Who Needs the Mortgage-Interest Deduction?
One of the first financial lessons I learned from my father was that when you buy a house, you get a tax break from deducting the interest on your mortgage. Therefore, he would explain as if it were as natural as pivoting at second base on a throw from shortstop, a person could afford to pay more for a house that he owned than he would on a residence that he was only renting and on which he didn’t get the tax break. I didn’t know why the government had chosen to influence my decision in this manner, and even less did I consider how it might affect the people on the other side the people who might be selling me a house, or lending me the money, or, for that matter, the guy who might have liked to have rented me an apartment if the Internal Revenue Code hadn’t been tilted against him. But it was a lesson I took to heart. When I was considering buying my very first dwelling, a 1BR w/EIK on West 79th Street with, for those who were sufficiently agile, a faint glimpse of the Hudson River, I
