What If You have a nice Chesapeake Bay home and are among the 10.4 million households who own a home with more than 3,000 square feet and the federal government decided that you and your family are to be penalized for living in a dwelling slightly larger than the norm.
 
Representative John Dingell (D-MI) head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee has decided to take away the mortgage interest tax deduction from all owners of homes larger than 3,000 square feet. He is introducing a bill that would strip mortgage loan write-offs for all homeowners who live in his notion of a MANSION, which he conveniently reduces in size to fit almost 30% of the houses in the country, calling homes of that size "McMansions.”
 
According to all of the reference books that we could find, a Mansion is described as:
 
1-      A large and stately house
2-      The house of the lord of a manor
3-      The main house on an estate
4-      A house built with many rooms, which are considerably larger than normal, usually the largest and the most expensive building in a particular area.
5-      A large dwelling house typically built for the wealthy or the ruling class
 
The term McMansion originated in neighborhoods where a homeowner builds or re-constructs an excessively large home built on relatively small acreage.

So Representative Dingell from his bully pulpit has decided that more than ten million families, including many of us on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, are going into a penalty box, supported by his distorted and corrupted use of the English language. Seems to us that he would be more effective attacking the major source of carbon emissions by working to develop clean fuels, rather than brand a third of our population as wasteful and extravagant, just to get his concept accepted. Click Here to continue.