111–120 of 156 posts
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Not most places in the U.S. If your whole neighborhood's valuations go up you all get taxed more.
If your whole neighborhood goes up, but not the whole city/municipality, correct. If the entire tax base goes up (not just one neighborhood), you should expect the mill rate to fall.
> I bought my house 55 years ago, and in the time that I’ve lived in it the city has grown up around me so that the plot of land that my house sits on is now extremely valuable. Examples like these ignore that the reason the land around them is vaulable is by virtue of the people living there making it a better and more prosperous place. They earn the windfall for the time they spend there without making it worse. So…
If the person who lived their for 55 years makes $10m from the increase in land value, how much should of this should he give to the people who rented for 55 years, lived in the same neighborhood, and went about their days with smiles as to make the place nice to live in? Also what if he was a real asshole, rude to everyone, kicking in fences, and his dogs barking 24/7, and the neighbourhood was doing well despite hi…
Renting a single place for decades is less common in north america, as homeowner friendly policies were designed to prevent the society from sliding into the serfdom that is more traditional in europe and elsewhere. If a homeowner was a problem, neighbours have police. There's a dynamic that works pretty well when there isn't a thumb on the scale.
I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…
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I see a different problem with the separation. In the modern day, the improvements may contribute more than 100% of the value of the land. In most cases the sole benefit of having land in a desirable city is that it is near other desirable things. This is unlike the agricultural model motivating Georgism, where the primary benefit of owning land is that you can grow crops on it. But taking the proposal literally that…
I still don't understand how Georgism makes any sense in a digital world. The biggest companies in the world require irrelevantly small amounts of land to operate. A person can make millions in a 10x10 box with a computer.
If you create something without using any natural resources, then you shouldn't have to pay any taxes on it — it all belongs to you. Well done! If a large company does it then same — it's good to use less resources, and taxing their use encourages people to use less. But you will still probably want to live somewhere (and eat food grown somewhere, and drink water that fell somewhere), and you pay tax on what you use, instead of the income you generate.
Georgism is about taxing resource consumption, not income.
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The inhabitants don't lose. Play your scenario out. A bunch of poor people buy 100 acres of land for $1, and they turn it into a paradise. It becomes cool, so rich hipsters wanna buy up chunks to Instagram it. The first person sells a patch of land he bought for $0.01 for $1M. Suddenly, property tax on everyone's $0.01 parcels shoots up from $0 to $12,000 per year. These people have no jobs, so they can't afford $12,…
This is wrong under a 100% land value tax. The value of land is a perpetual income stream an if the government takes all of this value the price of land falls to $0 regardless of all the amenities that improve it. Each amenity that improves it raises the tax which captures all the additional value from that external improvement which keeps the price at $0. Only improvements on the land itself will add to the price. O…
But as tax money is raised, the local government has a choice
1. They can use the tax money to fund services.
2. They can return the tax money collected as a Citizen's Dividend.
If they don't have any need for any more services, everyone would still be able to live there. Your concern that people will lose their community are unfounded. They might decide, as the tax goes up, that they don't need a 1 mile by 1 mile plot of land, in which case they can sub-divide it and live in the area they care about. Anyone who uses less than the average amount of land ends up net positive through this process. Since land ownership tends to be skewed by wealthy land-owners, this means the majority of people receive net proceeds.
But maybe the city does want to spend these new funds on roads and infrastructure for the new people. They have correctly identified that land values will raise by more than they spend, so it is in the interests of the community for them to build. Since these services are profitable to the community, the collected dividends will now be even higher. This represents even more gains for our original garden tenders, but everyone who joined after the initial process shares in these gains.
Now that they have built more awesome stuff, the original citizens are now much better off. This city is now filled with companies moving in, providing jobs for the citizens, it's a magical process. Land values are all much higher. This means that the tax is higher, but it means that the dividend is higher. They can now either go for #1 or #2 again...
In a non-LVT world, it wouldn't make sense for the infrastructure to be built for the sole profit of the original land owners, so it wouldn't be built. Everyone is better off with the land value tax.
> I bought my house 55 years ago, and in the time that I’ve lived in it the city has grown up around me so that the plot of land that my house sits on is now extremely valuable. Examples like these ignore that the reason the land around them is vaulable is by virtue of the people living there making it a better and more prosperous place. They earn the windfall for the time they spend there without making it worse. So…
And almost all land currently owned is the result of banditry. Pretty much every bit of habitable land has been fought over, both in the Old World and the New. It's all stolen goods.
