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Tax the Land

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Re: Tax the Land

#351

Post by [deleted] »

teakettle42 wrote: post #302
Manuel_D wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude here is precisely why local zoning is ineffective. The people who are negatively impacted by anti-development policies are the ones that don't get the privilege of living in economically powerful population centers in the first place. Sure, the home-owners might grumble about an apartment blocking their view, more crowded restaurants, or "neighborhood character as a city grows. The people who are negati…

> … and the people who can't even afford to move there in the first place. There’s no inalienable right to live in a popular place you cannot afford. Can you articulate an ethical argument for why it’s a problem that not everyone can afford to move to the most desirable cities?

[deleted]

Re: Tax the Land

#352

Post by jjav »

closeparen wrote: post #305
ricree wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's just another redistribution scheme More starkly, it seems to me that it's a redistribution scheme that exists primarily to enrich those who already have abundant capital. Who's going to be building and owning those high density structures afterwards? Not the people who are getting displaced from their homes, I suspect. In short, it feels as though we're being told that it is right and just that you should be dr…

People who own single family homes at the kinds of locations where developers are eager to build apartment buildings are among the wealthiest and most powerful ever to have lived. They are pretty successfully standing athwart capitalism’s most powerful firms, going toe to toe with people who have hundreds of billions of dollars on the line (in terms of Silicon Valley’s capacity grow and add headcount, not just the re…

> People who own single family homes at the kinds of locations where developers are eager to build apartment buildings are among the wealthiest and most powerful ever to have lived.

This is about as far from true as it can get.

Ordinary working class people who just happened to buy a cheap house in a place that many decades later became a hot-spot of real estate development.. are still ordinary working class people. Often very poor, even.

Re: Tax the Land

#353

Post by teakettle42 »

closeparen wrote: post #305
ricree wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's just another redistribution scheme More starkly, it seems to me that it's a redistribution scheme that exists primarily to enrich those who already have abundant capital. Who's going to be building and owning those high density structures afterwards? Not the people who are getting displaced from their homes, I suspect. In short, it feels as though we're being told that it is right and just that you should be dr…

People who own single family homes at the kinds of locations where developers are eager to build apartment buildings are among the wealthiest and most powerful ever to have lived. They are pretty successfully standing athwart capitalism’s most powerful firms, going toe to toe with people who have hundreds of billions of dollars on the line (in terms of Silicon Valley’s capacity grow and add headcount, not just the re…

And the trillion-dollar real-estate investment firms who will happily extract rent from an enormous, new, permanent rental class, in perpetuity?

I’m sure they appreciate your support.

Re: Tax the Land

#354

Post by tome »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #143

I busted my ass over many years to make my (nominally) single family home lot into an under the radar industrial site doing industrial things. I'd do a lot of fucked up things to prevent that from being taxed into oblivion.

What?

Re: Tax the Land

#355

Post by tome »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #18

in india,it has been a tradition of "you sold a piece of land and this happens: you get capital gains and there is not a lot of exemptions (another house, agri land) so you pay your taxes at indexed cost of acquisition. the "price" set between buyer and seller at the time of registration is added 5-7% "stamp duty". so $ 1 mil + 5 % to govt= paid by buyer. this is true for all subsequent sales so when the next buyer w…

> what more do you want them to impose?

The point of land value tax is to remove all those other taxes (at least, I wouldn't support introduction unless it did).

Re: Tax the Land

#356

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #351
teakettle42 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> … and the people who can't even afford to move there in the first place. There’s no inalienable right to live in a popular place you cannot afford. Can you articulate an ethical argument for why it’s a problem that not everyone can afford to move to the most desirable cities?

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: Tax the Land

#357

Post by apendleton »

bally0241 wrote: post #301
joshjob42 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This sounds extremely regressive. Basically rich developers will all be getting a huge property tax break by not having to pay taxes on the value of the land/building improvements, while small businesses and homeowners who can not afford to improve their property (or extract profit from it) will not be able to keep up with rising land taxes and be forced to sell. What a stupid idea.

> rich developers will all be getting a huge property tax break

These proposals would generally be revenue-neutral, so the same amount of total tax would be collected, but assessed by parcel (adjusted for demand) rather than by parcel + improvements. An area where there was demand to house lots of people might still have high taxes because the land would be in high-demand because of its potential to host big buildings, whether the buildings were there or not. In other words: they'd have to build the building to afford the tax, because if they put a parking lot on it or whatever, the taxes would swamp any revenue.

As to small businesses/homeowners: ideally in such a scheme, improvements they might want to make would be more affordable than they are under the current system, because they wouldn't owe taxes on the increased value. Ultimately though, you're right: systems like this are meant to address a circumstance where nobody can afford housing because there's way more need than there is supply, by incentivizing increasing the density of housing in such areas, which means some small structures will need to be torn down and replaced with bigger ones, and people unwilling or unable to do that will be incentivized to sell to someone who can. Their well-being gets weighed against the hypothetical well-being of the larger number of people that might otherwise be housed by the larger structures that would replace where they live now.

Re: Tax the Land

#358

Post by tome »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #84
larsiusprime wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually run the numbers? Land value tax would most likely reduce the taxes on most farms, the vast majority of land value is concentrated in urban spaces. The majority of farmland is almost certainly getting a tax break under a land value tax regime, especially if its used to offset existing sales and income tax. Further, while land value tax would reduce the average tax burden on the average farmer, it wou…

Whether it reduces tax depends on the specific tax rates. I’m not inquiring about whether it will reduce or increase taxes for farmers, but what kind of farming it incentivizes. If your taxes increase per unit land area, it incentivizes higher density agriculture which is generally going to lean more on chemicals and antibiotics (organic and free range). Unless LVT also increases the costs of inputs and labor, I don’…

> Whether it reduces tax depends on the specific tax rates.

Well, of course, but surely the comparison is with regard to total tax receipts.

Re: Tax the Land

#359

Post by tome »

teddyh wrote: post #192
brians wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Georgist land tax taxed the unimproved value of the land. The tax remains the same whatever you build on it. Sale price already nudges you to preserve, improve, or augment the value of the land. So I think your concern either already would have happened, or if not, a Georgist land value tax makes it no more likely. Thanks for the opportunity to think this through this far; what am I missing?

The article seems to be a little loose with its terminology. It uses the term “land value tax”, but describes it the same as what you term a “Georgist land tax”. But then the article seems to imply that all efforts nationwide to implement a “land value tax” are good, which I doubt, since what people usually mean by “land value tax” is much closer to what I described, not what you wrote.

I don't see the difference between "land value tax" and "Georgist land tax". Surely they both exclude the value of improvements, and the tax that includes them is called "property tax"?

Re: Tax the Land

#360

Post by jjav »

RC_ITR wrote: post #118
giantg2 wrote: post #13

"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…

>We already see standard property tax forcing the elderly out of their homes in many areas. This was exactly the narrative that led to Prop 13, and what it has led to is the most inflated property market in the entire world because there is nearly no carrying costs for a first (LA), second (Palm Springs), third (Atherton), or fourth (Tahoe) home! Sure, a random subset of boomers can die in their empty 6 bedroom house…

> nearly no carrying costs for a first (LA), second (Palm Springs), third (Atherton), or fourth (Tahoe) home!

You're still paying property tax on all those homes, and that propery tax goes up 2% every year. So "nearly no carrying costs" is not true.

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