Congress should act and raise the house exemption, updating an existing law that has not been updated in nearly 30 years, Chuck Flint, CEO of Coalition For Affordability and Prosperity, said during an appearance on Breitbart News Daily.
Flint explained that the housing market is “frozen” and observed that people tend to just look at interest rates. However, he said there is also a “stealth tax on capital gains,” and it needs to be addressed.
“And the law hasn’t been updated in 29 years, so Congress made this law to exclude a certain amount from capital gains tax when you sell a home, and the current amount is $250,000. If you’re a single individual, it’s 500,000,” Flint said, pointing out that this is completely outdated. In the year 2000, for example, the median price of a home was only $139,000. It has since gone up 200 percent. Because of that, the “government just gets a windfall now if you sell your home,” he explained.
“So while you’re you’ve got interest rates impacting housing market, you’ve got sellers that are staring down the barrel of a big tax, saying, ‘Ok, well, why should I put my home on the market if I’m just going to lose all this money?’ And that’s that’s the crux of the problem,” he said, pointing out that the median price of a home now is over $417,000.
“And so you think of just the enormous windfall that the government gets when you sell a home because they’ve never updated this law, they’ve never indexed it for inflation, which is another thing that they should do, and what we’re advocating. And you think about the other things that get indexed for inflation — the standard deduction every year indexed for inflation. You have contributions to retirement accounts that are tax deductible; those are also indexed for inflation, and this is not,” Flint said, describing this as “such an easy fix.”
All lawmakers need to do is fix this to help unfreeze the housing market, and the Senate could do it right now, he continued, with the Republican-led idea in Senate Bill 3332.
“Just throw it right on the floor and pass it, and send it to the president’s desk. I mean, the president has already talked about this issue before,” Flint said, adding that it has seen a lot of bipartisan support as well.
“You’ve got conservatives like Mike Lee, Jim Banks, Senator… Kennedy, on this bill. You’ve got some Democrats that are on the bill too,” he said, walking through the updated figures in the bill.
“For individuals, it’s 500,000. For married couples, it’s up to a million dollars that they can exclude,” Flint said. “So once again, going back to what Congress wants, I mean, clearly the intent is when you sell your home, you should be able to keep that equity.”
“I mean, that’s the whole point. You put the money in, you should be able to keep that. Why not? To your point, that you know that is an economic driver. That is an affordability issue, and you know, why not? Let people keep and put more money in their pocket, and clearly that’s been the policy of the Trump administration. That was the very first thing they did was to pass the one big beautiful bill and extend tax cuts,” Flint added.
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