Home mortgage interest deduction

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pages: 598 words: 140,612

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

An antiurban bias is even more obvious in housing and transportation policy, which seems almost intentionally designed to hurt the cities that enrich their countries and the entire world. The centerpiece of federal housing policy is the home mortgage interest deduction, which allows home owners to deduct from their taxes the interest on up to a million dollars of mortgage debt. Because more than 60 percent of Americans are home owners, this policy has become politically inviolate, but it is deeply flawed. The home mortgage interest deduction is a sacred cow in need of a good stockyard. It encourages Americans to leverage themselves to the hilt to bet on housing, which looks particularly foolish in the wake of the great housing bust of 2006-2008.

Environmental concerns should push toward a tax policy that encourages thrifty living in modest residences. The home mortgage interest deduction pushes us in the opposite direction, encouraging people to buy bigger homes, which are often suburban. The post-World War II move to enclaves like Levittown and The Woodlands was fueled by pro-home-ownership tax policies. I’m happy for people to enjoy the pleasures of large houses on large lots, but there is little reason why federal tax policy should subsidize those who buy big. A simple way to ease this problem without harming middle-class Americans would be lowering the upper limit on the home mortgage interest deduction to some more modest figure, like $300,000.

The government’s job is to allow people to choose the life they want, as long as they are paying for the costs of that lifestyle. Yet today, public policies strongly encourage people, including me, to sprawl. I doubt that I would be in the suburbs if it weren’t for the antiurban public policy trifecta of the Massachusetts Turnpike, the home mortgage interest deduction, and the problems of urban schools. Eliminating pro-sprawl policies won’t bring back every declining city, and it won’t kill the suburbs, but it will create a healthier urban system whereby walking cities can compete more effectively against the car. The stakes are even higher in the developing world, where cities are more fluid and where a wholesale move to American-style sprawl would mean a massive rise in driving and energy use.


pages: 104 words: 30,990

The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demand response, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Solyndra, stem cell, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Walter Mischel

The sensible Simpson-Bowles recommendations had no meaningful support from either party. The plan landed in Washington like a dead fish. Here is the tragedy: a majority of Americans supported the sensible recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles commission. Even with the tough love—a higher gas tax, a higher retirement age for Social Security, a reduction in the home mortgage-interest deduction, and other real sacrifices—American voters were willing to compromise in a way that their representatives were not. A Gallup poll taken shortly after the Simpson-Bowles recommendations were released found that 60 percent of Americans were willing to support a deficit reduction compromise even if it was a plan that they “personally disagreed with.”32 In other words, our current political system failed to confront our enormous fiscal challenges, not because of what voters wanted, but despite it.

Some of our most expensive government programs lavish benefits on the middle class, and even on those who are extremely wealthy. That has to change. The affluent should pay more for health care under Medicare and be taxed fully on their Social Security benefits. We must cap or phase out popular but expensive government giveaways that have little or no social value, like the home mortgage-interest deduction. The fact that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are eligible for a government housing subsidy is indefensible. That is how we achieve smaller, smarter government. Restore fiscal sanity. We cannot continue to borrow massively from the rest of the world. Our mounting debt is unfair to future generations, leaves the nation dangerously beholden to foreign creditors, and puts the financial system at risk.


pages: 251 words: 76,128

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, big-box store, business cycle, cashless society, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Only when the income tax began to encompass everyone after World War II did the interest deductions begin to affect taxes—and for the postwar home owner, they were fantastic. All the interest paid could be deducted. What incentive, then, was there not to borrow? Only those who took the standard deduction—that is, most renters—lost out. For home owners who took the mortgage interest deduction, the deduction effectively cut the cost of their borrowing by a third or a half. Interest on top of that was also subsidized. Borrowing wasn’t saving, but it was not nearly as pernicious as it would have been in the absence of the deduction. Unsurprisingly, between tax incentives and rising incomes, the middle class borrowed far more frequently than either the poor or the rich.

The reasoned economic argument mattered little to Reagan, who knew that eliminating the deduction would lead to a revolt by home-owning Americans, as well as the real estate industry. While the wonks debated, Reagan gave a speech in May 1984 to the National Association of Realtors, reassuring them that “in case there’s still any doubt, I want you to know we will preserve the part of the American Dream which the home-mortgage-interest deduction symbolizes.”3 Mortgage debt had long been thought of as “good” debt, which was why it was protected during the tax reform. Since the 1930s, when the FHA had made good housing a national project, Americans had been encouraged to take out long-term mortgages and buy a house. Owing a mortgage was not just a financial choice, it was a sign of adulthood and the imprimatur of middle-class success.

Owing a mortgage was not just a financial choice, it was a sign of adulthood and the imprimatur of middle-class success. While a mortgage signified maturity, credit cards signified fun. In the middle of the debates stood a few sacred cows: lower tax rates, steady government revenues, and the home mortgage interest deduction. While the deduction for mortgage interest had been tabled, however, all the other distortionary deductions, such as the interest on cars, credit cards, and all other consumer purchases, were still up for debate. The American Dream of home ownership proved to be one of the most resilient obstacles to Reagan’s conservative agenda.


pages: 1,845 words: 567,850

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2014 by J. K. Lasser

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, collective bargaining, distributed generation, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, telemarketer, transaction costs, urban renewal, zero-coupon bond

Some of the expenses will not be currently deductible. The allocable rental expenses are deducted from rental income in a specific order: Step 1. The rental portion of the following expenses is fully deductible on Schedule E of Form 1040, even if the total exceeds rental income: deductible home mortgage interest (15.1), real estate taxes (16.4), deductible casualty and theft losses (Chapter 18), and directly related rental expenses. Directly related rental expenses are rental expenses not related to the use or maintenance of the residence itself, such as office supplies, rental agency fees, advertising, and depreciation on office equipment used in the rental activity.

- - - - - - - - - - Planning Reminder Rental of Personal Residence Renting a personal residence is not treated as a passive rental activity if you personally use the home for more than the greater of (1) 14 days or (2) 10% of the days the home is rented for a fair market rental amount (9.7). On Schedule E, you may claim a full deduction for the rental portion of real estate taxes and mortgage interest, assuming the home is a principal residence or qualifying second home under the mortgage interest rules (15.1). See 9.9 for limitations on deductions of other rental expenses. - - - - - - - - - - 10.2 Rental Real Estate Loss Allowance of up to $25,000 If you are not a real estate professional (10.3) but you actively participate by performing some management role in a real estate rental venture, you may deduct up to $25,000 of a real estate rental loss against your regular, nonpassive income such as wages.

