Proposed Changes to the Mortgage Interest Deduction
ShelterForce
Ira Goldstein and Michael Norton
The discourse around proposed changes to the federal tax system, especially between talk show pundits and economists and politicians—each with their own allegiances—is devoid of some simple, transparent facts. A first step toward public understanding of who benefits and who loses from proposed changes to the Mortgage Interest Deduction is to examine current data on home mortgages.
In 1975, Congress passed the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), which requires lending institutions to report on all applications for mortgage credit. The federal government recently released 2016 data (the most current available) on mortgage lending activity across the U.S. While not every mortgage is captured by HMDA, it stands as the best representation of mortgages made by the nation’s lending institutions.
