Just received this from Ruth Potter, with whom I am not acquainted, who asked me to post it. Ms. Potter doesn't say so in her email, but from what I can see at the linked sites, this initiative emanates from the National Association of Home Builders. So--here it is:
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Hello
Congress and the Administration are looking into scaling back or eliminating the Mortgage Interest Deduction. The consequences would be devastating to the recovering housing market and the tens of millions of home owners who benefit from the deduction.
The House recently introduced a resolution to retain the mortgage interest deduction and I hope that you'll help spread awareness about it on The Privatopia Papers. We created http://SaveMyMID.org to support this initiative and I've also created a useful site for bloggers and journalists to borrow resources from:
http://savemymid.info
Please let me know if you have any questions or need more information. If you are able to post about this, I'd love to get the link and share it with my team.
Thank you,
Ruth
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Ruth Potter
Ruth@SaveMyMID.info
www.SaveMyMID.info
3 comments:
The consumers never get the bulk of the benefit of these deductions. They are anticipated and capitalized into the increased cost of the product or service.
For example, whenever legislation permitted increased deductions for health care expenses and insurance - the health insurance went up significantly before hand.
Similarly with houses. The ability to have more net income as a result of the mortgage interest deduction results in artificially inflated prices for homes. The builder industry "captures" a significant portion of any "deduction" through higher sales prices to begin with.
In other words, it's no wonder that the various associations of builders would be lobbying for "homeowners" to get the mortgage interest deduction
Yes. This is what is called "astroturfing," or the creation of fake "grass roots" activism by powerful interest groups. In this case, the home builders are trying to create the impression that some spontaneous citizens' group has emerged. However, one good thing about interest groups is their high level of awareness of legislative and regulatory activity that citizens would otherwise never know about until it was too late. There's nothing wrong with spreading the word.
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