Interest expenses If you itemize, you may deduct interest on qualified home mortgages, points, home equity loans, and interest on loans to carry investments. Interest on investment loans is deductible only to the extent of net investment income (15.10). Interest on personal and consumer loans is not deductible. Interest on home mortgages is deductible if certain tests are met (15.1). Deductions for home mortgage interest and points are included in the reduction to overall itemized deductions (13.7) explained above. See Chapter 15 for details on interest deductions. Taxes If you itemize, you can deduct real estate taxes and state and local income taxes, or you may be able to elect to deduct general sales taxes in lieu of the income taxes (16.3).


J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2016: For Preparing Your 2015 Tax Return by J. K. Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, collective bargaining, distributed generation, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, transaction costs, urban renewal, zero-coupon bond

Some of the expenses will not be currently deductible. The allocable rental expenses are deducted from rental income in a specific order: Step 1. The rental portion of the following expenses is fully deductible on Schedule E of Form 1040, even if the total exceeds rental income: deductible home mortgage interest (15.1), real estate taxes (16.4), deductible casualty and theft losses (Chapter 18), and directly related rental expenses. Directly related rental expenses are rental expenses not related to the use or maintenance of the residence itself, such as office supplies, rental agency fees, advertising, and depreciation on office equipment used in the rental activity.

Planning Reminder Rental of Personal Residence Renting a personal residence is not treated as a passive rental activity if you personally use the home for more than the greater of (1) 14 days or (2) 10% of the days the home is rented for a fair market rental amount (9.7). On Schedule E, you may claim a full deduction for the rental portion of real estate taxes and mortgage interest, assuming the home is a principal residence or qualifying second home under the mortgage interest rules (15.1). See 9.9 for limitations on deductions of other rental expenses. 10.2 Rental Real Estate Loss Allowance of up to $25,000 If you are not a real estate professional (10.3) but you actively participate by performing some management role in a real estate rental venture, you may deduct up to $25,000 of a real estate rental loss against your regular, nonpassive income such as wages.

Interest expenses If you itemize, you may deduct interest on qualified home mortgages, points, home equity loans, and interest on loans to carry investments. Interest on investment loans is deductible only to the extent of net investment income (15.10). Interest on personal and consumer loans is not deductible. Interest on home mortgages is deductible if certain tests are met (15.1). Deductions for home mortgage interest and points are included in the reduction to overall itemized deductions (13.7) explained above. See Chapter 15 for details on interest deductions. Taxes If you itemize, you can deduct real estate taxes and state and local income taxes, or you may be able to elect to deduct general sales taxes in lieu of the income taxes(16.3).


pages: 2,045 words: 566,714

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax by J K Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, collective bargaining, distributed generation, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, telemarketer, transaction costs, urban renewal, zero-coupon bond

Some of the expenses will not be currently deductible. The allocable rental expenses are deducted from rental income in a specific order: Step 1. The rental portion of the following expenses is fully deductible on Schedule E of Form 1040, even if the total exceeds rental income: deductible home mortgage interest (15.1), real estate taxes (16.4), deductible casualty and theft losses (Chapter 18), and directly related rental expenses. Directly related rental expenses are rental expenses not related to the use or maintenance of the residence itself, such as office supplies, rental agency fees, advertising, and depreciation on office equipment used in the rental activity.

- - - - - - - - - - Planning Reminder Rental of Personal Residence Renting a personal residence is not treated as a passive rental activity if you personally use the home for more than the greater of (1) 14 days or (2) 10% of the days the home is rented for a fair market rental amount (9.7). On Schedule E, you may claim a full deduction for the rental portion of real estate taxes and mortgage interest, assuming the home is a principal residence or qualifying second home under the mortgage interest rules (15.1). See 9.9 for limitations on deductions of other rental expenses. - - - - - - - - - - 10.2 Rental Real Estate Loss Allowance of up to $25,000 If you are not a real estate professional (10.3) but you actively participate by performing some management role in a real estate rental venture, you may deduct up to $25,000 of a real estate rental loss against your regular, nonpassive income such as wages.

However, interest on a loan secured by a first or second home may be deductible as home equity mortgage interest regardless of the way you use the loan. Interest on a loan used to finance an investment in a passive activity is subject to the limitations discussed in Chapter 10. However, if you rent out a second home that qualifies as a second residence, the portion of mortgage interest allocable to rental use is deductible as qualified mortgage interest and is not treated as a passive activity expense. 15.1 Home Mortgage Interest 15.2 Home Acquisition Loans 15.3 Home Equity Loans 15.4 Home Construction Loans 15.5 Home Improvement Loans 15.6 Mortgage Insurance Premiums and Other Payment Rules 15.7 Interest on Refinanced Loans 15.8 “Points” 15.9 Cooperative and Condominium Apartments 15.10 Investment Interest Limitations 15.11 Debts To Carry Tax-Exempt Obligations 15.12 Earmarking Use of Loan Proceeds For Investment or Business 15.13 Year To Claim an Interest Deduction 15.14 Prepaid Interest 15.1 Home Mortgage Interest You generally may deduct on Schedule A (Form 1040) qualifying mortgage interest on up to two residences (see two-residence limit, below).


pages: 93 words: 24,584

Walk Away by Douglas E. French

Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, Elliott wave, forensic accounting, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, loss aversion, low interest rates, McMansion, mental accounting, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, the market place, transaction costs, unbiased observer, wealth creators

With the American public becoming addicted to credit in the 1970’s and the Treasury looking for more tax money, the deductibility of consumer interest payments, including mortgage interest, became a target of the Congress. Whether it would really make a difference for home values or not, President Reagan wasn’t going to mess with the mortgage interest deduction, telling the National Association of Realtors in 1984, “I want you to know that we will preserve the part of the American dream which the home-mortgage-interest deduction symbolizes.” Two years later, Congress ended the deductibility of interest on credit-card and other consumer loans in the tax-reform act of 1986, but left the mortgage deduction in place.


