Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Redfin Economist says land value tax will fix the economy

narrativespodcast.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 238 posts

Re: Redfin Economist says land value tax will fix the economy

#71

Post by akira2501 »

sudden_dystopia wrote: post #32

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…

You're presuming that the homeless you see on the streets already "don't have somewhere to go." For the majority of them, this is not true. They choose to live where they can easily get drugs or avoid their mental health issues. Most of them have homes or families that they could otherwise return to.

From ground level, access to property does not seem to be any part of the problem here. Plus, you'd want that property to be somewhere close to jobs and services or you're just going to be pushing problems from the downtown core to wherever you manage to build these homes.

Re: Redfin Economist says land value tax will fix the economy

#72

Post by colinmhayes »

bko wrote: post #43
hash872 wrote: post #24

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…

If I understand it correctly, LVT would allow people to state what they think their property is worth and pay taxes accordingly. They could put down any value but anyone could buy it from them at that value. And this is supposed to be good? Forget politics, who thinks its a good idea to force people into economic transactions? I could see a whole new line of blackmail, akin to patent trolls, looking for people who un…

You're thinking of Glen Weyl's wealth tax proposal.

Re: Redfin Economist says land value tax will fix the economy

#73

Post by jstanley »

strongpigeon wrote: post #51
fullshark wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But pollution is a byproduct of being productive?

What I guess the parent is implying is that by taxing something, you’re effectively disincentivizing it. Tax land value, you’re punishing people for making land valuable. Tax pollution, you’re incentivizing people to pollute less.

The value of a piece of land is determined much more by the things around it than by the things that are on it.

A land value tax is punishing people for squandering valuable land. If you're not making a sufficiently productive use of your valuable land for it to be worth paying the tax, you should sell it to someone who will, and you should move somewhere cheaper.

Re: Redfin Economist says land value tax will fix the economy

#74

Post by zip1234 »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #47

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…

Or we could just do the completely free thing that is removing rules preventing construction of homes where they are desired...

Re: Redfin Economist says land value tax will fix the economy

#75

Post by notahacker »

colinmhayes wrote: post #52
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I have zero confidence that a Georgist tax would be revenue neutral 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.

But then we're on to why would the state do that, unless they happen to be a state composed entirely of geolibertarians that think redistributing ground rent is the proper purpose of government? A regular government considering going through the political pain of turfing out homeowners at least wants budget to spend on their actual political priorities

(Also, giving tax money "back" to the population is surprisingly nontrivial given political complications over which people qualify to get the rebate, political and practical complications over actually getting the money, and an expected ultimate impact - positive and negative - on the net recipients)

Re: Redfin Economist says land value tax will fix the economy

#76

Post by nemothekid »

goethes_kind wrote: post #53

The best way to fix the housing crisis, at the state/federal level is to create incentives for employers to move to less densely populated areas. But what makes it a bit more complex is that, ideally, one would, try to relocate entire technological hubs. But I do not see why it shouldn't be possible.

So just move the housing crisis to various pockets of the country every few years?

Re: Redfin Economist says land value tax will fix the economy

#77

Post by sosull »

sudden_dystopia wrote: post #32

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…

I think the idea runs into the problems experienced by newly-developed rural properties. Small, privately held parcels of land are absurdly expensive to service. Power, water, communications, sewage, food, waste etc. are easier to provide to people who live close together. And then there’s the problem of a social hierarchy of needs. People need someone to turn to in an emergency, input into their immediate environment, and focal points. In that sense land can be cheap, but places are innately costly, not just financially, but socially and historically.

Re: Redfin Economist says land value tax will fix the economy

#78

Post by zip1234 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #57
geocon wrote: post #2

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.

Maybe so. But why do I care what Redfin's chief economist thinks? She works for a real estate company and she has ideas, and she's an economist. That's all cool, but none of it tells me that she actually knows whether or not Georgism would work as advertised.

There are actual places where it has been used and is in use. Some even in the US.

Re: Redfin Economist says land value tax will fix the economy

#79

Post by jeffbee »

dragonwriter wrote: post #39
uberman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Note that an LVT of that form is isomorphic to public confiscation of land, which is leased back to the nominal “owner”.

The current system is that we're all living on subdivided Mexican land grants, which fundamentally doesn't make any more sense than any other system. So, confiscation is a big scary word, but I'm already living on a place that Pablo Vicente de Solá gave to Don Luís María Peralta 200 years ago, after stealing it from the remaining natives that hadn't been murdered yet.

When you think it through no system based on the sanctity of private property rights really makes any sense.

Re: Redfin Economist says land value tax will fix the economy

#80

Post by [deleted] »

hash872 wrote: post #24

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN