The 2017 tax act quietly curtailed the mortgage interest deduction.

Evidence

The real estate lobby also proved vulnerable recently when it lost a round with the temporary 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which is scheduled to expire on December 31, 2025. That legislation increased the standard deduction—which means fewer taxpayers will bother to itemize their mortgage interest deduction and just take the standard deduction instead. It also reduced the amount of mortgages you could have outstanding and still qualify for the mortgage interest deduction from 1 million to 750,000. And it limited the interest deduction for home equity loans, by requiring that the proceeds of the loan be used for home improvement. (The law used to allow you to take out a home equity loan for up to $100,000 and deduct the interest regardless of how you used the proceeds.) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 236

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete named provision (the $750,000 cap and floor on itemizing) the reader could add to the four-mechanisms toolkit.