Seventy-seven percent of mortgage interest deduction benefits go to households earning over $100,000

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. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 183

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A mortgage-interest deduction favors wealthy rather than poor renters — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 1286