Quote Originally Posted by Being View Post
Are you sure you mean Regular Savings? Here regular savings have an APY of like 0.25 %. And that's if you have over $100,000 in the account.
Not true, it's pretty easy to find rates up above 1.1%. 2.3% is out the question for an unrestricted account, but CDs might get you there.

Also, GGT - ARMs are the way most of the world works. In fact US mortgages are ARMs in that there is never a refinancing penalty, which means consumers can always reduce (but not increase) their rate. This results in banks instituting high transaction costs that generally don't help anyone. There was a Canadian economist who had a nice piece on the ridiculousness of US fixed-rate mortgages a while back, but I don't have the link with me right now.


Onto mortgage interest deductions: it's just an enormous subsidy for homebuying, and quickly raises home prices (but not much else). Also, the deduction provides little real benefit for moderate to low income homeowners since it's not an above-the-line deduction. Given the cost and dubious benefits for most Americans, I'd favor phasing it out entirely, but at least the proposals in the report start with the most egregious problems. Obviously it shouldn't be done immediately, given that the housing market is already in the shitter and lots of people have negative equity. But slowly phasing it out over a decade or so would probably be a good idea. At the end of the day, it would help new (especially poorer) homebuyers as the price of homes dropped to compensate for the lack of a tax writeoff.