> I bought my house 55 years ago, and in the time that I’ve lived in it the city has grown up around me so that the plot of land that my house sits on is now extremely valuable. Examples like these ignore that the reason the land around them is vaulable is by virtue of the people living there making it a better and more prosperous place. They earn the windfall for the time they spend there without making it worse. So…
> Only a bandit looks at what you have and tells you it's theirs. And almost all land currently owned is the result of banditry. Pretty much every bit of habitable land has been fought over, both in the Old World and the New. It's all stolen goods.
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> My issue is that, under the proposed system, two people who each own half of Los Angeles will pay a lot of property taxes, because the other half of Los Angeles adds taxable value to their half, even if their half is unimproved. That is the goal, isn't it. To remove speculation from land ownership. Under this model the owner of the unimproved part of LA has no right to the increase in his land value since he did no…
> What would be this persons incentive to own all this land under this model? It would lower their taxes. > This doesn't follow from anything. Land would have very low costs only if it is land that nobody wants, just like today. And selling your land will not lead to higher taxes on your remaining land unless the land that you sold gets improved in such a way that it increases the value of your land. Please don't bot…
So the incentive to holding unimproved land from which you derive no profit would be so that you would pay less tax then if you would made improvements and profit from those improvements.
> Please don't bother responding if you have no idea what you're responding to.
You should follow your own advice.
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High density housing will not work in places with a high standard and quality of living. It will certainly erode individual rights, create environmental decline and infringe upon privacy. In developed countries, high density housing will either make the city unbearably expensive(NYC) or bring down quality of life.(SF) High density is a sign that resources are scarce but demand for them has increased. The sign of a we…
Have you even been to Europe? There is a sweetspot between 500ft highrise and infinite swaths of SFH suburbia. That sweet spot is usualy also classified as "high density", and IMHO is better in every way.
We don’t need high density. It’s funny. Hong Kong, Singapore, Mumbai, London maybe..but we have literally brainwashed ourselves into thinking we need to be high density and by creating unnecessary economic activity/jobs/dense zones, we have created an unsustainable situation.
Case in point: Growing 1/4 of America’s food and 80% of almonds in a desert during a drought and in a state with the highest cost of living? Daft! And for what? A fraction of our GDP. While investment in education and tech and automation would create prosperity all over the world and we could export what we do best. Tech.
Are almonds a basic human right? I don’t think so. Water is…and Californians have to sacrifice water during a drought so the world can have its almonds and alfafa for their non native dairy cows. So we will soon be 10 billion. And we came from 3.5 million in 1975. When will this euphoria over expansion and ‘growth’ stop? It’s a fool’s dream and a dangerous one.
The Dutch solved this. They are a tiny country growing a lot of hydroponic food for Europe. Now they mostly sell tech and know how to grow hydroponic tomatoes. They don’t actually grow hydroponic tomatoes for the whole of the word. Optimization of resources and proper asset management. The asset here isn’t the water and wind and hydroponic tomatoes in Netherlands. It’s their tech and know how.
America doesn’t operate with an understanding of scale, economies of scale and diminishing returns. We could be better and shine better. But the elephant thinks it’s a pussy cat and ends up trampling everyone around it during playtime. A tragedy all around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
High density housing will not work in places with a high standard and quality of living. It will certainly erode individual rights, create environmental decline and infringe upon privacy. In developed countries, high density housing will either make the city unbearably expensive(NYC) or bring down quality of life.(SF) High density is a sign that resources are scarce but demand for them has increased. The sign of a we…
Westerners totally fail to appreciae,that once you replace all houses with, say, 6 story apartment of equivalent internal area, you gain so much space outdoors. The single story suburbia looks claustraphobic - instead you have soace for parks, public squares, and services and facilities. There can be large distances between apartment blocks, and can be very green
America is a nation of immigrants. They didn’t leave their home countries and sacrifice so much for a better future to go back into high density apartments and sprint to the park for fresh air.
I know elderly Asian neighbors who hyperventilate at city hall meetings when they hear their adopted country going the way of the homes they fled. And my heart goes out to them. My friends who came here from communist regimes prefer to live in middle America that used to be immune to the coastal political restlessness.
The way a govt can control a citizen’s life is through housing, taxes and trade it for quality of life. It’s borderline blackmail. Current trends and progressive/liberal/greenwashing fads invalidates entire lives and makes a mockery of immigrants’ journeys made towards a prosperous abundant life that is free from govt constraints.