J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2022: For Preparing Your 2021 Tax Return by J. K. Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, asset allocation, bike sharing, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, distributed generation, distributed ledger, diversification, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, sharing economy, TaskRabbit, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs, zero-coupon bond

Some of the expenses will not be currently deductible. The allocable rental expenses are deducted from rental income in a specific order: The rental portion of the following expenses is fully deductible on Schedule E of Form 1040 or 1040-SR, even if the total exceeds rental income: deductible home mortgage interest (15.1), real estate taxes (16.4), deductible casualty and theft losses (Chapter 18), and directly related rental expenses. Directly related rental expenses are rental expenses not related to the use or maintenance of the residence itself, such as office supplies, rental agency fees, advertising, and depreciation on office equipment used in the rental activity.

Because the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has reduced or eliminated various itemized deductions, the number of taxpayers who claim the standard deduction has greatly increased. Nevertheless, depending on your individual circumstances, your allowable itemized deductions for medical/dental expenses, state and local taxes, home mortgage interest, charitable contributions, casualty and theft losses from federally declared disasters and certain miscellaneous expenses may exceed your standard deduction, in which case you can claim those itemized deductions on Schedule A of Form 1040 or 1040-SR. Note that for 2021, a limited chariable contribution deduction is allowed if you claim the standard deduction; see the nearby Law Alert and 13.2.

However, interest on a loan secured by a first or second home may be deductible as home equity mortgage interest regardless of the way you use the loan. Interest on a loan used to finance an investment in a passive activity is subject to the limitations discussed in Chapter 10. However, if you rent out a second home that qualifies as a second residence, the portion of mortgage interest allocable to rental use is deductible as qualified mortgage interest and is not treated as a passive activity expense. 15.1 Deduction for Home Mortgage Interest 15.2 Home Acquisition Loans 15.3 Home Equity Loans 15.4 Home Construction Loans 15.5 Mortgage Insurance Premiums and Other Payment Rules 15.6 Interest on Refinanced Loans 15.7 “Points” 15.8 Cooperative and Condominium Apartments 15.9 Investment Interest Limitations 15.10 Debts To Carry Tax-Exempt Obligations 15.11 Earmarking Use of Loan Proceeds For Investment or Business 15.12 Year To Claim an Interest Deduction 15.13 Prepaid Interest 15.1 Deduction for Home Mortgage Interest If you itemize deductions, you generally may deduct on Schedule A (Form 1040 or 1040-SR) interest on home acquisition debt that is secured by a first or second home (see two-residence limit, below).


pages: 229 words: 61,482

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want by Diane Mulcahy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, deliberate practice, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial independence, future of work, gig economy, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, mass immigration, mental accounting, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, passive income, Paul Graham, remote working, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social contagion, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the strength of weak ties, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, wage slave, WeWork, Y Combinator, Zipcar

The answer is partly due to the persistent narrative about the financial benefits of home ownership. Many Americans accept the premise of home ownership as the foundation of the American Dream and default to that option without carefully considering the financial risks or evaluating other options. The U.S. government has gone to great lengths at great cost to encourage home ownership through the mortgage interest deduction, interest deductions on home equity lines of credit, and favorable capital gains tax treatment of the sale of a primary residence. The American Dream narrative and these government policies rely on the unquestioning acceptance of the three common myths of home ownership. MYTH #1: My home will appreciate in value.

., “Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962–2013: What Happened over the Great Recession?” NBER, The National Bureau of Economic Research, December 2014. www.nber.org/papers/w20733 7. Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, “Statistics: Type of Deduction 1999–2013,” December 15, 2015. www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/type-deduction 8. Toder, Eric J., “Options to Reform the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction,” Tax Policy Center, Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, April 25, 2013. www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/options-reform-deduction-home-mortgage-interest-0/full See also, Testimony Before the Committee on Ways and Means, United States House of Representatives, Hearing on Tax Reform and Real Estate, April 25, 2013. waysandmeans.house.gov/UploadedFiles/Toder_Testimony_42513_fc.pdf 9.


pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

“In the current morass, everything should, once again, be open for debate. One sacred cow that has long been in need of a good stockyard is the home mortgage interest deduction.”18 The deduction promotes inefficient use of scarce economic resources. On top of that, the bulk of the benefits go to fairly rich households, “people who are overwhelmingly in single-family detached houses,” notes Glaeser, who “would be likely to own that house with or without the home mortgage interest rate deduction.” He’s describing me, for instance; I own a single-family home in Canada, where no such deduction exists. He suggests “gradually reducing the upper limit” on the deduction to loans of up to $300,000.


pages: 296 words: 76,284

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

But with the new government backing, private lenders were suddenly willing to lend on much more generous terms, extending the length of the loan to twenty and then thirty years and ultimately lending more than 90 percent of the cost of the home to buyers. The modern-day long-term fixed-rate mortgage was born, making it possible for almost anyone to get a home loan. The mortgage interest tax deduction, a by-product of the 1913 law that established the federal income tax—and still one of the biggest incentives for home ownership to this day—provided a welcome assist. Then in 1944, the government passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, otherwise known as the GI Bill, which provided low-interest, zero-down-payment loans to millions of veterans.

” • • • For all the ideals of freedom our country was built on, our modern residential pattern of suburban development—and the notion that it provided a better way to live—was decidedly master-planned. It started with the federal policies that laid the groundwork for suburbia, the post-Depression inventions explored in the previous chapter that suddenly made home ownership affordable for the middle class. The mortgage interest tax deduction, which wasn’t even intended for mortgages but was an indirect product of the 1913 act that established the federal income tax, today provides nearly $400 billion in subsidies to home owners each year, propping up the market for single-family homes to the detriment of renters, who get no such help.

“I love this street,” he says. “This place totally rocks, doesn’t it?” He then shows a picture of Brainerd today, a strip mall surrounded by parking lots, to show the difference. The 1894 version, he implores the audience, is what we need to go back to. “We built this before the interstate highway act, before the home mortgage interest deduction . . . before zoning, before the thirty-year mortgage,” he says. “We built places that rocked back when we had to build them to be financially sound.” Marohn has not been immune from the pain of the housing crisis. His house, which he and his wife had built in 1995 and refinanced a few times, has lost value; it was assessed at $272,000 a few years ago and he thinks it would sell today for $200,000.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The federal highway subsidy has actually increased over time, because the gas tax that funds the Highway Trust Fund has been fixed at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993. As inflation has eroded that tax’s real value, Washington has used general tax revenues to fund roads, which effectively subsidizes driving and energy use. The home mortgage interest deduction was originally part of the tax code because all interest that households paid was deductible. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 eliminated the more general interest deduction, but the favoritism shown to homeowners remained. After World War II, the federal government expanded its support for home buying with Veterans Administration loans for returning soldiers.

