As a result of both the decline of real user cost of owner-occupied housing and the failure of this cost for nonresidential investment to fail similarly, some have argued that the U.S. economy has overinvested to housing at the expense of industrial capital and thus has suffered substantial...

The obvious economic, although not political, solution to the overinvestment in owner-occupied housing in the 1970s would be to tax owner-occupied hous ing more heavily, thereby raising its user cost relative to that of industrial capital.

Model simulations are run to obtain a range of realistic estimates of the long-run revenue impact of a capital gains tax rate cut to a maximum of 15 percent. The basic vehicle for the simulations is a slightly modified version of the Galper-Lucke-Toder (GLT) general equilibrium model. The key...