Fiscal Cliff — Eliminate the Mortgage Deduction (therefore raising taxes on everybody)

Congress wants to raise the tax on every single person who owns or lives in a house.

In a quest to find more revenue sources with which our leviathan government can feed their out-of-control spending habit, Congress is looking to steal a big part of the housing market investment strategy: the mortgage deduction:

A tax break that has long been untouchable could soon be in for some serious scrutiny.

Many home buyers deduct their mortgage interest when assessing their tax bill, a perk that has helped bolster the income of millions of families — and the broader housing market.

But as President Obama and Congress try to hash out a deal to reduce the budget deficit, the mortgage interest deduction will likely be part of the discussion.

Limits on a broad array of deductions could emerge in any budget deal. It is likely that any caps would be structured to aim at high-income households, and would diminish or end the mortgage tax break for many of those taxpayers.

For all of you fools who voted for Obama, believing that he would only raise taxes on the evil %1 and those making over $250K per year: suckers! Do you own a home? Well guess what? Or taxes just went up. A lot.

Don’t own your home and rent instead? Well, guess what? Your landlord’s taxes just went up. A lot. And guess how he’s going to pay that tax increase? If you guessed, “raise my rent,” BINGO!

And if you believe that Obama and Congress simply want this new source of revenue as part of a plan to decrease the deficit, well you are a deluded moron. The only thing they want to do with new revenue is redistribute and spend.

Period.

The $83 billion in tax savings from the mortgage deduction? Would fund our government for 8.3 days. Without reducing the deficit by a single penny.

As a homeowner who benefits from this exemption, I’d be all for eliminating this deduction and ALL other deductions. With one simple caveat: implement either the flat tax or the national sales tax (fair tax). Preferably the flat tax. We need every single voter to have some skin in the game, unlike our current system, which exempts nearly half of ‘em.

Mark Steyn on the folly of overtaxing the wealthy (and the idiocy of Warren Buffett):

If you took every single penny that Warren Buffett has, it’d pay for 4-1/2 days of the US government. This tax-the-rich won’t work. The problem here is the government is way bigger than even the capacity of the rich to sustain it. The Buffett Rule would raise $3.2 billion a year, and take 514 years just to pay off Obama’s 2011 budget deficit.

If you think only the wealthy are going to be hit by what’s coming, think again. The fiscal cliff is going to drag everyone else down with it. It’s just the warm-up for the total societal collapse of the United States.

The Weekly Standard warns folks to “watch what Warren Buffett does, not what he says.” You know, kinda like Al Gore flying around in his private jet to warn the rest of us to reduce our carbon footprint…