See also influenza pandemic (1918–19) Sprung-Keyser, Benjamin, 331 Stalin, Joseph, 325 Stanton, Christopher, 231 Stergios, James, 306 Stigler, George, 178–79 “stop and frisk” policies, 288–91 Strong, William Lafayette, 84–85 student debt, canceling, 16 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, 44 sub-Saharan Africa, 79 suburbs, 7–8, 215, 219, 268–69, 270 Sugar Research Foundation, 125 suicides, 98, 123, 204, 319 super-spreader events, 87 Sweden, 197, 302 Swift, Gustavus, 182 Switzerland, 134 Sy, Elhadj As, 323 Sydenham, Thomas, 118 Tabarrok, Alex, 282 Taiwan, 132, 149, 156, 165, 166 Tammany Hall, 73, 82, 268 Tan, Brandon, 300 taxes and taxation as centrifugal/dispersing force, 218 and corporate relocations, 209 and declines in tax base, 7 and funding of public services, 8 and home mortgage interest deductions, 216 impact of pandemic on revenues from, 6 tax subsidies for working poor, 16 of unhealthy products, 100, 128 teachers unions, 308, 311–12, 313–15, 316 Tebes, John, 290 telemedicine, 146 tenements, disease-infested, 81–83 terrorism car bomb in Times Square, 287–88 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 6, 243 testing for COVID-19 of asymptomatic populations, 18, 149, 164, 167, 198 countries with notable success in, 156 in Germany, 156, 167 governments’ responsibility for, 154–55 in New Zealand, 18, 156, 164–65 in the United States, 149, 150, 167 WHO’s test for, 150 Texas, 18–19, 214 Thatcher, Margaret, 224 The Third Wave (Toffler), 219–20 “three strikes” laws, 14, 277, 281, 282–85, 286 Thucydides, 25, 29–30, 34, 36, 46 Tito, Josip Broz, 54 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 14–15, 72 Toffler, Alvin, 22, 207, 219–23, 224–25, 226, 227, 229, 238 trade, 28, 32, 40, 42 transportation, 7, 210, 212–14, 215, 216–17 travel restrictions ability to quickly implement, 55 and cordon sanitaire at national borders, 53 and COVID-19 pandemic, 50, 54, 55, 149, 150 failures in, 50 of New Zealand, 163 Ragusa’s application of, 41–42 screening international travelers, 55 and yellow fever in Philadelphia, 47 Troesken, Werner, 78 Truman, Harry, 137–38, 140, 145 Trump, Donald, 132, 151, 152 Trump administration, 149–50, 168 tuberculosis, 175 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 268 “Typhoid Mary,” 38 unemployment/joblessness due to COVID-19, 2, 169, 196, 197, 228, 229, 233 and housing costs, 272 long-term, 272 and universal basic income, 204 United Kingdom commitment to urban sanitation in, 77 food consumption trends in, 108–9 health care spending in, 134, 142–43 manufacturing in, 189, 190 National Health Service of, 139–40 place-based health differences in, 103 rural population in, 221 service industry in, 2, 190 sewer system investment of, 76–77 vaccine preorders, 144 vaccine rollout, 77, 145 United Nations (UN), 57, 92, 325 universal basic income, 204 University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 91 upward mobility, 3, 16, 244, 257–58, 276 Urban Fortunes (Molotch and Logan), 267 urbanization, rate of, 173, 221 USA Today, 310–11 U.S.


pages: 204 words: 67,922

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

The median size of new homes has increased to 2,500 square feet today, up by almost 50 percent since 1976. Likewise, the proportion of new homes with four or more bedrooms has doubled and the number with three or more bathrooms has tripled in just the last twenty years. These figures, and the debt burden that drives them, make the home mortgage interest deduction the most sacrosanct federal policy after social security17 As a result, cheap and easy credit has been a major reason why the United States recently dipped into negative savings for the first time since the Great Depression.18And though manufacturing of machinery and other durable goods has pretty much flown the coop (that’s the coop, not the co-op), new homes and renovations are about the only thing left that we actually physically construct ourselves.


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

“And I couldn’t take all thirty first steps.” But providing the poor with those steps might mean seeing them as deserving for no other reason than their poverty—something that is not and has never been part of this country’s social contract. We believe that there is a moral difference between taking a home mortgage interest deduction and receiving a Section 8 voucher. We judge, marginalize, and shame the poor for their poverty—to the point that we make them provide urine samples, and want to force them to volunteer for health benefits. As such, we tolerate levels of poverty that are grotesque and entirely unique among developed nations.


pages: 257 words: 75,685

Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better by Rob Reich

bread and circuses, effective altruism, end world poverty, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jim Simons, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nick Bostrom, Pareto efficiency, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, supervolcano, time value of money, William MacAskill

On the ubiquity and scope of their use in official state policy, see Mettler, Submerged State, and Christopher Howard, The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Howard examines nearly all the major tax expenditures, the home mortgage interest deduction, employer pensions, the earned income tax credit, and targeted jobs tax credits, and his book is framed as an examination of the hidden welfare state, but he curiously provides no discussion of the charitable contributions deduction, one of the costliest of all tax expenditures. 23. Newer studies that take long-term effects into account generally find lower price elasticities than earlier studies, ranging from −0.47 to −1.26 rather than −1.09 to −2.54.


pages: 249 words: 66,383

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, debt deflation, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, school choice, seminal paper, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, the scientific method, tulip mania, young professional, zero-sum game

But, as David Miles shows through a series of calculations, the Great Recession in the United Kingdom would have been far less severe had they been in place. The program has proved immensely popular with very high volume of equity loan issuance, which shows how government choices dictate what financial contracts prevail in the marketplace.18 Tax policy is another factor that limits innovation in the mortgage industry. The home-owner mortgage-interest deduction encourages home owners to borrow using traditional mortgage contracts. The SRM contract—because of its risk-sharing qualities—would likely not qualify as a “debt instrument” and would therefore not have the same preferential tax treatment as standard mortgages. In fact, the IRS only gives the deduction if the party obtaining the financing—a home owner or shareholders of a corporation—is “subordinate to the rights of general creditors.”19 To get the tax advantage, a home owner must bear the first losses when house prices fall.


