401–410 of 910 posts
Pufff, Brazil does that since forever. By paying some tax over your land, basically your government is taking it from you every generation or two. Roughly, 2% each year and in 50 years and it's gone.
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Property taxes and wealth taxes undermine property rights in ways that normal income taxes don’t. If I earn $100 and pay tax on it, whatever’s left over is mine forever, and I never have to pay tax on that income again. If I buy $100 worth of property, I have to pay tax on it again every year forever, which basically means I’m only buying the right to rent it from the government in perpetuity. Your use of the phrase…
I used to agree with you, then I read Falkvinge's proposal of a taxless state and it changed my mind. I'm now convinced that property tax (or more accurately, land tax) is the only justified tax, or more generally, that all taxes paid must be tied explicitly and characteristic to a service rendered, and that the only services a state should be allowed to render must be administration of a commons. You cannot defend y…
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It's the same in Australia. It seems like a pretty sensible way to encourage the best use of high value land.
Only some parts of Australia, isn't it? They also have silly things like stamp duty, which is a sin tax on giving land to someone who has a better use for it.
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Given that it was never "your" land to begin with (what, did you create it?), that's not an unreasonable approach.
That device you used to post that comment, what, did you create it? Those clothes you are wearing, did you create them? The car you drive, did you create it? I’m not saying anything pro/con the LVT. But measuring ownership by whether you created it or not is a pretty terrible measure. You wouldn’t own _anything_ worth any value in the modern world.
As the saying goes, they aren't making more land. With a constrained resource that nobody created, the least efficient way to allocate it is to just let whoever got there first have it. A far better way would be to have competitive bidding so whoever thinks they can do a better job gets a shot at it.
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The IRS has nothing to do with property taxes. Property taxes mainly go to your town and some to your state. They mainly fund your local schools, streets, parks, maintenance, etc. Do you think all these things just magically exist?
Same thing, it's a bunch of inefficient brats taking my money and not giving me that amount of value in return. I could do things much more efficiently with the same amount of money. Hence, owning property isn't attractive to me at all right now unless they can stop taxing it.
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A land value tax seeks to only tax the value of the land itself, not the improvements. Of course that's not always easy to assess, but neither are property values for normal property taxes. Even setting that aside, if the land value taxes on the land that someone owns dramatically increase then that means the value of their property has dramatically increased, and they can sell the land for a dramatic profit. Certain…
The land value in absence of human activity is zero. All value stems from improvements made by people, either on the land, or nearby.
If somebody is sitting on a prime seat in the hot tub, and they don't really care very much about it, and there's a line of 20 people waiting to get in, we have a wasted resource. Revealing true preferences by having people put some skin in the game means that more people are happy, more people are productive, and society works better.
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I’ve heard economists champion the idea, but I’ve heard little talk about what the tradeoffs are. What are the downsides?
Sometimes people want to sit on underdeveloped-for-the-location land not because it's a low-effort way to ride capital gains but for non-economic reasons. Examples include conservation projects and urban farms, but the big one is empty-nesters ageing in place (while the city has grown around them). If you've seen the start of the movie Up you'll recall that Mr. Carl Fredrickson owns a detached home which now has apar…
I do have sympathy, it's a understandable position for someone to be in, but I'm not sure that Up in specific is the best analogy?
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Property taxes and wealth taxes undermine property rights in ways that normal income taxes don’t. If I earn $100 and pay tax on it, whatever’s left over is mine forever, and I never have to pay tax on that income again. If I buy $100 worth of property, I have to pay tax on it again every year forever, which basically means I’m only buying the right to rent it from the government in perpetuity. Your use of the phrase…
I used to agree with you, then I read Falkvinge's proposal of a taxless state and it changed my mind. I'm now convinced that property tax (or more accurately, land tax) is the only justified tax, or more generally, that all taxes paid must be tied explicitly and characteristic to a service rendered, and that the only services a state should be allowed to render must be administration of a commons. You cannot defend y…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that it was never "your" land to begin with (what, did you create it?), that's not an unreasonable approach.
The government didn't create it either. The only reasonable recipient of the 2%/year tax is God.
That share could come as government services, or it could come as a paycheck. But in either case that 2% belongs to all of us equally.