the progressive income tax scheme, I don't see why it isn't possible to critique this aspect of it while supporting the concept at large.

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Re:This is why I don't give you a job by tptacek on Saturday January 07, 2012 @06:59PM (#3438433)

I generally don't agree with your premise, that it's unfair to advantage homeowners in the tax code. I think society as a whole benefits from increases in home ownership (homeowners are stakeholders in neighborhoods). I think the tax code can either be simple or effective.

You are free to disagree at length with both of those beliefs and I won't fault you for doing so, except that if the best argument you can muster is "no fair, I just want to rent" I may roll my eyes.

But the thing I really wanted to point out is, there are 104905480 things we can debate on HN where a change of perspective might be productive. This isn't one of them; the mortgage interest tax deduction is a psychological pillar of the middle class of the US and eliminating it would be painfully disruptive to huge numbers of voters.

Narcotics will be decriminalized nationwide before we lose deductible mortgage interest, is my prediction. People have strong feelings about drugs, too, but the decision to legalize them or not doesn't change whether they can still afford the cable bill.

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Re:This is why I don't give you a job by burgerbrain on Saturday January 07, 2012 @08:03PM (#3438552)

"You are free to disagree at length with both of those beliefs and I won't fault you for doing so, except that if the best argument you can muster is "no fair, I just want to rent" I may roll my eyes."

This is fundamentally an issue of the tax code, once again, favoring those who are well off while disadvantaging those who are not.

If that doesn't concern you, then so be it.

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Re:This is why I don't give you a job by toomuchtodo on Sunday January 08, 2012 @12:08AM (#3438941)

The mortgage interest deduction is subsiding those who make the choice to reduce their labor mobility; why would we subsidize people who want to reduce their competitiveness in the labor force?

Hopefully the mortgage interest deduction will go the way of ethanol subsidies.

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Re:This is why I don't give you a job by rwmj on Sunday January 08, 2012 @06:21AM (#3439339)

The equivalent UK benefit (MIRAS[1]) was abolished by the Conservative party, which out of the two main parties would be the right wing party of home ownership. It can happen ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_Interest_Relief_At_So...

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Re:This is why I don't give you a job by Retric on Sunday January 08, 2012 @11:05AM (#3439781)

High levels of home ownership causes long term economic harm by preventing people from moving around in response to better job offers etc. More importantly the mortgage tax credit simply increases home prices vs. making them more affordable. The reality is it's wildly understood as a bad idea economically, but it's so popular it's simply being chipped away by capping it and not indexing the cap to inflation.

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