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

Thus, unlike in many jurisdictions in the United States, where the borrower can simply “mail the key to the bank and walk away,” if, for example, the value of the property falls below the mortgage principal, Canadian borrowers can have other assets and even future earnings attached by the lender. Home mortgage interest is not tax deductable in Canada either (but capital gains on a home are also not subject to tax). Full recourse mortgages and no mortgage interest tax deductibility significantly reduce the incentive to take out excessively large mortgages. Indeed, there is an incentive to accelerate mortgage repayment.

See also climate change Green Movement, 209–211 Greenwood, John, xxiv gross domestic product (GDP): country comparison, 30, 64; Latin America, 50–51; Mexico, 30, 36 H1N1 flu, 29 Hale, David, 3 Harper, Stephen, 13, 16 Hatoyama, Ichiro, 105 Hatoyama, Yukio, 103, 105 health care expenditures, 258, 260 herd instinct, 288–289 heuristics, 287, 289 Heyman, Timothy, xviii, xix, 29 Hezbollah, 212–213 Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC), 121 HIH Insurance, 142 Hinton, Les, 300 home mortgage interest deduction, 17, 144 Hong Kong, 164 housing sector: Australia, 143–145; Canada, 19–20; US, 9 HST, 20 Hungary, 262 hydrocarbons, 181–183 income taxes, 6, 260–262 India, 204, 257 Indonesia, 7–8 industrial policy: Japan, 106–107; South Africa, 130–131 industrial production, country comparison, 65 infant industries, 106–107 inflation, 51, 82, 95, 166, 256 information: diminishing returns of, 292–301; freedom of, 295; processing of, 292–294; role of, xxix; selective consumption of, 295–297 infrastructure, 83, 131–132, 148 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), xix, 29, 31, 35, 38, 43–45 interest rates, 166; Australia, 147; Canada, 22–23; gold prices and, 173 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 219 international currency, 155–156 International Energy Agency (IEA), xxv international financial institutions (IFIs), 119, 121 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 119, 154, 162 Internet: impact of, xxix, 292–301; multilayer structure of, 295; perceptions of reality and, 298–300 investment banks, 239 Investment Canada Act, 26–27 investment decision-making, xxix, 285–291 Iran: 2009 election in, 205–209; civil society in, 208; economy of, 211–214, 217–218; Green Movement in, 209–211; military-industrial complex in, 212–213; modern, 204–206; political situation in, xxvi, 203–218; revolutions in, 206–208 Iranian citizens, 208–211 Iraq, oil production in, xxv, 186–189 Ireland, 166 Israel, 213, 217 Italy, 262 Japan: agricultural sector in, 110–112; current account surplus, 93; economic problems in, xxi, 92–101; economic reform in, 104; electoral changes in, 109–110; exchange rate policy, 98; export markets, 94, 95; fiscal deficits, 93, 98–100; fiscal policy, 98–100; government debt in, 160, 167; impact of financial crisis on, 92; industrial policy of, 106–107; labor rigidity in, 112–114; monetary policy of, 9, 96–98, 101; policy response in, 95–96; politics in, xxi–xxii, 102–114; productivity losses in, xvi; reforms needed in, 110–114; savings rate in, 88, 92–93; US demand and, 93–94 Japan Agriculture (JA), 110–111 Japan Air Lines (JAL), 113–114 Jefferis, Keith, xxii job losses, xvi Joint Oil Data Initiative (JODI), 183 Jones, Lupita, 35 Journalism Online, 301 Kahneman, Daniel, 289 Kaletsky, Anatole, xx, 57, 78, 82 Kan, Naoto, xxi, 97, 103, 105 Katz, Richard, xxi, 102 Kedrosky, Paul, 295 Kenya, xxii, 119, 126 Keynesian economics, 68–69 Kishi, Nobusuke, 105 Koizumi, Junichiro, 103, 108–109 Kosmos, 184–185 Krugman, Paul, 299 Kuczynski, Pedro Pablo, xix, 48 Kuhn, Thomas, 204–205 Kuwait, 184 Kyoto Protocol, xxvi, 222–224 labor costs, 69, 74, 85–87, 89–90 labor market: Canadian, 17–18; Japan, 112–114 Latin America, xv, 48–54; commodity boom and, 52–54; demographics, xx, 51; diversity of, 48–49; economic growth in, 51, 53, 257; financial crisis in, xix–xx; impact of financial crisis on, 50–51; reforms, 49–52, 53–54.


pages: 261 words: 78,884

$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, business cycle, clean water, ending welfare as we know it, future of work, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, informal economy, low-wage service sector, machine readable, mass incarceration, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, The Future of Employment, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The NHTF is supposed to act as a pot of money that could be tapped by states to help support the building of affordable housing developments. Yet the recent housing crisis derailed efforts to fully fund the NHTF, and the federal government has yet to build the program up. One idea to fund such an initiative is to limit the home mortgage interest deduction on mortgage values above a certain level, perhaps half a million or a million dollars, in effect shifting a subsidy away from very wealthy families to some of the very poorest ones. Another possible avenue to increase the stock of affordable housing and decrease residential segregation is to reduce the prevalence of discriminatory “exclusionary zoning” regulations.


pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

Like other deductions, it is a particular boon to those in the upper brackets; about three-quarters of all the deductions for home mortgage interest go to taxpayers making more than $100,000 per year. About half of American homeowners take the standard deduction, which means they get no tax break for paying their mortgage. While this deduction is promoted by realtors and mortgage bankers as a boon to home buyers, it is just as likely to make a home purchase more difficult. All studies (except those funded by the real estate industry) find that a mortgage interest deduction raises the price of a house. When the OECD investigated the impact of the mortgage interest deduction in wealthy countries where it is still in place, it concluded that “new purchasers . . . are not necessarily the beneficiaries of these tax provisions,” because the interest deduction forces them to pay an increased price.

