If you give people tax breaks to buy homes, you cause house prices to rise

If I were setting the ordinary level Leaving Cert economics paper, my first question, an easy one to get the students started, would be about supply and demand. It would go something like this:

A country is experiencing a shortage of supply of starter homes; builders say they can’t make enough profit at the existing prices to make building worthwhile. What would happen if the government gave people a tax break to help ...