Redfin Economist says land value tax will fix the economy

The best argument for favorable LTCG taxes is that naive taxation of long-term capital gains as current-year income in a progressive tax system overtaxes income that takes an extended period to generate and isn't repeatable, but allowances for advance recognition and/or deferral of recognition of income for tax purposes solve that and are also usable for non-capital income that is concentrated over a shorter time than the work to generate it (as is often the case for creative work.)

If you want to encourage sales of idle assets of a particular class, tax the asset, don't lower the capital gains tax.

LVT + UBI would accomplish the same thing (and then some) more fairly and efficiently; UBI would subsidize the LVT for your primary residence, while secondary residences (and residences owned by corporations and other non-residents) would see no such benefit.

Every single thing you just listed would take energy to produce and would bear a carbon tax because a carbon tax is really just an energy tax. The electric vehicles need batteries, the batteries need lithium, and the lithium has to come out of the ground. This results in a product with much more mass than your typical ICE, thus has more energy put into its production, but to offset this the electricity can theoretically come from some solar farm in the Mojave desert. In practice it probably comes from a gas fired plant, but that is still a lot better than if it were to come from a coal powered plant (and sometimes it does).

Everything we do by living has an impact on the planet. Actually to be more exact anything any living creature does has an impact on the planet, but we’re the only species that thinks on a planetary scale (except maybe birds, I’m sure there’s a fun philosophical discussion there but we’ll have to table it) and therefore care about this ecosystem we have conceptualized as a planet.

So when I eat some beans or drink milk and or a cow eats some grass or “feed”, we both emit a GHG with a global warming potential of 27-30 over 100 years. You should be happy to note that as a responsible citizen of this planet, I have omitted both beans and milk from my diet. Unfortunately my hypothetical methane account is probably overdrawn on account of my love of steak as my primary source of protein.

No. We cannot live without waste as a necessary product of living, and since there’s a lot of us, we waste a lot of energy. What we can do is get a lot more efficient with our energy usage and reduce the total amount of waste, but we will continue to be GHG emitters for as long as we have civilization. Either we find some way to get the planet to absorb more of our emissions or we naturally die off until we reach an equilibrium with the planet. That could be billions of us or it could be zero of us. I’m unconvinced tax policy will be our silver bullet, nor will cronyism.

> we should financially reward people who make greener choices.

Which brings me to my final point. If you mean this in a private market sense, that’s fine. If you mean this as an extension of tax policy and the course of government business, this is called cronyism—the government picking winners and losers and is a fine example of why our tax code is already so complex. We have plenty of that already, and I would like to see less to the point that it approaches or eventually achieves zero but I’m not holding my breath.

And at some point you run out of land, after which point you'd need to shrink everyone else's parcels to make room for new birthright parcels. Further, not all land is equal; if one parcel has a bunch of features that another lacks, then it stands to reason that unless the former is smaller than the latter, the citizens assigned to either would be on an unequal footing.

In short: what you call a "land dividend", once you've addressed the above, is literally Georgism - specifically, LVT plus a citizens' dividend (more modernly known as "UBI"). This results in a self-balancing system for ensuring every American enjoys one's equal share of America's land value. Own more than your fair share? You pay more LVT than you get from UBI. Own less than your fair share? You get more UBI than you pay LVT.

Sure that could work, but it looks like 5x the complexity and political will required.

Also, I'm not fully sold on UBI, because I haven't heard a convincing argument on why it wouldn't lead to persistent inflation. As the economy moves towards a you-will-own-nothing stance (to be fair, I'm contributing to this in trying to launch and operate SaaS services)

Even if UBI was the answer, the political fight is bigger, I think. Let's just be honest and straightforward about what we (well, some of us -- it is a democratic republic after all) want, we want people to stop speculating on houses and use them for living.

Assuming we can agree on the premise, tax the behavior we want to disincentivize as directly as possible, be clear about why we're doing it. Clear hearts, full hearts, can't lose. Just kidding this is politics so absolutely can lose but you get the idea.