Why a land-value tax is inevitable • Hacker News Board

Re: Why a land-value tax is inevitable

#151

Post by pydry » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:31 PM UTC

hourislate wrote: post #53

The only thing inevitable will be that eventually Land-Value taxes will not be enough (if implemented) and then what? There is no end or limit to the amount of money a Government can squander.

There's no end or limit to the amount of money any person or institution can squander.

It's a flow of income (land rent) that can accrue either to everybody and be shared or to individuals. One way or another some party has to be the beneficiary. The question is who deserves this unearned income?

Re: Why a land-value tax is inevitable

#152

Post by pydry » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:34 PM UTC

kart23 wrote: post #19

I think an LVT only works if property tax is removed. And getting every state to have less taxes will be rough. http://savingcommunities.org/issues/taxes/landvalue/

LVT essentially is a property tax, except it's designed to be fairer, harder to evade and more economically efficient (doesnt tax productive activity) than other forms of property tax.

It would make little sense to have two kinds of property tax.

Re: Why a land-value tax is inevitable

#153

Post by mlinksva » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:34 PM UTC

hourislate wrote: post #53

The only thing inevitable will be that eventually Land-Value taxes will not be enough (if implemented) and then what? There is no end or limit to the amount of money a Government can squander.

Squandering taxes seems like a separate problem. In the case taxes are squandered, and in the case they are not, it makes sense to use the most efficient taxes first.

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem shows "that under certain conditions [presumably including limited squandering, though I didn't check], beneficial investments in public goods will increase aggregate land rents by at least as much as the investments cost"

Re: Why a land-value tax is inevitable

#154

Post by snaily » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:36 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #135

chiefofgxbxl wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to measure the carbon cost of everything. You tax carbon at the source, like power generation and oil drilling. The costs will naturally balance upwards. The downtown parking lot, for example, probably doesn't have recurring carbon costs. The gasoline people use to drive there will be more expensive from the carbon tax on oil and gasoline production, and the cement or asphalt that takes electricity to…

That works for internal products, but not foreign ones. If you're importing from somewhere that also has a comparable carbon tax it's fine, but otherwise you have to apply the carbon tax to all imports. Doing so also likely violates any free trade agreements you've signed. It's a hard problem, but the gains are massive, so it's worth it. It'll be a lot easier if a set of countries do this together.

To elaborate on that last point, one concrete model that was on the HN front page lately was the "climate club": https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001

Re: Why a land-value tax is inevitable

#155

Post by mullingitover » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:36 PM UTC

throwaway201103 wrote: post #143

mullingitover wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vacant lot in the middle of Manhattan has a massive opportunity cost to society. If you goal is to own a vacant lot and you don't care where it is, trade that vacant lot in Manhattan for another one in rural Alabama.

The apartment tower also has massive costs. It requires high-capacity water, sewer, electric, and trash service. It requires specialized fire protection services including extra training and equipment to fight fires in high rise buildings. It has a massive carbon footprint. Why should a property owner who does not impose any of those costs (or imposes a tiny fraction of them) pay equally for them?

The apartment tower is likely in a high density area already built for those types of services. It's a perfectly sensible idea to penalize those who would waste those services on a vacant lot.

Re: Why a land-value tax is inevitable

#156

Post by darawk » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #135

chiefofgxbxl wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to measure the carbon cost of everything. You tax carbon at the source, like power generation and oil drilling. The costs will naturally balance upwards. The downtown parking lot, for example, probably doesn't have recurring carbon costs. The gasoline people use to drive there will be more expensive from the carbon tax on oil and gasoline production, and the cement or asphalt that takes electricity to…

That works for internal products, but not foreign ones. If you're importing from somewhere that also has a comparable carbon tax it's fine, but otherwise you have to apply the carbon tax to all imports. Doing so also likely violates any free trade agreements you've signed. It's a hard problem, but the gains are massive, so it's worth it. It'll be a lot easier if a set of countries do this together.

I think the solution here is likely to pass extra-onerous taxes on imports, and then tell the host countries "If you don't like it, apply the tax yourselves, and then we'll remove ours once we deem yours satisfactory".

Re: Why a land-value tax is inevitable

#157

Post by teddyh » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

The idea of land-value tax strongly reminds me of the often cited, and much maligned, so-called fiduciary duty to shareholders which CEOs and/or board members reportedly have. This duty creates, it is said, an incentive towards naked short-term greed, which is often described as a bad thing. Now, even though this duty is also usually derided as fictional, the argument, if this duty did exist, is reasonable. But does not a LVT create the same incentives in landowners – in essence forcing landowners to always use the land in a way which extracts the maximum amount of money from it? Why then is a LVT a good thing while the duty thing would be bad?

Re: Why a land-value tax is inevitable

#158

Post by jelliclesfarm » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #124

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not my point. And you didn’t answer my question. You spoke of commons as collective inheritance. A serial breeder..say..someone who has a couple of children with different women more selfish than someone who has 1-2 children. The commons will be saturated by the needs of genes of prolific breeders who use women’s bodies as vessels. Is that selfish? Since we are talking about selfishness and commons as a collec…

I really don't care about individual-morality questions that do not show up in the aggregate. These are perhaps good philosophical problems to ponder, but the legacy of liberalism is such that we think that they imply questions to how society should be run. Nope, they don't. These serial breeders do not show up in the aggregate in any country I've every been too. If you are worried about population rates in dirt poor…

Yes. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-pa... : census for 2019 and men’s fertility

Re: Why a land-value tax is inevitable

#159

Post by darawk » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #11

1. UBI 2. LVT 3. Environmental externality taxes That's all we need to fix the 21st century. Simple as hell so basically immune to regulatory capture, and will usher in a rate of progress we haven't seen in 100 years, if ever.

I totally agree, although I would expand the LVT to tax on all non-commodity property (e.g. intellectual property, like patents, copyrights, domain names, etc.). I think LVT is the biggest and most important of these types of taxes, but taxing all non-commodity property in the style recommended by Glen Weyl is even better.

Re: Why a land-value tax is inevitable

#160

Post by joe_the_user » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

I think the problem with land-value taxes is that objective valuation of raw land value is actually difficult and even arbitrary. If you say a parcel of land is valuable because there's a building on it, you wind-up with just a real estate tax. If you value all land the same, people will just abandon ownership of large parcels, probably with paradoxical results.

Almost automatically, the assessment of just land has to be harder than the assessment of land plus the property that's there. And assessing land for taxes tends to be politically hard. For example, the overall process of real estate taxation in California was politicized into a disastrous mess years ago with proposition 13. Just undo prop 13 would be a simpler matter and even that likely isn't going to happen.

Further consider, the objective land value of a parcel in Mountain View is probably less than the assessed value a lot of homeowners pay their taxes based on. I'd be in favor of measures that force more intensives use of that land but taking on home-owners with vast political influence is going to be a challenge.