until the age of 35, an individual should be able to choose to have 12.4 percent of his salary paid not to Social Security taxes but instead into a restricted savings account covered by deposit insurance, from which savings can be used only to make a down payment on a house. The down payment (using this and possible other savings) must be a minimum of 20 percent, the house must be bought to live in, and the related loan must be a sound credit which is a “qualified mortgage,” as now defined by regulation. The point will be to create retirement savings in the form of equity in property, as a partial alternative to earning benefits from a troubled government pension program.
A major motivation behind the idea is a desire to steer government policy away from encouraging people to buy homes with little or not money down.
I personally think we should stop encouraging people to have their savings and shelter highly correlated. Simply make no down-payment structures illegal if that’s the concern. Plenty of countries do that.
co-sign.
I would like to see debt subsidizing go away in the housing sector, but this is hardly a better alternative. I see no reason why anyone with priors about public choice and hayekian order would be enthusiastic about this.
I’ve always thought the economic units of housing ownership are inefficiently small. Without the myriad zoning laws and local regulations you’d naturally have large housing conglomerates with a national footprint that’d allow people to move easily and rid themselves of the most painful parts of home ownership (buying furniture, moving, upkeep, etc).
Ie, in a more perfect world we’d have much less home ownership, not more.