Mortgage Interest Deduction

Leonhardt at NYT:

The mortgage interest deduction, for example, saves more than $5,000 a year for the typical household in the top 1 percent of earners. Most middle-income households don’t benefit from the deduction at all, because they instead claim the standard income tax deduction. And the mortgage deduction is the second-largest tax break for individuals, costing about $80 billion a year, more than the budgets for the Education Department and Justice Department combined. ...

The truth is, closing loopholes has much stronger support among economists and columnists than it does among voters. Only 23 percent of Americans benefit from the mortgage deduction, but 93 percent support it. ...
So what kind of tax increases do Americans support? The old-fashioned kind. Seventy-two percent support raising taxes on income above $250,000, according to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, and a large majority likewise favor raising Social Security taxes on the affluent.
In the end, the most likely tax increase may be the one that’s already on the books. On Jan. 1, 2013, all the Bush tax cuts — on the affluent and nonaffluent alike — are set to expire, which would solve roughly one-quarter of our long-term deficit problem. If Republicans have their way, all the tax cuts will be extended. If the Democrats have their way, most of them will be.