But Australia, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, for example, have no deduction for mortgage interest at all. Yet eliminating the deduction seems to have no impact on home ownership. In all the industrialized democracies, the rate of home ownership is just about the same. Roughly 65% of families own their home in countries that have the mortgage interest deduction, and about 65% of families own their home in countries that do not. Just like the charitable deduction, though, the write-off for mortgage interest is hard to get rid of. It has been part of the tax code for so long (more than a hundred years) that people see it as a basic right.

., 44–45 health care, 17, 37–38, 44, 51, 63, 69, 114, 118, 157, 176–80, 186, 221 health insurance, 29, 36, 52–53, 63, 81, 126, 133, 209, 218, 246–47, 251 hedge funds, 137–38, 183 Helvering v. Gregory, 159–61 Hines, James R., 56–57 Hollande, François, 127, 133–34, 142, 151 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 30, 32, 36 home ownership, 8–9, 36, 40, 52, 75–81, 87–91, 116, 122. See also mortgage interest deduction; property: taxes Hoover Institution, 96–97 Hungary, 15, 18–19, 41, 111, 239 Iceland, 15, 129, 200 Illinois, 141–44, 157, 163 immigrants, 155, 192, 194–95, 229 imports, 34, 50, 65, 187, 189, 193 income definition of, 17–18, 52, 222, 255 distribution of, 44–46, 57 foreign-earned, 22–23, 81, 143–58, 161–64 inequality of, 43–46, 115–25, 135, 139 “ordinary,” 137, 160 seven brackets of, 97 “stateless,” 150, 154 income tax earned income tax credit, 217 elimination of, 225 history of, 1–3, 12, 34–35, 45–46, 121, 135, 145, 173, 250 nonpayers of, 233–34 rebates of, 41–42 See also specific types Income Tax, The: A Study of the History, Theory, and Practice of Income Taxation at Home and Abroad (Seligman), 45 India, 34, 129 inequality, economic, 8, 43–46, 98, 107, 115–25, 127, 135, 139, 172–75, 242, 253–56 inflation, 32–33 inheritance tax, 17, 30, 99, 121, 129–33, 254 insurance, 31–32, 60–61, 181–82.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The process of obtaining permits should be made much easier, and disputes about them resolved much more quickly.39 Towns and villages should have less power to veto developments in their jurisdiction.40 States should do more to help in the construction of new apartments, whether directly through the addition of new units of public housing or indirectly through financial assistance to local municipalities.41 Finally, the introduction of land value taxes—which levy the same charge on a patch of land irrespective of whether its owner lets it lie barren or decides to erect a building on it—would provide a strong incentive to build new homes.42 A different tax system could also improve the distribution of housing. Higher rates on second homes and vacant properties could drive up occupancy rates.43 Existing incentives for rich people to buy bigger homes or purchase additional properties—like the mortgage-interest tax deduction in the United States or the easy availability of buy-to-let mortgages in the United Kingdom—could be abolished.44 None of these policies will be easy to pass: Since the equity they own in their homes is a primary source of wealth for many middle-class people, they have a strong incentive to vote for higher home prices.45 And since a precipitous drop in housing prices can, as the world painfully learned in 2008, lead to a huge short-term shock, politicians are understandably worried about any policy that might pop a speculative bubble.46 But if we take housing seriously as an artificial restraint on our affluence—and thus a danger to our democracies—there are ways to compensate the losers of falling home prices, and to make potential gains more salient to the winners.

For an example of an empty tax penalty, see “Council Tax: Changes Affecting Second Homes and Empty Properties,” Gov.uk: Borough of Poole, http://www.poole.gov.uk/benefits-and-council-tax/council-tax/council-tax-changes-affecting-second-homes-and-empty-properties/, accessed September 14, 2017. 44. The benefits of the home mortgage interest deduction—introduced in its current form in 1986—are ten times greater for a household earning more than $250,000 than for a household earning between $40,000 and $75,000. See James Poterba and Todd Sinai, “Tax Expenditures for Owner-Occupied Housing: Deductions for Property Taxes and Mortgage Interest and the Exclusion of Imputed Rental Income,” paper given at the American Economic Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, January 5, 2008, http://real.wharton.upenn.edu/~sinai/papers/Poterba-Sinai-2008-ASSA-final.pdf, accessed September 14, 2017. 45.


pages: 430 words: 109,064

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

Quoted in Eric Lipton and Raymond Hernandez, “A Champion of Wall Street Reaps Benefits,” The New York Times, December 13, 2008, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/business/14schumer.html. 58. U.S. Census Bureau, Housing Vacancies and Homeownership, Table 14, available at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/hvs/historic/index.html. 59. Edward L. Glaeser and Jesse M. Shapiro, “The Benefits of the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction,” Tax Policy and the Economy 17 (2003): 37–82, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/20140504. 60. Edward L. Glaeser, “Attack of the Home Buyers’ Tax Credit,” Economix Blog, The New York Times, November 10, 2009, available at http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/attack-of-the-home-buyers-tax-credit/.


pages: 543 words: 157,991

All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, break the buck, buy and hold, call centre, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stock buybacks, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, the long tail, too big to fail, value at risk, zero-sum game

It suggests upward mobility, opportunity, a stake in something that matters. Historically, owning a home hasn’t just been about taking possession of an appreciating asset, or even having a roof over one’s head. It has also been a statement about values. Not surprisingly, government policy has long encouraged homeownership. The home mortgage interest deduction is a classic example. So is the thirty-year fixed mortgage, which is standard in only one other country (Denmark) and is designed to allow middle-class families to afford monthly mortgage payments. For decades, federal law gave the S&L industry a small interest rate advantage over the banking industry—the housing differential, this advantage was called.


pages: 263 words: 89,368

pages: 432 words: 124,635

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Then there is the U.S. government’s accelerated depreciation tax deduction, which gives developers a generous tax break for creating new buildings rather than renovating or reusing old ones. It effectively rewards Walmart for abandoning older stores and building in regional power centers far from the communities they first promised to serve. Another misguided gift to sprawl is the home mortgage interest tax deduction. The United States is one of only a handful of countries in the world that gives individuals a tax break on interest for home mortgages. In practice, the deduction has given the biggest tax break to people who can afford to buy new homes on the suburban fringe rather than those who buy cheaper, modest homes in older neighborhoods.


pages: 279 words: 87,875

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare by Ryan Dezember

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, interest rate swap, low interest rates, margin call, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, rent control, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs

., selling speculation in waterfront Realty, Joan T. redevelopment pact redlining refinance loans refinancing Regions bank Register English editor of full-page ad in layoffs at as reporter for regulatory response RE/MAX franchise rental properties from foreclosures home prices and increases in Kay’s software scanning of McNeilage mortgage-interest tax deduction and mortgages compared to rental-home business rent-backed bonds rentership society “A Rentership Society” (report) renting costs of homeownership compared to mortgages changing to in Spring Hill upmarket for well-to-do repossessed houses residential construction retirement retirement homes rezoning request Ricardo, David RICO Act Riley, Bob Riverbrooke Capital Partners road construction Romem, Issi Roosevelt, Franklin D.


