241–250 of 613 posts
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Also Milton Friedman! Important qualification to recognize this is not just a leftist policy.
It really does seem like an extremely capitalist concept! The idea is to force the market to compete much more thoroughly. Not sure why folks are saying it’s a “leftist redistribution ploy,” when the main benefit is to force owners to make a profit on their land or sell.
In my mind, LVT only works properly when you've ripped out every other tax: income, sales, capital, you name it. Absolutely no more friction and warped incentives. Divide the government budget by the weighted land values and tax accordingly. But that could never work in our world. There would be too much temptation to add a small tax here for this other thing, and then it snowballs, and then we're back to where we st…
That is pretty much how existing property taxes work.
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> if they don't care enough to vote that's their problem. The life of a renter is completely different from that of a homeowner. Most renters are of a lower class, living paycheck to paycheck. All they think about is staying afloat, not getting involved in local politics. You need a surplus of time and energy, and roots, to get involved. Comments like this ignore the conditions under which people live and how these c…
Many places make voting difficult. I recognize this, and agree that it is terrible. Voting should be as easy and widespread as possible. There comes a point on the effort scale, however, below which not voting means you just don't give a damn. Voting in my city involves thirty seconds on a website to request a ballot and then dropping your envelope in the mail. If you don't care that much, or have managed to screw yo…
Democracy sounds egalitarian in principle, but in reality, economics on the ground insulates a large number of people from the power process.
I get what you are saying about not wanting these clueless people to have a say in how things are run, but they weren't born in a jungle...they were were made into what they are by the system.
Local governments, which have been granted near unchecked authority by state governments, are entirely captured by homeowners. I'm not fully clear on this statement. Is it putting forth that local governments shouldn't be controlled by the people who are local, or is it saying that homeowners hold more power than renters? If the former, that's just silly. If the latter, renters get the same one vote per person as eve…
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Your solutions seem hacky and off-the-cuff, when we could solve the problem by addressing it directly: if a large number of people want to live in a small area, make that area support a large number of people! High-density housing with walkable neighborhoods, and excluding cars from walkable spaces, makes all of the typical pains of city-dweller life melt away.
Aside from a small group, the people that want to live there don't want that though. There's a preference for SFH and larger footage. It's generally easier to control commercial activity than personal activity/choice. I see the real problem as too many people wanting to live in one spot. To me, my solution is addressing the root problem.
There is simply no way to solve that equation without something breaking.
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The major, important difference is that LVT only taxes the site-value of a property, not the value of the buildings etc on it. More or less you'd be charged property taxes as if your lot was a blank empty lot. So for instance if you buy some land and redevelop it into an apartment building or a stadium etc your LVT would hardly change (it might a bit because your building might increase the value of properties nearby…
> it might a bit because your building might increase the value of properties nearby, but that's generally a pretty weak effect so it would have a small impact on your taxes That sounds like a fantastic way for a developer to force out all of "the poors" around them by developing an area and making the value of their land skyrocket. Since they cant hold it they have to sell which kicks them out of their home for less…
This would put gentrification on overdrive. Did the author think this one through?
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> providing no service Landlords are not parasites and provide a valuable service. I think a land tax would be great to curb speculation. Buying property, not providing any service (neither by renting nor capital investment in improvements), and just pocketing the appreciation, I agree, that's parasitic on the community. FWIW - I don't think a landtax would create a meaningful tilt towards more affordable home owners…
> Landlords are not parasites and provide a valuable service. Landlords take property that could be owned outright by the resident and extract, at best, a middleman's fee. Some landlords also provide access to services such as repair, cleaning, etc and combine those fees with the rent, but there is no reason those could not be equally available to owner-residents without the landlord acting as a middleman, and there…
People ignore the risks, but they are real and they will return.
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> providing no service Being a landlord does provide a service, the service of managing the land and property. I don't want to buy a house right now because I'm not ready yet, so I _want_ landlords to provide properties so that I can have a home without having to go through the process of buying one just to sell it a year or so later.
We can still do that under a land value tax system. Property managers are good; the argument being made here is that a "house" is really two assets: the land, and the capital of the building itself. The latter is a depreciating asset, the former doesn't behave like capital at all, because, among other reasons, it can't be produced. Property managers receive a return on their labor (services to their tenants) and thei…
> The LVT also has an appealing underlying moral framework: The luck to own a piece of land that happens to appreciate — say, you bought a house in San Francisco before the tech boom — should not come with it the ability to extract rents without providing value. This would put gentrification on overdrive. Did the author think this one through?
the owner of the land is part of a long transaction chain that started from the initial development and ownership of that land.
They provide value. The value is in allowing the existing owner exit. The fact that this exit is possible makes investment in the land less risky and therefore, investments happen.