Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

czar_el t1_it8uat8 wrote

Reply to comment by SportySaturn in Many countries have a "hidden welfare state" for incumbent homeowners, as governments subsidize homeowners through the tax system. The homeownership welfare state is strongest in the US and other Anglophone countries, but weakest in the Scandinavian countries. by smurfyjenkins

>Calling it welfare is just trying to create resentment .

It's the opposite. It's trying to break through to the privileged elite who think they "do it all on their own through merit", as opposed to the poor who "get handouts because they don't work hard enough".

Pointing out that people with means get tax incentives (aka tax expenditures), which is akin to welfare expenditures, helps make them realize that they took get support (just less visible), and that it's not a value judgment of who is better or who works harder. It is a tradeoff of how we apply public funds. Then, you can unemotionally evaluate whether the net social benefit of home ownership outweighs the net benefit of reducing hunger, etc as we apply our limited resources as a society.

As long as those tax expenditures are not part of our conversation, natural biases will draw focus to regular expenditures and will distort the overall cost benefit evaluation. And the people who react with resentment are exactly the people we need to educate.

22

SportySaturn t1_it8y113 wrote

>It's trying to break through to the privileged elite

Looks like you fell for the bad framing.

https://www.ncsha.org/blog/fha-2020-annual-report-shows-fhas-impact-on-first-time-and-minority-homeownership/

Home ownership rate in the USA, those benefiting from mortgage interest deductions, is about 65%.

Those are your "privileged elite" benefiting from the "welfare" system.

2

czar_el t1_it8z4ro wrote

I'm not saying they're the only ones who benefit from it. I'm saying that they assume government support does not apply to them, and default to the frame of "welfare bad".

Also, you just linked one agency and one part of a report explicitly looking at first-time and minority home buyers. The study in this post looked at multiple countries, and programs not limited to first-time and minority home buyers.

19