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Georgism

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Re: Georgism

#191

Post by corpMaverick »

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,…

What happens if I build a house in the land ? Is the house is still mine ? It seems like it would keep me from improving the land.

Re: Georgism

#192

Post by Mirioron »

neilparikh wrote: post #181
Mirioron wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the supply of housing remains constant and the demand of housing remains constant then prices remain constant. LVT changes none of these variables directly. Doesn't LVT increase the cost of providing the already existing housing and wouldn't that decrease the supply of housing? This would apply one time when the LVT comes into effect.

No, LVT adds no cost to providing housing. All land is taxed, so a landowner has to pay the same tax whether the land is empty, or has a single floor house, or a 30 story apartment. If anything, it encourages building more, so that the income from the rent can be used to the pay the LVT.

>No, LVT adds no cost to providing housing.

I'm not talking about long-term, but the initial effect of LVT coming into effect. If the landlord has to pay more then that's an increase in cost. Landlord income was likely at equilibrium before LVT. Those that could afford to lower prices to outcompete others probably already did so. As a result I don't see how we can expect landlords to eat the cost instead of passing it on.

>If anything, it encourages building more, so that the income from the rent can be used to the pay the LVT.

Sure, but this also requires housing to be as profitable (or more) as other uses of the land. It might make sense to turn that housing into something else.

Just to be clear, I'm not arguing about what it would be like in the long-term. I'm talking about the transition between going from not having LVT to having LVT. It's not at all clear to me that this wouldn't disrupt housing.

Re: Georgism

#194

Post by tryptophan »

pydry wrote: post #103
CydeWeys wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of agree that replacing property taxes with land-value taxes would make sense, so long as you can actually do the value assessments fairly and impartially. What doesn't remotely make sense to me is the suggestion that LVT should be the primary or even only tax, which you see others arguing for here in the comments.

I think a lot of people don't really realize how much free money is creamed off by property owners and resource extractors. Not least because of their constant attempts to disguise what they do as productive. It's not like people are in a coffee shop and seeing "% of this product that goes to rent" built into the prices. They tend to assume that the price of the cup is basically the ingredients (which is why people b…

Good point! Rent is like 12-13% of our countries entire GDP, which is kind of insane for just people paying others for owning a piece of land.

If a high (but arguably appropriate and fair) land value tax was implemented and captured like 8-10 % points of that, it would fund like 70% of the government.

Re: Georgism

#195

Post by snidane »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #171
snidane wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech companies should pay for what they use. They are efficient at not consuming too many resources while producing a lot of value? Probably shouldn't pay much then. But this applies not only to big tech companies but to individuals too - they shouldn't pay much if they don't consume or extract from others. Taxes are only a last-resort mechanism to raise money in absence of proper funding model. If you can price gove…

I'd like to see your "proper funding model" for the military. Or you'd have to say that the military is part of your "last resort". But then you need to raise enough money to pay for all your last resorts. If LTV is your method, the numbers may not work (as others have said here). Or, instead of raising all that money, you could say that we don't need that big of a military. That's not an insane position. But using d…

Military is actually a great example for LVT.

If you mean defence part of it. Invading other countries is likely profitable for select groups so who else should pay for it if it gets approved.

But let's focus on defence. It's not that much individual people, who need protection, because they can flee to another country in case of war.

What actually needs protection is property which you cannot take with you. And voila that happens to be real estate (locational value).

So who should be footing the bill for defence more than owners of land who are desperate for its protection when shit hits the fan?

Similar argument can be used to justify LVT for funding of other protective services such as police and firefighters.

Re: Georgism

#196

Post by epistasis »

Mirioron wrote: post #182
jrs235 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On that note, is the inherent land value of a lot in Bushwick way higher then 20 years ago now that they've gentrified? Is neighborhood desirability an 'unimproved' attribute? Yes. Desirability and infrastructure near land increases it's unimproved value.

So if I want my tax bill to be cheap I should be against everything that the government does that would improve life around my home? Won't this take NIMBYism to a whole new level?

Georgism was proposed in a time before we invented zoning, which was a system explicitly motivated by racial and class segregation. The Supreme Court case that made it constitutional is explicit about wealthy land owners having the right to exclude the poor from living in apartments nearby.

So we need additional correctives to the additional injustices that capitalism has invented since Henry George's time, like our NIMBY-promoting land use decision system. We could, for example, adopt something like Japan's more federal system.

Re: Georgism

#197

Post by tryptophan »

Mirioron wrote: post #182
jrs235 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On that note, is the inherent land value of a lot in Bushwick way higher then 20 years ago now that they've gentrified? Is neighborhood desirability an 'unimproved' attribute? Yes. Desirability and infrastructure near land increases it's unimproved value.

So if I want my tax bill to be cheap I should be against everything that the government does that would improve life around my home? Won't this take NIMBYism to a whole new level?

This is why its such a great tax - if the government and others are shelling out money to improve an area; you won't get to free ride off it and get huge property values.

If you want to pay less taxes, you move to an area that doesn't do this sort of investment. If you want nice stuff, you can move in and pay for it, and be content that people who are against improvement are kicked out by higher taxes.

Re: Georgism

#198

Post by LVTfan »

May I suggest that if you've not read Henry George's thought yourself yet, you take some time with them? There are two sections of the Schalkenbach site devoted to them -- first, the books, articles and speeches themselves, and then an introduction to HG's thought, with perspectives from a number of writers, mostly recent. With the latter group is a short version of Progress and Poverty entitled "Significant Paragraphs."

His vision and clarity are remarkable and inspiring. 120 years ago, his ideas were widely understood throughout the English speaking world. (There were also a lot of hilarious misinterpretations by people who hadn't read, as is often the case.)

And if you explore a bit, you'll find some good websites and blogs devoted to his thought.

Re: Georgism

#199

Post by epistasis »

NumberWangMan wrote: post #169
LVTfan wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't the AMOUNT of land they use, but the value of what they use. An acre of good farmland might be $2500. An acre in Manhattan might be $250 million and up. The rental value of the land is proportional to the value of the land. And when the Single Tax was conceived, it was already abundantly clear that urban land values were far above rural land values, and rising much faster. Few tech companies will want to loc…

Hmm, that's a good point. Though, wouldn't an LVT that encourage companies to push all their employees to work from home, where possible? There are certainly benefits to that, but it might mean that certain industries get taxed much more heavily than others. Is it ok if distributed work-from-home software companies pay no tax at all, because they have no offices? The workers would pay tax on their own houses and apar…

If you take this a few more steps, what happens is that those employees that can work more remotely without significantly decreasing productivity will leave, because of the savings. Which will decrease land prices from those that truly benefit from co-locating, increasing their profits.

A LVT will generally greatly decrease the concentration of wealth. The massive concentration of wealth in the Bay Area economy comes mostly from land owners extracting an inordinate amount of wages, something far greater than the 30% that is typically considered livable. Tech takes from others far less than the landowners take from laborers.

Tech is flashy and gets all the attention these days, but it's not the big story when it comes to exploitive capitalism in the Bay Area. What's really driving poverty and homelessness and evictions are the housing austerity imposed by wealthy landlords and landowners and homeowners to maximize their financial gains.

Re: Georgism

#200

Post by tryptophan »

sudosysgen wrote: post #135
pydry wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You let the free market decide the price of patents. Each year they are all put up for sale. Highest bid wins and gets the patent, and they can license it to others or keep it for themselves.

1% of patent value is paid each year as compensation for the government protecting the IP.

Similar system could work for copyright property.

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