51–60 of 238 posts
Want to fix the economy? Stop punishing people for being productive. Stop paying people to fail. Want something to tax? Tax pollution.
But pollution is a byproduct of being productive?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
1. That might help some, but it won't fix it. Wherever else taxes are cut won't be on property, therefore the "land value tax plus some other tax cuts" will work out worse for property owners. That's kind of the point . But it's also, as hash872 says, the thing that makes it politically impossible. 2. Make it revenue neutral? Who's going to do that? Some legislature somewhere? Are they actually going to do it? Or are…
It's pretty trivially easy to make any tax revenue neutral. Just return 100% of the tax revenue to the people split evenly between every person or adult in the country.
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…
Renters are close to out-numbering non-renters by double digits.
Those are incredibly new phenomena. It's hard to over-state how different things are now compared to even 5 years ago.
I will be surprised if there isn't an open electoral revolt against land owners in my community over the next 10 years. And not just pro-housing policy, but policy explicitly designed to punish.
I don't have an opinion on LVT, but the idea that home owners are the primary organized electoral power base is, I think, shifting quickly in many communities. Landowners, I think, I have two options: find ways to fracture/disempower the rent base in the communities where they invest or else find a way to keep the number of non-renters well over 50%.
9 times out of 10 the issue with housing isn't that housing is truly in short supply - it's housing within a reasonable travel time of desired locations that is in short supply. To view the solution myopically as we must change people to allow more housing in their backyard, is only one frame - and not even the most effective one. Innovating the urban -> rural transport chain is the most challenging, but its implicat…
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…
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.
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…
One way to solve the issue of people being taxed out of their property would be to give the option to put a lien on the property if they’re earning less than a certain income (or over a certain age). This way, the owner gets to stay in their home, but the city is (eventually) getting the taxes it’s owed. I haven’t fully thought through all the incentives it brings though. However, it seems like a better solution than…
https://dor.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2022-02/PTDeferral_Se...
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…
Could you start small? Just a minor LVT to begin with, which could potentially be raised over time. Possibly implemented by a single city instead of nationwide.
Disagree. We should go the other way, abolish all primary residence property taxes and replace with value added taxes. Other lands for secondary and commercial properties can still be taxed. Otherwise you are really just leasing land from the government. 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 sm…