It would be easier to do what Singapore does. You get a 99 year lease on the land.
When the lease it up, the government takes it back. Between those two time points you’re free to buy and sell.
Tax the Land
291–300 of 613 posts
Re: Tax the Land
#292"The big question land value taxes help answer is: How can a government raise funds without distorting choices and possibly leaving people worse off? If you tax income, it provides a disincentive to work. If you tax property, it provides a disincentive to improve the physical buildings on top of the land." Of course it will distort choices and leave some people worse off. If the author can't see that, then they have…
The effect of income taxes is not simply to disincentivize work like one would imagine. Top talents who are able to afford the cost choose their tax residence due to income tax. Even in the US, it would influence people's career decisions about where to live/work. Businesses also take the taxes into account when choosing countries/states to invest or build facilities.
Re: Tax the Land
#293Local 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…
> 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?
It's that the NIMBY subset of homeowners has disproportionate power in local government over other residents.
> If the former, that's just silly. If the latter, renters get the same one vote per person as everybody else. If they don't care enough to vote that's their problem.
This is facile -- zoning decisions are essentially never put up to a democratic vote. The outsized NIMBY power doesn't come from voting; it's from activities like attending local government functions, filing complaints, advocating to their representatives, etc. These are not things everyone has time or know-how to do.
Re: Tax the Land
#294The Vox article says > 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. It seems a bit presumptious to say it is all luck - that somebody couldn't have predicted that the land would appreciate and thus bought…
Successful speculation is still luck. The point is that the person who purchased the land may have gained value far in excess of the improvements they made or the capital they provided. Under a LVT the community and government which gave the land value will capture that.
Re: Tax the Land
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like Georgist taxes, but it's unclear that tax incidence will fall entirely on the rentier class. Important land is always unique, and therefore taxation would be have be incredibly dialed-in, no? A busy major international port would need to be taxed very differently than a sparsely attended beach just a mile away. This seems very difficult to get right. Have there been practical applications that show that's not…
> A busy major international port would need to be taxed very differently than a sparsely attended beach just a mile away. This seems very difficult to get right. you could imagine that the taxation is tied to the value of the land, which can be calculated as the rent income, minus the value of improvements upon the land (such as any buildings, which can be estimated by the cost of construction and maintenance over t…
valuations are always subjective. you pretend it's like some sort of precise science, but it is not, never was, and never will be. ffs, the example is a major international port, not a cookie-cutter shoebox-sized condo.
The very first thing that will happen upon implementation of LVT is simple "rebranding" of "renting" into "mortgages".
What tax do you charge then? some LLC "owns" the port. some bank provides it a "mortgage".
What's the tax due on such mortgaged property? Previous rent? What if such rent was never charged and it was mortgaged from day zero? What then? What if there is no comparable entity to compare to? Just some half-ass guess?
What's the LVT tax on the Suez Canal? Panama Canal?
It's FAR from trivial.
Re: Tax the Land
#296The Vox article says > 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. It seems a bit presumptious to say it is all luck - that somebody couldn't have predicted that the land would appreciate and thus bought…
There’s a deeper point, which is that land didn’t appreciate because of anything you did. (Unless you developed it, and LVT leaves developed value tax free).
Re: Tax the Land
#297I feel what's missing from this article is there needs to be a tax free threshold for landtax, much the same how income tax tends to be organised so the first $X earnings are untaxed.
Ideally a typical person shouldn't have to pay land tax on their home, otherwise they are effectively renting their own property.
Morally I feel government shouldn't tax a home and generally should aim tax to be as small as possible on life essentials. E.g Things like the home, food goods and medical treatment should have as little tax placed on them as possible.
Land tax would be best done at a cumulative value. Add up everything you own and apply a progressive rate against that. So a normal personal would be below the threshold while someone owning 100+ properties is at a rate likely to encourage them to divest to other asset classes or as the article suggests, extract more value.
There'd need to be some rules about trust/company ownership at top value to reduce people obvfuscating ownership. And separate rules for residential, rural and industrial/commercial zones.
Something like land tax isn't good or bad until you know the detail.
Re: Tax the Land
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a place where there should be more homes if you were looking at it from a regional perspective aka, somebody else deciding that there should be more homes. I think that's the wrong perspective to take. I don't want an authority to decide this - the locals should make their own choices (right or wrong).
Wrong choices are still wrong. I'd like to move into a house with my wife, but at this rate we'll be saving for a decade to get there. With climate change we have no idea how the real estate market will be at 1.5 degrees warming.
NIMBYism is a thing.
But the flip side of that coin is local authorities that have zoning laws that allow the big and powerful builders to build pretty much whatever they want, wherever they want. Which always turns out to be high-rise condos for multi-millionaires and billionaires, most of whom have them as investment properties and don't actually live there.
You see that here in Austin, all along the river, especially downtown.
I wish we had some NIMBYism that we could actually aim at those plans for high-rise condos.
Re: Tax the Land
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there is a place where there should be more homes if you were looking at it from a regional perspective, it is in the interest of the people who live there to block those new homes from being built to limit supply of the asset they own. The people who would vote in favor of the new homes don't actually get to vote, since they don't live there yet.
I think it makes sense that people who don’t live within a community should not be permitted to vote in that community’s elections. Consider the question for states or countries. Would it make sense for Massachusetts residents to vote in Connecticut‘s elections? Or Canadian residents to vote in the US’s elections?
I think people who don’t live in a parcel shouldn’t get to vote on that parcel’s height limit.
The municipality is a more or less arbitrary level of aggregation at which to make land use decisions.
Re: Tax the Land
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there is a place where there should be more homes if you were looking at it from a regional perspective, it is in the interest of the people who live there to block those new homes from being built to limit supply of the asset they own. The people who would vote in favor of the new homes don't actually get to vote, since they don't live there yet.
I think it makes sense that people who don’t live within a community should not be permitted to vote in that community’s elections. Consider the question for states or countries. Would it make sense for Massachusetts residents to vote in Connecticut‘s elections? Or Canadian residents to vote in the US’s elections?
What about someone working in Mountain View and contributing to the Mountain View economy, but living in Morgan Hill because that’s all they can afford?