31–40 of 238 posts
Daryl Fairweather is the chief economist at Redfin, a major housing and real estate company (competitor to Zillow). Seems she's pretty bullish on LVT.
On a somewhat absurd tangent, I’ve been toying with the idea of something I call a “land dividend” to solve homelessness. If every US citizen had by birthright, a small parcel of land with no taxes owed, they would always have somewhere to go. Even if they lived in a tent. And land is one thing the government has in surplus and divvying it up could could both decrease expenses while also solving a problem without creating new tax burdens.
A very high LVT is a politically unserious proposition, because it would involve drastically raising taxes on the people who actually vote & hold political power in society- the middle class, upper middle class, and wealthy in suburbs and low-density urban areas. All of the alleged 'efficiency' gains you hear Georgists claim really mean 'middle class homeowners forced to sell their single family home to developers du…
A very high LVT is a politically unserious proposition, because it would involve drastically raising taxes on the people who actually vote & hold political power in society- the middle class, upper middle class, and wealthy in suburbs and low-density urban areas. All of the alleged 'efficiency' gains you hear Georgists claim really mean 'middle class homeowners forced to sell their single family home to developers du…
A very high LVT is a politically unserious proposition, because it would involve drastically raising taxes on the people who actually vote & hold political power in society- the middle class, upper middle class, and wealthy in suburbs and low-density urban areas. All of the alleged 'efficiency' gains you hear Georgists claim really mean 'middle class homeowners forced to sell their single family home to developers du…
>All of the alleged 'efficiency' gains you hear Georgists claim really mean 'middle class homeowners forced to sell their single family home to developers due to crushing tax increases'. Every day the evening news and social media would carry a new, tearful story of a family forced to sell their home. This seems trivially fixable by making the tax revenue neutral (ie. every additional dollar collected by the LVT is c…
A very high LVT is a politically unserious proposition, because it would involve drastically raising taxes on the people who actually vote & hold political power in society- the middle class, upper middle class, and wealthy in suburbs and low-density urban areas. All of the alleged 'efficiency' gains you hear Georgists claim really mean 'middle class homeowners forced to sell their single family home to developers du…
High but realistic LVT at say 2% wouldn’t force people to sell, it would however tank the value of ultra expensive land. Fewer people could afford 2% of land value + mortgage costs + insurance + … at current prices which means there are fewer buyers at those prices. That price drop scales with the LVT so at 10% you would pay more than at 2%, just nowhere close to 5x as much.
Well it would depend on why the land is expensive. What it would do (at least in theory which I do agree with) is force the expensive land to be developed for a useful economic purpose instead of just sitting there.
For single-family homes and such a LVT is likely to be neutral or slightly positive b/c a lot of those homes weren't built on particularly valuable or useful land (which is why it was cheap in the first place).
I really like the idea of focusing taxes on more of a "what am I actually paying for in my community" which LVT and variations of that tend to support, but it'll never happen in the US.
A very high LVT is a politically unserious proposition, because it would involve drastically raising taxes on the people who actually vote & hold political power in society- the middle class, upper middle class, and wealthy in suburbs and low-density urban areas. All of the alleged 'efficiency' gains you hear Georgists claim really mean 'middle class homeowners forced to sell their single family home to developers du…
>All of the alleged 'efficiency' gains you hear Georgists claim really mean 'middle class homeowners forced to sell their single family home to developers due to crushing tax increases'. Every day the evening news and social media would carry a new, tearful story of a family forced to sell their home. This seems trivially fixable by making the tax revenue neutral (ie. every additional dollar collected by the LVT is c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The nominal value of each parcel of land doesn't matter when calculating a landowner's tax burden. You just need to compare each piece of land relative to one another and scale the tax burden accordingly.
That is how traditional property tax works. However (as I understand it) a LVT that replaces property tax (potentially all other taxes as the one true tax) is based solely on the yearly cost to lease a parcel of land. Your tax is just that, the cost to lease. With a LVT there is no "here is your % of the district tax burden apportioned by what you own" only a "here is what we estimate it would cost to lease this prop…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's some empirical research for you then: http://gameofrent.com/content/is-land-a-big-deal Additionally, property tax rates vary massively from state to state and there's pretty strong correlation between property tax rates and housing supply and housing affordability. The legacy of California's Proposition 13 and its effects on housing supply are very well studied. Property tax still has inefficiencies (it can pu…
Thanks for the link! Here’s an equally wordy refutation of Georgism https://dailyanarchist.com/2012/06/12/what-is-georgism-follo...
>A common explanation of Georgism’s failure is that the philosophy itself is flawed and, ultimately, would strengthen collectivism and the state, not individualism. In this vein Tucker asked a fundamental question: How can a collective like society own land if such ownership is improper for individuals? Either land could be owned by an individual — and, thus, sold or transferred to another individual — or it was not subject to ownership at all. He considered collective ownership to be a contradiction in terms. Or, as Tucker might ask, “Can I sell my share? No? Then I don’t own it either individually or as part of a collective.”
>It is to such critiques of Georgism that Part II of this article will turn.
Granted, that might be a good criticism of Georgism from the perspective of a committed anarchist, but I was expecting, you know, economics.