Only a small minority of taxpayers can actually benefit from the mortgage deduction

Evidence

A taxpayer can only reap these benefits by choosing to itemize deductions that, when combined, are greater than the standard deduction, which isn’t the case for most people: A recent analysis of IRS statistics showed that only 22 percent of tax returns claimed deductions related to home mortgage interest. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities produced a report showing that 77 percent of the benefits of the mortgage interest deduction went to homeowners with incomes higher than $100,000, while almost half of homeowners with mortgages, who are mostly middleand lower-income earners, did not receive any tax benefit. Changes to the tax code in 2017 are likely to make this number even higher. The Tax Policy Center predicts that with the increase in the standard deduction and the cap on state and local taxes—which primarily limits deductions for high-income taxpayers in expensive real estate markets like New York and California, which just happen to lean Democrat—only 10 percent of Americans will itemize their deductions. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1239

Categorization

• XREF: Critical for the legal-brief defense: the deduction is not neutral but a badly-targeted subsidy whose benefit skews to high earners — usable as the saturated-system harm evidence.