J.K. Lasser's New Tax Law Simplified: Tax Relief From the HIRE Act, Health Care Reform, and More by Barbara Weltman

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, mortgage debt, Ponzi scheme


pages: 368 words: 145,841

Financial Independence by John J. Vento

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, passive income, retail therapy, risk tolerance, the rule of 72, time value of money, transaction costs, young professional, zero day

Still, a house can increase in value if you hang on to it for many years and maintain it well. It can also help you financially in other ways. Why a Mortgage Is Still Good Debt The reason a home mortgage is usually considered good debt is that from the moment you buy the house, it offers certain financial reliefs and leverage. For starters, your home mortgage interest may be tax deductible. (The federal government allows you to deduct mortgage interest expenses to the extent your mortgage does not exceed $1 million. Therefore, if you are in the 40 percent tax bracket and you are paying 6 percent interest on your mortgage, your after-tax cost for financing may actually be only 3.6 percent, which is 6 percent less the 40 percent tax savings).


pages: 500 words: 145,005

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, impulse control, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, late fees, law of one price, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, Mason jar, mental accounting, meta-analysis, money market fund, More Guns, Less Crime, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, New Journalism, nudge unit, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, presumed consent, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

In fact, in my parents’ generation, families strived to pay off their mortgages as quickly as possible, and as late as the early 1980s, people over sixty had little or no mortgage debt. In time this attitude began to shift in the United States, partly as an unintended side effect of a Reagan-era tax reform. Before this change, all interest paid, including the interest on automobile loans and credit cards, was tax deductible; after 1986 only home mortgage interest qualified for a deduction. This created an economic incentive for banks to create home equity lines of credit that households could use to borrow money in a tax-deductible way. And certainly it made sense to use a home equity loan to finance the purchase of a car rather than a car loan, because the interest was often lower as well as being tax deductible.


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Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game


pages: 183 words: 17,571

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, disintermediation, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, underbanked, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game


pages: 519 words: 118,095

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Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation With Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis by Johan Norberg

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, millennium bug, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, precautionary principle, price stability, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

For this reason, ever since the United States introduced an income tax its government has been helping out its citizens by allowing them to deduct mortgageinterest payments from that tax-similarly to some other countries, including Sweden. This support for homeownership was reinforced by President Ronald Reagan and Congress in 1986, when the tax deduction for home mortgage interest was retained, while tax incentives favoring rental development and ownership were removed. In addition, the deduction for other consumer loans, such as car and credit card loans, was abolished, which had the effect of steering more and more lending toward the housing market. In 1994, 68 percent of home loans were in fact used to pay down debts for other consumption, for example, car purchases.'


pages: 147 words: 45,890

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert B. Reich

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, business cycle, carbon tax, declining real wages, delayed gratification, Doha Development Round, endowment effect, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, job automation, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, We are all Keynesians now, World Values Survey

In requiring Americans to share the costs of adversity, it enabled them to share the benefits of peace of mind. Peace of mind and security freed them to consume more of the fruits of their labors. The government sponsored the dreams of American families to own their own home by providing low-cost mortgages and interest deductions on mortgage payments. In many sections of the country, government subsidized electricity and water to make such homes affordable. And it built the roads and freeways that connected the homes with major commercial centers. The interstate highway system—forty-one thousand miles of straight four-lane (sometimes even six-lane) freeways to replace the old two-lane federal roads that meandered through cities and towns—became the single most ambitious public works program in American history.


The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra


pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Returning the federal minimum to its 1970 value would produce about $19,000 a year, after payroll taxes, for a forty-hour week. Inequality would decline; legitimate employment would become more appealing compared to crime; justice would increase. Inequality could be reduced further by altering public policies that favor owning a home, apartment, or condo over renting: the mortgage interest deduction and federal backing of mortgage loans. When the mortgage interest deduction began about a century ago, the goal was to encourage average people to own property, then viewed as a moon-shot idea. For several generations, the interest deduction aspect of the federal tax code helped all average people build net worth, since renters who borrowed to pay the rent could deduct their debt costs.

The social goal of encouraging average people to own property remained valid, as in generations past, but since 1986, federal policy has concentrated net worth toward homeowners and away from renters, while driving up home prices in a manner that hinders aspiring first-time buyers; federal policy now also tends to cause urban rents to rise, preventing many men and women from living in the cities, where the best jobs are. Perhaps, then, it should be no surprise that since 1986 inequality has increased. The more expensive the home, the greater the value of the mortgage interest deduction and the greater the advantage to the ownership class, even when federal housing assistance to the poor is taken into consideration. By 2017, the typical homeowner had about thirty times the net worth of the typical renter. Some of this difference is explained by homeownership pushing couples toward long-term relationships, legitimate employment, and fiscally sensible living—all valid policy goals.


pages: 336 words: 95,773

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

We already transfer significant resources from the working young to the retiring old in the form of government-run social benefits such as Social Security and Medicare. Housing used to countervail that trend by providing middle-class working households an opportunity to build their own nest eggs by accumulating home equity—and with tax advantages such as the mortgage-interest deduction that offset at least a small part of the tax payments that fund programs for the elderly. Yet even now that buffer is being removed for younger buyers, who own less of the homes they buy as house prices skyrocket and down payments can’t keep up. For Millennials, both our tax payments and our mortgage payments are providing subsidies for older generations.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

