923 I gave you numbers....
I get it, you don't want all those people who are getting the mortgage interest deduction to lose it. You have made that abundantly clear. I have already responded to that argument about four times on this thread, by stating that eliminating this deduction should be part of an overall simplification of the tax code that lowers rates and has little or no impact on the middle class, and has a phase out period.
As for your specific stats, they conveniently ignore the fact that 25% of the dollars spent on the deduction go to people earning over $200,000 per year, even though those people make up a very small portion of the people who get the deduction overall, and that 75% of the dollars spent go to people earning over $100,000 per year. Which are numbers I posted several pages ago.
I have not verified your numbers, and you did not provide a cite, but they appear to come from a bunch of real estate industry websites. Nonetheless I will assume for the sake of argument they are correct. It appears that these numbers apparently try to justify the deduction as something that assists "the middle class". Your post then proceeds to define the middle class as including people who make more than 100,000 per year up to $200,000 per year. $100,000 puts a taxpayer in the top 17%. $199,000 puts a taxpayer in the top 3%. So you are apparently arguing that the top 17%-3% are in the "middle class". Seems to me that the "middle class" ought to be, I don't know, maybe in the actual middle of the income distribution? The national median is $44,000, but $199,000 is still "middle class"? Source for all numbers in this paragraph:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
So, we have a situation where 75% of the cash spent on the deduction goes to people in the top 17%, and a good chunk of that goes to people in the 3-5%. If this is supposed to be a deduction that helps the "middle class", it's missing the target.
Got some more numbers for me? Would you care to respond to the numbers I just gave you?