This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 1st, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

The tax credit that's supposed to help develop housing units for low-income people

looks an awful lot like a big subsidy to developers and the housing units some

research indicates many of them would exist anyway.

Vanessa Brown Calder, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute,

discusses this my partisan giveaway.

When I spoke with former Catoite Mark Calabria

about the home mortgage interest deduction.

Of course the standard Libertarian line on it is that it's basically a giveaway to wealthy people. It encourages people to buy more house

than they otherwise would and quite possibly put less down than they otherwise would and encourages people to stay in debt.

What? Is there any relationship between mortgage interest as a special giveaway to the middle class and this low-income housing tax credit?

Yeah, I would definitely bucket this in kind of the same category which is that this is one of those

subsidies that everybody kind of on both sides of the aisle comes together and

loves together so this may actually be something that has some possibility

of getting done during this congressional session here.

And that's kind of a couple of things.

One is that every state gets a piece of it and it's allocated on a per capita basis so basically

everybody has their hand in the cookie jar and then the other thing is that it has a

large number of industries and special interests that generally would not actually be friendly

with one another that all are benefiting.

So you have a coalition of developers and lawyers and construction companies and

financial intermediaries and investors and housing affordable housing

...