Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Facebook RSS

Look Who’s Getting Oregon’s Housing Subsidy Dollars: The Rich

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

By Nigel Jaquiss, wweek.com

Oregon homeowners get more than $800 million a year in subsidy—and fatcats take the biggest chunk.

The Oregon House Revenue Committee met yesterday, in part to review the state’s role in addressing soaring real-estate costs.

One of the questions lawmakers examined is what programs the state currently has to subsidize affordable housing.

While the Oregon Department of Housing and Community Services provides a variety of programs that help fund affordable housing, lawmakers heard yesterday that the tax breaks property owners get—for mortgage interest, property taxes and capital gains—dwarf the relative pittance the state allocates to affordable housing.

Just those three tax breaks alone are worth more than $800 million a year to property owners.

By far the biggest subsidy is the home mortgage interest deduction, which costs the state nearly $500 million a year in foregone taxes…(emphasis ours)

We Respond & Your Comments

We’ll skip over some of the nonsense above, starting with the fact that tax breaks for mortgage interest, etc. have absolutely nothing to do with what the state chooses to spend on affordable housing.

Instead we’ll focus on mortgage deductions “costing” the state around $500 million. How can money it never gets “cost” anything?

If you don’t get a raise next year does it “cost” you money? Of course not. But liberals believe that government has first call on any money we have. They think it really belongs to the state. So whatever the state doesn’t get is a cost. Hey, that’s the thinking that made Cuba an economic powerhouse. Right?

Share

Comments are closed.