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Georgism

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Re: Georgism

#131

Post by snidane »

free_rms wrote: post #111
MiroF wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r... It does not seem at all clear to me that most economic activity is in services and not in resources/monopoly ownership. > farming economically unviable Farming is already unviable, that's why we subsidize it so heavily.

If you filter that list to US companies, it does seem to be mostly in services, with logistics and manufacturing coming up next. I'm fine with taxing the hell out of Exxon, btw, or at least not giving them cash-in-a-briefcase subsidies, but you're not going to replace the income tax on that. We collected 3.46 trillion in income taxes last year. How do you get there on a land-value tax? Do we weight it so Manhattan la…

You don't need to raise as much when you don't need to subsidize rent-controlled housing, unemployment and other expenses related to high cost od living in places of abundant work opportunity.

That said, you roll out the new policy gradually by reducing labor related taxes while increasing land and monopoly related ones.

After several iterations you should expect convergence to a new stable position.

It's better to prefer iterative deployment over big bang changes. Not only in software.

Re: Georgism

#132

Post by perilunar »

rikroots wrote: post #4

Back in a different life, I worked on the Lyons Inquiry which looked at English Local Government finances. Final report was issued in 2007[1]. As part of the work we had to look into Land Value Taxes as a supplement/alternative to Council Tax and Business Rates. There's nothing wrong with the idea. The big issues were mainly around introducing a new tax system and the massive upheavals and uncertainties businesses an…

> "Why tax property?"

Because its appreciation in value is largely unearned wealth, especially in a country like England with a long history of aristocracy and landed gentry.

Re: Georgism

#133

Post by sudosysgen »

xiphias2 wrote: post #54
CydeWeys wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not being concrete. How do you properly tax a tech company whose land allocation is negligible compared to the overall value of the company? Tech companies have less than 1% of their value tied up in land. If they're all-remote and cloud-based, then they have $0 in land. How would you even tax them if the only tax is based on land? Also, I live in an apartment. Should my tax be $0? Or if I owned and lived on l…

The whole point of this tax type is encouraging efficiency. Tech companies are usually efficient, and taxing them less increases their efficiency even more. At the same time their harmful effects should be regulated (GDPR is an example of such regulation). Countries and states that let tech companies thrive are winning the race for capital.

The point of taxes is absolutely not to encourage efficiencies. The point of taxes is to fund the state in order to provide for defense and palliate the ills of capitalism.

Re: Georgism

#134

Post by sudosysgen »

bluecalm wrote: post #84
CydeWeys wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of taxes is to fund government spending. That is a large amount of money you need to bring in every year. Taxing based on income seems to make the most sense for that, not "taxing based on efficiency". If tech companies have billions of dollars but aren't paying taxes just because their business doesn't happen to use land, how does that make sense? Why is land efficiency the only thing that matters? T…

Who do you think should pay more taxes: someone sitting on 10M worth of land and doing nothing or a factory worker with no assets making 20$/hour? Income tax is unfair. It taxes productive people instead of those who benefits the most from the stable system (land owners).

Who do you think should pay more taxes: someone with a house in Brooklyn or a multi millionaire tech worker with a remote SaaS company?

Re: Georgism

#135

Post by sudosysgen »

pydry wrote: post #106
CydeWeys wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What tax should tech companies pay then, given that the only land they really need is cheap rural land for data centers? This taxation system does make sense for land, but there's way more economic activity happening that isn't associated with land than there is that is.

An extremely heavy tax on holding patents. Patents are essentially the "land" of the tech industry. With weaker patents there probably wouldn't be any such thing as "big tech" as it would be constantly disrupted from below. The exception is google's search index, which is, given its capital intensity and power requirements, practically a form of of heavy industry on a par with aerospace or automotive.

Do you tax all patents equally? If so, the issue is obvious. If not, how do you determine how much?

