The
Government is broke. What do they do to
fill their coffers? They slowly but
surely chip away at tax benefits and create new taxes for you. One tax benefit that has been up in the air
is the mortgage interest deduction where you can deduct your interest payments
from your taxes. President Obama during
his speech at the Democratic National Convention shows his support for keeping
the mortgage interest deduction which is good news for current and future home
owners. Tax benefits are one of the main
perks of owning real estate.
To go
further back, during the Republican National Convention, protecting the
mortgage interest deduction wasn’t in their platform. However, with the effort and pressure from
the National Association of Realtors, protecting the mortgage interest deduction
was inserted into the platform.
What do you
think? How would you feel if Government
were to take away this tax benefit designed for current and future homeowners?
Obama Promises to Protect MID for the Middle Class
DAILY REAL ESTATE
NEWS | FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 07, 2012
President
Barack Obama in his speech last night to accept the Democratic nomination
for president said he will protect the mortgage interest deduction for
middle-class families.
“I refuse to ask
middle-class families to give up their deductions for owning a home … just to
pay for another millionaire’s tax cut,” he said.
The president’s speech
focused heavily on preserving the financial health of middle-class households,
and he said that any deficit reduction and tax increases that he would seek in
a second term would not affect households earning up to $250,000.
“I want to reform the
tax code so that it’s simple, fair, and asks the wealthiest households to pay
higher taxes on incomes over $250,000 — the same rate we had when Bill Clinton
was president,” he said, “the same rate we had when our economy created nearly
23 million new jobs, the biggest surplus in history, and a lot of millionaires
to boot.”
Alluding to the
excesses in mortgage originations during the housing boom and the subsequent
mortgage crisis, the president touted the rules that are now in place to
protect households from taking out loans for which they don’t have the ability
to repay. “We believe that when a family can no longer be tricked into signing
a mortgage they can’t afford, that family is protected, but so is the value of
other people’s homes, and so is the entire economy,” he said.
The president says in
a Q&A for the September/October issue of REALTOR® Magazine, which comes out
in mid-September, that he’s open to ensuring the rules don’t cut off the flow
of mortgage credit to otherwise creditworthy borrowers.
“We will work with
regulators to strike the appropriate balance for a healthy market that is open,
fair and sustainable over the long term,” he said in the Q&A.
