Have not read all of the posts but wanted to share an idea I had in 1981.
I was a Div Controller for the NOLA Div of US Home. We were building 600 homes or so a year in Louisiana at the time.
I had this idea that you eliminate the mortgage deduction but you made the income on mortgage’s tax free to investors. Sort of like muni’s are today.
The idea was that it would effectively reduce conforming mortgage rates by about 35% or so. This was back when mortgage rates peaked at 21.5% or so.
I was able to mention it to the corporate controller when he visited the office one time but he was so dense he didn’t grasp the benefits.
Perhaps if we were to do that now we could keep mortgage rates low and since now a days a lot of people’s standard deductions are greater than the mortgage deduction then it would not really affect the tax revenue to the government as much as one would expect. It would however give a market reason to have lower mortgage rates as opposed to manipulation by the Fed.
