51–60 of 613 posts
In my mind, LVT only works properly when you've ripped out every other tax: income, sales, capital, you name it. Absolutely no more friction and warped incentives. Divide the government budget by the weighted land values and tax accordingly. But that could never work in our world. There would be too much temptation to add a small tax here for this other thing, and then it snowballs, and then we're back to where we st…
Do we burn witches too?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that were the case, why would someone else not bid $1 more to buy that house and rent it out? Then someone else would logically be willing to bid $1 more than that, until there was no easy profit left… I think the answer is that much of the landlord’s initial profit is more or less income from working a job (buying, insuring, readying, showing, screening, fixing, collecting, etc) as evidenced by the share that a p…
>I think the answer is that much of the landlord’s initial profit is more or less income from working a job [...] It can simultaneously be true that being a landlord is a bunch of work, and that is being parasitic middleman. That's because being a landlord is composed of two parts: providing access to the land, and building/maintaining a shelter that sits on top of the land. People generally aren't upset with the lat…
"The big question land value taxes help answer is: How can a government raise funds without distorting choices and possibly leaving people worse off? If you tax income, it provides a disincentive to work. If you tax property, it provides a disincentive to improve the physical buildings on top of the land." Of course it will distort choices and leave some people worse off. If the author can't see that, then they have…
This policy only makes sense where zoning is also loosened enough to actually build on the land though...if zoning doesn't allow you to do anything with the land to make more money (building apartments, subdividing, etc.), this just becomes a tax on poor landowners.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Landlords are not parasites and provide a valuable service. Landlords take property that could be owned outright by the resident and extract, at best, a middleman's fee. Some landlords also provide access to services such as repair, cleaning, etc and combine those fees with the rent, but there is no reason those could not be equally available to owner-residents without the landlord acting as a middleman, and there…
> Landlords take property that could be owned outright by the resident Why do you assume every resident wants to own their property? When I lived in Baltimore you can be damn sure I didn't want to own anything in that city. There are valid reasons for renting to exist, landlords do provide valuable services, and there are people who do want landlords and renting to exist. It's okay to say you personally don't like la…
See, it's actually precisely the opposite: I don't hate people personally for owning and renting homes, I dislike the system for being broken and allowing such parasitical inefficiencies. "Hate the game not the player" etcetera
Wait! We voted for more taxes on land owners not renters, why are the rents going up!?! Vox is a dumpster fire and the owners have been hyperbolic rage bait farmers for over a decade.
You need to read books on LVT and Georgism, it's been around for going on 150 years with praise from such diverse figures as Einstein or Tolstoy. Hardly invented by Vox, but judging from your tone you have pre-existing qualms about this particular news outlet.
Wait! We voted for more taxes on land owners not renters, why are the rents going up!?! Vox is a dumpster fire and the owners have been hyperbolic rage bait farmers for over a decade.
https://www.gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-t...
The best empirical evidence available shows pretty strong signs that land value taxes are not passed on to tenants
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> providing no service Landlords are not parasites and provide a valuable service. I think a land tax would be great to curb speculation. Buying property, not providing any service (neither by renting nor capital investment in improvements), and just pocketing the appreciation, I agree, that's parasitic on the community. FWIW - I don't think a landtax would create a meaningful tilt towards more affordable home owners…
> Landlords are not parasites and provide a valuable service. Landlords take property that could be owned outright by the resident and extract, at best, a middleman's fee. Some landlords also provide access to services such as repair, cleaning, etc and combine those fees with the rent, but there is no reason those could not be equally available to owner-residents without the landlord acting as a middleman, and there…
I get what you're saying, but it reads like sophistry. Yes, _technically_, a landlord, can delegate all services. In practice, there's no single "tenant" who would do anything remotely capital-intensive, like fixing a roof. They just up-and-leave.
> owner-residents
It's called home-ownership. It's expensive for a reason, and the fact that parts of the housing stock are for rent, and there's a middle-man, is not it.
> the landlord acting as a middleman
Many people do not have the wherewithal and look for a middleman. Young, seniors, people on the move, rich people who have no emotional attachment to a house, ...
The fact that Blackrock owns single family homes is due to an unfortunate combination of zoning, tax-structure, job concentration, ... creating the unique conditions that makes single family homes an attractive investment. Not because there's inherently something "extractive" about landlording.
(I guess, in core Adam Smith terms, there is a case, the way he frames "rent" as distinct from capital and labor, but it's a theoretical framework, and much of it still stemmed from the feudal legacy in Europe, where landlords had divine and aristocratic rights to family property. And in any case, it's not the same as "rent", the check Americans write every month, which usually has a large labor component).
I find speculation much more parasitic, and it's precisely that which land tax tries to address.
There is something deeply wrong with the fact that you can buy-to-rent a property and immediately turn up a profit, essentially inserting yourself as a parasitic middleman in the process, providing no service, and extracting an economic rent.
> providing no service Being a landlord does provide a service, the service of managing the land and property. I don't want to buy a house right now because I'm not ready yet, so I _want_ landlords to provide properties so that I can have a home without having to go through the process of buying one just to sell it a year or so later.
Property managers receive a return on their labor (services to their tenants) and their investments of capital (maintenance and improvements to the building).
Conventional landlords are a mixture of property managers and "pure" landlords. A "pure" landlord makes money only off of gatekeeping access to the land.
The fact that it is entirely possible for a landlord to outsource property management to a 3rd party and still have a profitable venture is a telling sign. In a land value tax system, you would only be able to profit from property management, not from "pure" landlordism of holding a scarce asset nobody can make and waiting for it to go up in value or collecting rent to let people access it.
I was interviewed by Jerusalem in the piece and have written an in-depth series with many citations from the empirical literature about this subject: www.gameofrent.com
Wait! We voted for more taxes on land owners not renters, why are the rents going up!?! Vox is a dumpster fire and the owners have been hyperbolic rage bait farmers for over a decade.
Sounds like a testable hypothesis, let's look at the evidence: https://www.gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-t... The best empirical evidence available shows pretty strong signs that land value taxes are not passed on to tenants
If property taxes are raised and my mortgage/interest/tax payment are now 1350$ you will raise rent accordingly unless you are running a charity or expect a roof to repair itself. I don't need a theoretical analysis from a game developer who has to imagine himself as a landlord as I have personally owned rental property before, have known people who have owned rental property and rented property before.
Not really stated in the article are three caveats: 1) Zoning laws have to change as well to actually allow development of the land being taxed toward more productive ends. 2) The land tax amount needs to be high enough that the pain of the tax effectively forces owners to improve what's on the land. A homeowner sitting on a million dollar piece of property in California taxed at ~1% is still unlikely to build an apa…
"The land tax amount needs to be high enough that the pain of the tax effectively forces owners to improve what's on the land" The author likely isn't aware of that. If the author made that argument then it would undermine their argument about affecting people's choices minimally or not at all.
You tax the carbon. That tax money is then put into an account. At the end of the year, every single individual is then given an equal share. The disincentives the use of carbon, while at the same time providing means that a majority of people actually get a net benefit.
The land tax should be set so that the price of the house becomes just the price of the house - the cost of the materials and labor. The land value should drop to zero. You then take that money, maybe use some of it for some public goods, might use some of it to get rid of bad taxes like property, income and sales, then give the rest back just as with the carbon tax.
The transition needs to be done with care(I heavily like giving everyone tax credits equal to the current value of their land, others like phasing in the tax over decades), but once we are in a land value tax environment everyone will be better off.