131–140 of 375 posts
Adam Smith’s definition of 'free market' wasn’t freedom from governments, it was freedom from rentiers. Land is big deal. Value of land comes mostly from it's surrounding infrastructure. Taxing it is one of the least harmful taxes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO the biggest issue with property taxes, land taxes, or any other similar idea, is that they arbitrarily tax one kind of wealth over others. Why should a person who owns a house worth $500k (and perhaps has a mortgage on it) pay not only the exact same tax rate, but also the amount of tax as a person who owns a house worth $500k (and doesn't have a mortgage on it), but also has $5 million in other assets? (This isn…
Owning huge amounts of land is uniquely antisocial in a way that owning huge amounts of other stuff isn't. If Mr Moneybags buys ten thousand paintings, we can always produce more paintings (and the rising price of paintings will push more people to take up careers in art). But if Moneybags buys ten thousand acres, the rest of us are ten thousand acres worse off in a way that we can't really fix.
If you are really hardcore about richer people paying even larger part then simply make the curve slightly progressive.
If you want poorer people to pay even less make the minimum number required for max tax higher.
This would make the overall tax system 1000x simpler releasing a gigantic amount of labor and would allow IRS to actually check effectively if people are lying. It would make all fraud much harder.
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Well, 1 is right. Land just doesn't matter that much today. Take Google, for instance. What does Google own? They own some land - some fairly expensive land. But they also own a bunch of code and data, and they own google.com, which is probably the most valuable of the three. Why tax the land, and not the domain name? And, if you go by just about the first thing the article says, if your goal is to cut down on rentie…
Did you read the rest of the article where it established the fraction of wealth in the nation that is due to land? Why are all the dumpy and decrepit houses in Silicon Valley worth 10x what they would be in the rest of the country? What is the value of the lane in Silicon Valley versus the market caps of the various companies there? If there's a trillion dollar company, and the houses around it go for 2 million each…
Only 400k houses? I don't think that supports your point very much. Apple, Amazon, or Google have land footprints that are far smaller than 400,000 houses.
And, the growth in inequality is coming from land? The top 0.01% have what percent of their assets in land? And, which came first? Did they make their money on stocks and then buy the land to diversify? Or did they make the bulk of their initial money on the land?
The maps showing land value peaking in cities should be a good indicator of this but the opposite conclusion is being formed. If land is expensive, it will be taxed at a considerable amount per year driving people out of these areas or into condos where they can share the costs with those on the floors above and below them.
Perhaps there will be two types of development with this Georgism paradigm, high rise and extra urban but at the cost of suburban homes.
Do they really lump profitability from agriculture in with location, rent profit, etc.? It seems unfair to tax farming, a labor intensive job, equivalently to passive income propositions.
I'm not a huge fan of how deadweight loss is defined in the article: > virtually all economists agree that land value tax has zero "deadweight loss"–a fancy word for a drag on the economy that makes certain activities no longer profitable Property taxes tax the land + the building. Building taxes are complicated to assess. They require tax assessments, appraisers, tax code, accountants to compute depreciation schedul…
That's not quite what deadweight loss is; deadweight loss is when you can produce apples for $1, but a tax induces you to have to sell them for $1.10, preventing everyone who would be able to buy them at $1.05 from getting apples.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/corruption-of-economics/oclc/...
This was based on an earlier paper by Gaffney, "Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem Against Henry George"
https://masongaffney.org/blog/index.php/2007/04/neo-classica...
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Georgism makes a distinction between Capital (value produced by labor) and Land (value that existed before humans showed up). Rewarding owners of capital incentives people to make more, but rewarding owners of land benefits nobody other than the landowner.
That seems like a bit of a murky distinction, though, right? Taxing land disincentives economic activity a large component of which is in the land value (running a parking garage or hotel in downtown Manhattan, or a farm in a fertile region, etc.) but incentivizes other types of economic activity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some evidence would be more convincing than a glib "nah, I'm right"...
Oddly enough there was no evidence provided for the original claim, either. This despite there being many sources of this estimattioj laid out directly in the original article. The comment didn't mention why the original articles' various methods do not work.
Maybe that's just me...