Re: Georgism

#137

Post by sudosysgen »

jrs235 wrote: post #115
CydeWeys wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you determine the value of intellectual property if not by looking at how much income is actually being derived from said IP? And at that point, don't you just have the same income-based corporate taxation that we already have, with extra steps?

You hold an annual auction for the exclusive rights to the property that the tax will be derived from. The current owner can choose to keep the rights and pay the tax or they can choose to sell the exclusive rights to the highest bidder who must pay and then becomes the holder of the exclusive use rights and the new owner would then also pay the tax based on the known value. This might also usher out IP trolls and IP…

This will not help determine the true price of IP, as such a system will be endlessly exploited by bad faith actors.

Re: Georgism

#138

Post by logicprog »

JSavageOne wrote: post #17

I've yet to see a single valid objection as to why LVT (Land Value Tax) should not be the primary tax, yet it's nowhere to be found in the political dialogue. Such a shame that the majority of the tax burden instead falls on the working class while the landowners get a free ride.

Don't know if you'll consider these valid, but here are some critiques of the LVT and Georgism:

- https://mises.org/wire/murray-rothbard-and-henry-george - https://mises.org/library/single-tax-economic-and-moral-impl... - https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/a_search-theore.htm...

The best criticism I've found, however, is here: https://www.orionsarm.com/fm_store/Critique%20of%20Georgism..... It's from a more mainstream economist POV (I think?) than the other links and is far more fair and detailed.

Re: Georgism

#139

Post by CydeWeys »

free_rms wrote: post #101
tlholaday wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What doesn't remotely make sense to me is the suggestion that LVT should be the primary or even only tax When you were new to arithmetic, did it remotely make sense to you that the number of integers and the number of even integers was the same? If you find a surprising conclusion, consider reading the argument. Perhaps you will discover that you agree with the premises and the reasoning, and the conclusion will se…

If the arithmetic for this tax scheme doesn't seem to remotely work out, ruminations on the nature of infinity aren't going to set me at ease with it. Here in the finite world, most of the money moving around is in services, while most of the land is disconnected from that economy. How are you getting 1-2 trillion in tax revenue from land without making, say, farming economically unviable? Will it just be riddled thr…

I've never seen the numbers proposed in a way that makes sense.

We know what the total budget is right now, at a national, state, and local level. And we know where that income is coming from -- mostly a mix of income, property, sales, payroll, corporate, and other taxes. And crucially we know exactly what the breakdown of that taxation burden is on various people in various financial situations.

I want to see the numbers on this Georgian proposal that show the total revenue at federal, state, and local levels. Is the total amount of tax the same? Or are we talking about radically reduced tax revenue in total? And how does the distribution of who pays this tax change under the new system? Then, and only then, with these figures, we can look at the proposal and see if it remotely makes sense using the typical criteria of (a) is there enough funding for current levels of government services at all levels, (b) are the changes in who's paying how much in taxes fair and equitable, etc.

I really want to see a full proposal on exactly what a typical individual and corporate tax bill for a variety of common situations, and I want to see that those numbers all add up to enough revenue.

Re: Georgism

#140

Post by sudosysgen »

nabla9 wrote: post #20
alexmingoia wrote: post #11

The problem with georgism is that “unimproved value” is a non-market price. It’s just made up by whoever is appointed assessor. Georgism conflates made up “value” with market “value”. Ultimately some person has to assess the value of the unimproved land, meaning someone anointed to write down whatever number they want. Value is subjective. There is no such thing as “unimproved land value”, unless you’re talking about…

There is brilliant way to solve it so that value and market-value meet. Keep the land always in market. It's called Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax (COST). Land owner would self-assess the value of assets they possess, pay a tax on that value. The owner would be required to sell the asset to anyone willing to purchase them at this self-assessed price. If you value the land high for any reason and want to keep it,…

The issue with that is that you then have the exact same issue with assessing the value of the improvements made in order to determine non-improved value from improved value. No issue is fixed, it's just moved around.
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