Home-Buyer tax credit: should it expire?

September 29, 2009 · Tagged with Real Estate 

On top of that, the way the tax credit is being implemented at times echoes certain practices that may have helped get us into the housing mess. For example, some state housing agencies are allowed to provide second mortgages to buyers who don’t have enough money for a down payment so that they might “monetize” the tax credit and get the cash up front. Down-payment assistance is considered by many to have contributed to the crisis because it helped people buy homes they couldn’t really afford. Anyone who doesn’t understand that it’s a bad idea to push people into buying houses when they’re not ready to hasn’t been paying attention for the past two years.

Worse yet, by extending the home-buyer tax credit, especially to existing homeowners, we run the risk of creating a situation where it never goes away. If a tax credit – or any other economic benefit – sticks around long enough, people start feeling entitled to it, even if it was originally supposed to be temporary. In academic literature this is called the endowment effect. Taking away such a program once it’s ingrained can be a monumental political challenge. It’s not just that expanding the home-buyer tax credit would cost $50 billion to $100 billion this year. It’s that it could easily wind up costing that every year.

The question, then, is, Do we want to create a broad new housing-related entitlement?

To figure out the answer, we might look to an existing one: the mortgage-interest tax deduction. Each year we give up some $80 billion in tax revenues so that homeowners don’t have to pay tax on the income spent on mortgage interest. The thing is, about half of homeowners don’t claim the deduction; they don’t see the benefit, nor do the one-third of people in the U.S. who rent a place to live.

The people who do see a meaningful benefit are, by and large, already rich. Economists James Poterba and Todd Sinai found that the tax savings from the mortgage-interest deduction for households earning more than $250,000 is 10 times the tax savings for households earning $40,000 to $75,000. According to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, a little more than half of the savings is seen by just 12% of taxpayers – those with incomes over $100,000.

The other interesting bit about the mortgage-interest deduction is that policymakers never intended it to help promote homeownership – something that many people assume to be the case and use to help frame their thinking about the appropriateness of using the tax code to boost home-buying. Rather, the deduction is an artifact of the 1894 federal income-tax code, under which all interest was deductible, since pretty much all interest was a business expense. There weren’t really loans to buy houses back then. In other words, a massive and costly cornerstone of American housing policy isn’t even something we chose.

The good news with the home-buyer tax credit is that we do, in fact, have a choice.

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