But the mortgage interest deduction has an even more powerful ally than the real estate industry--they have some liberal Democrats and members of Congress. When Ronald W. Reagan hinted during the 1984 campaign that just maybe the deduction could be reformed, Walter F. Mondale called the suggestion "the worst single idea around in tax law."

The mortgage interest deduction also benefits from its low political visibility. It's easier to spend $30 billion through the tax code than to mail out one million checks for $30,000. It wasn't until 1974 that Congress and the President were even required to list the revenue loss of "tax expenditures" such as the mortgage interest deduction as costs on the budget.

The mortgage interest deduction has the privilege of being one of the most sacred of sacred cows in the tax code. During the debate over the 1986 tax reform bill, proposals to limit the deduction to primary residences and to cap the rate of deduction at 14 percent were soundly defeated in Congress.

Every attempt to introduce some measure of fairness into the deduction has met with protests about the "sanctity of home ownership." Mondale went so far as to call the mortgage interest deduction "the only deduction that is in the tax law that does any good at all for the average American."

The problem with the deduction is that the "average American" gets precious little out of it. You could scarcely imagine a system that distributes housing assistance as regressively as does the mortgage interest deduction.

Surely it is the responsibility of a society as wealthy as ours to ensure that no one has to sleep on a grate. Just as surely, it is the height of unfairness to take away housing funds from the poor while maintaining lavish deductions for middle-and upper-class homeowners. Congress should eliminate this $32 billion dollar handout to the wealthy and use that money to provide adequate housing for the truly needy.