Your Atlanta real estate may not provide you with the tax break you have gotten in the past. President Obama’s Deficit Commission released a plan earlier this week detailing specific actions Congress will need to take to get the federal deficit back under control during the next decade. It is important to note that the plan does not actually balance the budget, that is more of a long-range plan (27 years to be exact). Commission co-chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles propose ending the mortgage break for second homes, home-equity loans and any amount of a home loan above $500,000. The NAHB’s response to this and to USA Today’s recent editorial on the subject is that the middle class could get hurt by removal of Mortgage Interest Deduction (MID).

NAHB’s response to USA Today’s editorial: This editorial ignores the potential economic damage that would result from curbing or ending the mortgage interest tax deduction. This tax benefit goes mostly to the middle class (nearly 70% to households with less than $200,000 in annual income), who actually rely upon it …to afford owning their homes. In a housing market that is slowly beginning to heal, pulling back the deduction now would put more downward pressure on home prices, leaving more home owners with mortgages larger than the value of their property and fueling even more foreclosures.

New York Times reporter David Kocieniewski covers the topic in Taking Aim At a Very Sacred Cow. He comments, “Because the mortgage interest is one of a limited number of tax breaks available to middle-income Americans, the commission’s proposal has also rekindled a debate about how much of the pain of deficit reduction should be borne by the middle class.”