Forgive me, but if a few beers during the Supper Bowl (congrats p) haven't clouded my thinking, "Teddy" is screwing the pooch on his analysis.

Put simply, he needs to subtract the standard deduction (last year around $7000 for head of household) from the amount of itemized interest deducted by homeowners. Standard and itemized deductions are exclusive. (If a new homeowner deducts $10,000 in interest instead of the $7000 standard deduction, this is an effective decrease in taxable income of only $3000)

Teddy claims $238,000 is a "conservative" estimate of the median house price in the U.S. I searched three different sources and the highest of the three examples I found was $209,000.

Teddy can't even follow his own Goddamn math:

...we'll assume an average 15% tax rate. Historically, there was a roughly 8% mortgage rate in 1998 and 6% rate in 2003 for the average household. This works out to $11,200 interest paid in 1998 (.08 x $140,000) and $14,280 per household in 2003 (.06 x $238,000). It would follow that at a 15% tax rate the average household pays $600 less in taxes due to higher interest payments...

(14280 x .15) - (11200 x .15) = 462 ... not 600.
Also, these people have most likely refied their $140,000 to lower their monthly payment. (Not everyone is going to finance, or qualify for, the entire increase in home value- i.e. try to pocket "238000" – 140000)

Again, your link boils down to “We need to get rid of Bush” because he cut taxes and the deficit is out of control. So what is the proposed Answer!!?? Raise taxes before we recover from the recession?

The thing with Economics is it’s not a hard science. Any nut with a calculator and some statistics can try to look like they know what they’re talking about. This type bullshit doesn’t fly on the Spaceboard.

Please try to post links to credible sources that might be a little more objective than these blogs.

Regards,
Rob