Top 20% Income Filers Got 61% of Revenue Lost from State of Oregon Mortgage Interest and Home Property Tax Deductions.

The 2013-2015 Oregon Tax Expenditure Report HERE has, for the first time, some details by income about revenue losses from the mortgage interest and home property tax deductions.  

On pages 99 and 100 full time filer data is broken into 5 income groups that each represent 1/5th of all full time filers and the total amount of revenue lost from these deductions is shown for each income grouping. 

I have extracted that data and created two graphs in a one page MS Word file on my SkyDrive HERE, and also embedded the file below:





My Observations: 

1. Of the 60% of ALL full year filers (those with incomes below $43,000) those who claimed these deductions received $79 million /12.2% of the total 2009 revenue lost ($647 million) to the State of Oregon from these deductions for full time filers.
2. Of the 20% of ALL full year filers (those with incomes above $75,000) those who claimed these deductions received $394 million/61% of all of the total revenue lost to the State of Oregon from these deductions for full time filers.
3. This means that the bottom 60% of filers by income accounted for only 12.2% of revenue lost from these deductions while the top 20% by income accounted for 61% of the revenue lost from these deductions and this also means that...
4. ..The TOP 20% of all full year filers accounted for nearly 5 times the lost revenue from these deductions when compared to the BOTTOM 60% of all full time filers. ($394M/$79M=4.99).

 Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.