This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, November 27th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The low-income housing tax credit is supposed to spur developers to create more low-cost housing,

but the subsidy fails on a number of metrics.

Vanessa Brown Calder and Chris Edwards discuss their new report and why the subsidy needs to go

away sooner than later.

Ben Carson, who is the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development recently tweeted,

the low-income housing tax credit is one of the most effective tools we have

to create affordable housing.

So how does this tax credit work?

Well, right now in Congress, we're going through a process of trying to eliminate

unneeded tax credits and various

breaks for corporations and other folks. And Vanessa Brown Calder and I think that

eliminating the low-income housing tax credit should be

it should be on the chopping block for Republicans it's complex and costly and we

don't really need it in the tax code. All right so how how does it function, Vanessa?

So it's a complicated process and we could probably spend an entire podcast just talking about

the low-income housing tax credit and how it works. But in a nutshell, it is a supply side subsidy,

and it's about a $9 billion supply side subsidy last I checked,

which all that means, I know that's economics jargon, it just means that it is a program which

subsidizes the construction of housing rather than subsidizing low-income tenants directly.

Okay, well, right, so the supply side, meaning the construction.

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