And conversion of agricultural land to allow residential and commercial property construction was creating the potential for huge financial gains. County councilors, who held the authority to rezone land, leveraged that authority for financial gain and political power. The government was priming the pump with incentives such as grants for first-​ time home buyers, mortgage-​ interest deduction, and tax breaks 178   e u r o t r a g e d y on urban-​renewal schemes and capital gains.93 In 1996, the IMF had noted the disturbingly rapid increase in property prices and had warned against policy measures to stimulate construction.94 However, an insidious nexus of relationships was forming among politicians, property developers, and banks.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Emmie Martin, “Here’s How Many Millennials Got Money from Their Parents to Buy Their Homes,” CNBC, March 12, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/11/how-many-millennials-got-money-to-buy-homes-from-their-parents.html. 34. Anya Martin, “How Parents Can Help with Jumbo Mortgages,” Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-parents-can-help-with-a-home-loan-1447342246. 35. “Mortgage Interest Deduction Is Ripe for Reform,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, June 25, 2013, https://www.cbpp.org/research/mortgage-interest-deduction-is-ripe-for-reform. 36. Ezra Levin, Jeremie Greer, and Ida Rademacher, From Upside Down to Right-Side Up: Redeploying $540 Billion in Federal Spending to Help All Families Save, Invest, and Build Wealth, Corporation for Enterprise Development, 2014, 26, https://prosperitynow.org/files/resources/Upside_Down_to_Right-Side_Up_2014.pdf. 37.


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WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Meanwhile, government policies designed for an era when home ownership was a pathway into the middle class now exacerbate the problem. The tax deductibility of mortgage interest, allowed even on second homes, drives prices up even further, giving rich housing subsidies to those with the means to buy them and making homes even more expensive. A limit on the amount of mortgage interest deductibility would be corrective, but is blocked by the wealthy interests who benefit from it. The negative impact on the real economy doesn’t end there. Investors focus on companies that will have huge “exits”—that will return at least 10x their investment. This quest for outsize winners has the perverse effect of starving ordinary businesses of capital.


pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game


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A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, book value, BRICs, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, framing effect, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond


pages: 270 words: 73,485

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce


pages: 621 words: 123,678

Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need by Grant Sabatier

8-hour work day, Airbnb, anti-work, antiwork, asset allocation, bitcoin, buy and hold, cryptocurrency, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, drop ship, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, lifestyle creep, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, side hustle, Skype, solopreneur, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, TaskRabbit, the rule of 72, time value of money, uber lyft, Vanguard fund

Even though I could easily pay off my home, I have a fifteen-year mortgage on it at 2.625 percent interest, and I am going to keep that mortgage because I’d rather invest that money at 7 percent plus returns than use it to pay off my mortgage. Investing in stocks gives me a higher return; I’m also able to take advantage of the tax advantages of home ownership, like the mortgage interest and tax deductions. If the interest rate on your debt is higher than any return you could realistically get on an investment, then you should pay down that debt before you invest, because that debt is compounding faster than any money you invest would grow. Compounding works both ways, so always make the decision that benefits you most based on the numbers.


pages: 482 words: 121,672

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition) by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, framing effect, George Santayana, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, Teledyne, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game



pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

The original Paulson plan is like a massive blood transfusion to a patient with severe internal hemorrhaging. We won’t save the patient if we don’t do something about the foreclosures. Even after congressional revisions, too little is being done. We need to help people stay in their homes, by converting the mortgage-interest and property-tax deductions into cashable tax credits; by reforming bankruptcy laws to allow expedited restructuring, which would bring down the value of the mortgage when the price of the house is below that of the mortgage; and even government lending, taking advantage of the government’s lower cost of funds and passing the savings on to poor and middle-income homeowners. 3.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

After 1997, when almost all the Boomers who wanted to purchase housing had already done so (the youngest were by then thirty-three and the oldest, fifty-seven), home prices rose dramatically. It’s not that growth in the economy or population accelerated suddenly or permanently. The better explanation was government subsidy. The Boomer-controlled government expanded housing subsidies during the Boomers’ prime home-owning years: property tax caps, mortgage interest deductions, tax exemptions on sales, and so on all favored existing and wealthier homeowners. The government also cultivated the sentimental idea of homeownership as a national virtue. So while renting is often a better financial decision, Clinton, Bush II, and so on extolled this peculiar American dream, and consumers came to view home ownership not just as a necessity or luxury consumable, but as a surefire investment, even a kind of entitlement.


pages: 314 words: 101,452

pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce


pages: 252 words: 66,183

pages: 225 words: 11,355

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, deal flow, disintermediation, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, long peace, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, mass immigration, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, pension reform, pets.com, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the new new thing, the payments system, too big to fail, value at risk, very high income, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K, yield curve



pages: 389 words: 136,320

pages: 250 words: 77,544

pages: 172 words: 54,066

pages: 268 words: 74,724

pages: 331 words: 95,582

pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game


pages: 290 words: 72,046

pages: 307 words: 96,543

pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce



pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

The only real difference between Right and Left was the readiness of the Conservatives to deregulate the private rental market, in the hope of encouraging private landlords, and the equal and opposite resolve of Labour to reimpose rent controls and stamp out ‘Rachmanism’ (exploitative behaviour by landlords), exemplified by Peter Rachman, who used intimidation to evict the sitting tenants of rent-controlled properties, replacing them with West Indian immigrants who had to pay market rents.31 As late as 1971, fewer than half of British homes were owner-occupied. In the United States, where public housing was never so important, mortgage interest payments were always tax deductible, from the inception of the federal income tax in 1913.32 As Ronald Reagan said when the rationality of this tax break was challenged, mortgage interest relief was ‘part of the American dream’.ao It played a much smaller role in Britain until 1983, when a more radically Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher introduced Mortgage Interest Relief At Source (MIRAS) for the first £30,000 of a qualifying mortgage.


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game


pages: 519 words: 155,332

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

See the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s “Worst Case Housing Needs” report to Congress: https://www.huduser.gov/​portal/​publications/​Worst-Case-Housing-Needs.html. Previous years’ reports are also available at www.huduser.gov. See also the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s “Out of Reach” report (previously cited), as well as “The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes,” by the same organization: http://nlihc.org/​research/​gap-report. housing assistance dollars: Here I compare the money spent on mortgage interest deductions to the Department of Housing and Urban Development budget for rental assistance programs: https://www.hud.gov/​program_offices/​cfo/​budget. It should also be noted that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported in March 2017 that high-income households (over $200,000) received an average of $6,076 in housing benefits, four times greater than the $1,529 received on average by the low-income households that were fortunate enough to receive any assistance at all.