Weekly Roundup: Existing-home sales rebound

Here’s your chance to catch up with news included to inform, enlighten and perhaps even entertain you. To read about The Big Apple, check out the other of today’s posts and look for Out and About early next week.

FOR $28 MILLION YOU CAN BUY AN AGING CELEB’S DAHLINK BEL AIR MANSION

THIS TENANT DEMONSTRATES ANEW THAT HE IS UNINTERESTED IN MAKING NEW FRIENDS

NEW-HOME CONSTRUCTION ENDS THE YEAR ON A WEAK NOTE

BUT SALES OF PREVIOUSLY OWNED HOMES BOUNCE BACK, CAUSING

Don’t worry about proposal to drop interest deduction

(Flickr photo by JD Hancock)

A caller last week was worried about the investment condo he had purchased this year.

His concern centered on the a particular item in the draft plan floated by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, co-chairs of President Obama’s fiscal commission.  After this post was published early today, they coincidentally released their 59-page report.

Their recommendations for deficit reduction must be approved by 14 of the panel’s 18 members, accepted by the administration, and passed by the Senate and House to be implemented.  I don’t hear many of those members embracing that sodden turkey.  (Sorry, but I’m still digesting.)

The item that had my caller concerned was elimination of the tax deduction for mortgage interest,

I got an e-mailed mortgage offer that was easy to refuse

In a serendipitous coincidence, I received an e-mail from CitiBank and noticed an entry on SmartMoney.com the same day last week.

Each concerned the concept of paying off a mortgage early. The e-mail was temptingly headlined:

Pay Off Your Mortgage Years Sooner!

The message went on to promise

Maybe tax benefits of homeownership should end

Abolishing the mortgage-interest deduction would replenish the nation's coffers. (Flickr photo by hto2008)

If anything I have posted so far hasn’t made me a pariah among my professional peers, this piece may well do that.

A column I read in the New York Times on Saturday got me thinking, again, about the question of U.S. government policy of supporting home ownership (which has fallen a couple of points to around 67 percent since the housing bust) by allow a tax deduction for mortgage interest.

In his provocative article, Joe Nocera quotes several economists and questions the policy.  Why does the policy represent a cow so sacred that it cannot be slaughtered, not even touched?

That cow, of course, is that that home ownership fulfills the American dream. To my mind, heretical as it may be for a real estate broker to ask, hasn’t the time come to send that old cow to pasture?