From: Enrique Diaz-Alvarez <enrique at ee.cornell.edu> Reply-To: enrique at ee.cornell.edu Organization: Cornell University X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.04Gold (Win95; U) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: mortgage talk: Jordan vs. Liu, and much more. References: <9905280118.AA02596 at blood.infothecary.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Jordan Hayes wrote:
>
> From enrique at anise.ee.cornell.edu Thu May 27 15:55:52 1999
>
> Top quintile, roughly speaking.
>
>
> It's tough to tell exactly from the numbers the IRS publishes, but for
> those with AGI in the $15k->$17k range, the average exemption plus
> deductions is around $10.4k ... given a few kids in that average
> family, I suppose it could be argued that it's dominated by the
> standard deduction, but the $30k->$40k AGI range averages about $13k of
> exemptions and deductions, so I think it's a little weak to claim that
> only top quintile taxpayers are getting a tax advantage from a
> mortgage.
I am not sure I understand what personal exemptions have to do with my argument, since you get them whether or not you itemize your deductions. Filers only benefit from the mortgage exemption if the interest they are paying plus any other deductions other than the personal ones is greater than $7,500, right? I have a very hard time seeing how that would be the case for families with AGIs under 50K.
Enrique
>
> /jordan
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