It has become fashionable (I am happy to say) for  politicians to talk about ending or at least scaling back tax subsidies. But  pols mean very different things when they say this. And new analysis by the Tax  Policy Center shows that whether they help you or not often depends on how much  money you [...]

Apparently nostalgic for recession, more than 100 House Republicans have proposed to cut federal spending by $550 billion in 2012. The Republican Study Committee (RSC) doesn’t ever quite say this is their plan, but it is. One hardly knows where to begin. This is an amazing number. It implies a 15 percent reduction in government spending [...]

The American housing market is in trouble. Prices continue to fall, many would-be buyers can’t qualify for mortgages, sales remain sluggish, and the backlog of potential foreclosures continues to grow. The benefits of the temporary tax credits offered in 2009 and 2010 have long since worn off. Meanwhile Congress is working to revamp Fannie Mae [...]

The deduction for interest on home mortgages may be the most beloved of all tax subsidies. A politician needs only to muse about repealing or restructuring the deduction to be set upon by suburban mobs (led, perhaps, by real estate agents and mortgage lenders). But a new analysis by my Tax Policy Center colleagues Ridathi Chakravarti [...]

Tomorrow, the White House will release its ideas for overhauling mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  While there is little agreement in Washington over just what to do, there is broad bipartisan support for big changes. In large part that’s because when the implicit government guaranty behind Fan and Fred turned explicit in the [...]

Do we want to use the tax code to subsidize home ownership? And, if we do, is the mortgage interest deduction the best way to do it? A new paper by my Tax Policy Center colleagues Eric Toder and Katherine Lim, along with Urban Institute researchers Margery Turner and Liza Getsinger, asks these provocative questions, and comes up with some surprising answers.