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Tax the Land

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Re: Tax the Land

#551

Post by CryptoPunk »

neilwilson wrote: post #472
CryptoPunk wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Tax has nothing to do with raising money. Taxation is entirely about raising money. >>It’s about releasing real resources for the public good - largely people to provide public services. What does "releasing real resources" mean, and how does taxation achieve that? And how does a land value tax fail to achieve that? >>It’s about releasing real resources for the public good - largely people to provide public service…

"Taxation is entirely about raising money." It isn't. Government has no need of it. Taxes are essentially shredded and deleted. All very simple when you realise there isn't a fixed amount of money and it grows and shrinks as required by the economy. What is spent and what is taxed are inductively connected, not directly connected. That's how we have 'deficits'. It's a function of the accounting. "What does "releasing…

>>It isn't. Government has no need of it. Taxes are essentially shredded and deleted.

That is not what happens to tax revenue. I recommend you look at a government budget, and see the source of much of the money spent.

>>If you tax employment directly, private firms offer fewer jobs because there would be insufficient money in circulation to employ everybody (wages are insufficient to purchase output due to the tax take). The public sector then hires those who can no longer get jobs in the private sector.

Private firms don't offer fewer jobs when you tax employment. They offer less for the jobs they offer when you tax employment.

Government can hire people because it can offer wages competitive with those provided by the private sector, and it can offer those wages because of the funds it acquires through taxation.

Governments have no need to tax employment to hire workers. This is trivially shown by jurisdictions with no taxes on employment and many government workers.

>>Government is largely service based rather than goods based. What it needs is people.

Abstractly, people need land, so government can trade access to land for services rendered for the public, i.e. for employment with the government.

Re: Tax the Land

#552

Post by anamax »

closeparen wrote: post #540
anamax wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An urban scene is strengthened by people and culture. Not so fast. Rome wasn't strengthened by the Visigoths. More to your argument, while London is arguably unchanged by the addition of 1k or even 10k people, it is changed by the addition of 100M or even 10M. Maybe it's still good, but by a different definition. Forward reference: adding 10M people to London will necessarily destroy many of the "iconic neighborhoo…

The suburbs encircled the places worth caring about. Now we can’t have any more of the places worth caring about because to do so would threaten the historic fast food joints on their peripheries. Which almost no one even likes, but “almost no one” is all it takes to prevent a change under current rules. Of sprawl we can always print more. Of places worth caring about we’re stuck forever with whatever we had before w…

BTW, you do know that typical suburb lots are closer to 1/8 than 1/4 acre, right? (Atherton and Greenwich are NOT typical.)

> The suburbs encircled the places worth caring about.

How do suburbs keep SF from thriving?

Apart from giving people someplace else to go that is.

When people leave cities for suburbs, they're saying that they prefer suburbs to cities, that they don't prefer what you assert that they prefer, that those "iconic neighborhoods" don't serve their needs. (Those neighborhoods are just as walkable as before.)

> Now we can’t have any more of the places worth caring about because to do so would threaten the historic fast food joints on their peripheries.

You're seriously arguing that McDonalds in Daly City doomed SF? It wasn't Long Island that destroyed Penn Station.

> London’s role as a center of civilization and culture is more important than its role as an architecture museum.

You're ducking the question of what 10M more people would do to London.

And you gave up on the "iconic neighborhoods" which were so important just a couple of messages ago.

Re: Tax the Land

#553

Post by meristohm »

jjav wrote: post #546
CryptoPunk wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I am rather skeptic of land value taxes, but I would like to hear your view of why land value tax is better than simply raising the tax on rent and property sales. The article goes into the advantages of a land value tax over other types of tax, including a property tax: The big question land value taxes help answer is: How can a government raise funds without distorting choices and possibly leaving people worse of…

> We should not have a scarce natural resource sitting idle or under-utilized. Does it make sense to always optimize for nothing but maximum ROI for each plot of land? For example: imagine how many untold billions of extra value and tax revenue could be generated in Manhattan by tearing down Central Park and building it all full of dense housing towers. But would Manhattan be a better place to live as a result?

I think we're significantly undervaluing letting land carry on with low-enough human involvement so as to promote biodiversity and resilience, as has been done in numerous cultures around the world for millenia. Sometimes we get too selfish and exploit resources for short-term gain. We're in a tough spot as a species, borrowing heavily against the wellbeing of future generations (I view the health of the air, water, land, and other life as essential to our wellbeing).

Re: Tax the Land

#554

Post by tdehnel »

apendleton wrote: post #349
tdehnel wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if they don’t want to do that with their land?

... sucks to be them? No tax scheme is truly neutral, and any tax scheme is going to favor certain behaviors and disfavor others. If the behavior you wanted to undertake isn't the one a given tax system incentivizes, that's probably unpleasant, but somebody had to get the short straw, and as a society we may as well pick a short-straw-holder in such a way that broadly pro-social outcomes are maximized, like increasin…

Why not just raise existing taxes across the board to pay for this? Seems a lot more fair since pro-social benefits are distributed among the whole society.

