[PEN-L:11491] Re: Home Mortgage Deduction

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 06:53 AM 7/29/97 -0700, you wrote:
>
>The home mortgage interest deduction has several negative aspects, two of
>the main problems are:
>
>First, it promotes urban sprawl and the decline of the inner city.  This
>is due to the fact that it is cost effective to be highly indebted in
>housing.  When people desire new amenities (like large yards or bigger
>houses) it makes sense to purchase new housing rather than upgrade
>existing housing.  Further, as housing ages and the cost of upkeep
>increases, it influences the decision to abandon rather than improve the
>building.
>

One thing to be clear about is that this "entitlement" is on the hit-list
of people like Peter Peterson and Warren Rudman. They group it with social
security as an item that benefits the upper-middle class. So an attack on
it is not necessarily progressive. Peterson and Rudman like to point to
Japan as an example of a more "enlightened" policy since there are no such
tax deductions associated with home ownership there.

The questions of housing and transportation could lend itself to the sort
of green-green mystification. Advocates of "less is more" might argue that
we should walk more and live in apartments. The problem is that the working
class might just interpret this as another form of Jimmy Carter austerity.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of the Soviet Union as socialist model
is the degree to which the question of public housing had become
discredited. A renewed socialist movement should engage in the sort of
creative thinking that the Bauhaus movement produced, but attuned to the
21st century. My suspicion is that there is less than meets the eye in
suburbia as evinced by the anomie of the teenagers who are condemned to
wander aimlessly in shopping malls like spectres in Dante's Inferno.

Louis P.