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The government is very good at filtering that money through processes and contractors that extract as much of it as possible. The main benefit of reducing the safety net to a basic income is the elimination of a massive amount of administrative overhead. As a random example of subsidy of the wealthy, every year, the government loses at least $70B to just the mortgage interest deduction, which is allowed for the first $750K of the value of up to two homes. That is $2,160 for every poor person in America, or $6,480 per poor family of three. edit: > Little of the deduction’s benefits go to households that have difficulty affording a home. Data from the Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey show that in 2011, 10.5 million homeowners faced what HUD calls “severe housing cost burdens,” meaning they paid more than half of their income for housing. Some 90 percent of those homeowners (and about 40 percent of all homeowners) had incomes below $50,000, yet JCT estimates for 2012 show that homeowners with incomes below that level received only 3 percent of the benefits from the mortgage interest deduction. At the same time, 77 percent of the benefits from the mortgage interest deduction went to homeowners with incomes above $100,000, almost none of whom face severe housing cost burdens. Some 35 percent of the benefits went to homeowners with incomes above $200,000; taxpayers in this income group who claimed the deduction received an average subsidy of about $5,000. https://www.cbpp.org/research/mortgage-interest-deduction-is... |