The mortgage interest deduction’s homeownership legend is politically constructed, not empirical.

Evidence

The conventional wisdom around the mortgage interest deduction (and its popularity among high-income, predominantly white taxpayers) has a lot in common with the conventional wisdom surrounding the marriage bonus: Both are widely seen as a sure way to save, but both benefit far fewer taxpayers than most people think. The financial journalist Roger Lowenstein describes the mortgage interest deduction as “an American folk legend: the government invented [it] to help people buy their own homes, and the level of homeownership has risen ever since.” Congressional legislative history also explicitly makes this connection. In a speech to the National Association of Realtors in 1984, President Reagan promised, “In case there’s still any doubt, I want you to know we will preserve that part of the American dream which the home mortgage interest deduction symbolizes.” Such language reinforced the idea that the tax break was a key ingredient of the American dream of homeownership, even though it was not an ingredient evenly distributed among black and white homeowners. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1241

Categorization

• QUESTION: The marriage bonus/mortgage deduction parallel is asserted twice but not developed here; worth chasing how far the symmetry extends.