Re: Tax the Land

#555

Post by closeparen »

teakettle42 wrote: post #353
closeparen wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hope they do. They're great. I make sure to work with these firms and not local families for my own residential needs because I don't want to put money in the pockets of evil people playing anti-social strategies. It is stomach-churning to know that many of the same people who line up at the microphone on Wednesday night to block development would then call me back on Thursday morning to respond to my inquiries on their rental listings. With the corporates I am at least paying someone to fight against entropy to bring homes into existence, not just to maximize what they can extract from what they bought in the 70s.

Re: Tax the Land

#556

Post by closeparen »

clairity wrote: post #519
CryptoPunk wrote: post #212

I've long advocated a land value tax. I would suggest that any reform of this nature, that eliminates private capture of economic rent, accompany one-time compensation to the parties that lose that economic rent, so in this case, compensation to make up for the loss in property value that a LVT would incur. The same should apply to any other repeal of rent-seeking institutions: anti-labor-competitive laws privileging…

i disagree that we should make landowners "whole" in some sense, as they went into their investment knowing that the value of their investment could go down. it's not up to the rest of us to bail out wealthy landowners in that way, which creates a perverse incentive to seek government bailout for any and all risk-taking. enact the tax gradually, say over 5 years, and the property market will adjust accordingly.

One reason the West is prosperous is we have the rule of law. This obviously doesn't free investors from all risks but it does reduce political risks, i.e. being arbitrarily dispossessed by the government is mostly not something you factor in. In poorer countries it does get factored in: people take less risk and demand a higher premium for doing so, since why bother if it's just going to get seized? This goes a decent part of the way to explaining why they are poorer countries.

A Georgist would counter that land is special in this regard: unlike investment in productive enterprise, we don't actually need investment in land to create wealth. I think it's an open question whether markets would actually buy this designation, or see it as open season on all kinds of property. The latter would be very, very bad!

Re: Tax the Land

#557

Post by closeparen »

clairity wrote: post #536
CryptoPunk wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think when we change the laws, we should compensate those who lose out from the change. By giving people the assurance that the laws will either remain the same, or they will be compensated if a change in the law incurs for them losses in their investment, people will be encouraged to invest more of their time and money in endeavors in our society. Regulatory/institutional stability is a related concept and widely…

no, investors need no additional incentive to invest. they squarely chose to take the risk, and will do so regardless of boondoggles like this, because they have no better alternative (i.e., opportunity cost impels them). it's the same fallacious argument used to keep progressive taxes at bay (oh noes, the rich people will leave america for... ???). let them fail. it's not a social problem in the slightest. the socia…

There is nothing to buy with your social safety net payments unless investors are taking risks on the businesses that make and sell it. You can't just abolish private property from within capitalism and leave it there. Once you have taken that step you have to go all the way to state-controlled production.

Although again, the Georgist point is that this is specifically not true for land: the land is there whether you invest in it or not.

Re: Tax the Land

#558

Post by everforward »

Manuel_D wrote: post #483
belorn wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The jobs are becoming increasingly concentrated in a few metro areas, but the home-owning class constrains the supply of housing and drives up the price of their own assets. Disincentivizing this sort of rent seeking behavior is precisely the kind of thing property taxes accomplish. There are two solutions to that problem. Governments could either make it easier to rent in the increasingly concentrated metro areas,…

Reversing the trend of jobs concentrating in metro areas is not exactly feasible. How would this be done? Prohibiting companies from hiring more than X employees? What keeps them from just setting up another company and hiring them as consultants? Or is there going to be a fixed cap on the number of people who are permitted to be employed? If someone moves to the city, and it's already at it's max number of workers t…

There are ways this could be done.

One option is building for remote work. Up the definition of "broadband" to include something people can actually use for work, and mandate that employees are allowed to work remotely, with full pay, unless employers can demonstrate the job cannot be done remotely. Workers who have to be local should either get the same tax break, or the company should have to pay those taxes instead. It might also require simplifying (or at least simplifying the administration of) state/local taxes. There are a lot of people, myself included, that live in dense areas for work rather than by choice. My hangup is that I want to live in a nice house, but don't want the risk of buying/building a nice house that I have to sell at a loss because I have to move for work.

Another option is to add population density as a factor on taxes. Raise taxes and then offer a discount for people in low population density areas. Or you could tie the discount to the median income.

Anecdata, but a lot of the people I know don't really want to live in urban areas so much as that they have to because of jobs. We either need to decouple workers from physical proximity, or force companies to disperse. The first option decouples workers, and the second incentivizes companies to disperse.

Re: Tax the Land

#559

Post by closeparen »

jjav wrote: post #546
CryptoPunk wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I am rather skeptic of land value taxes, but I would like to hear your view of why land value tax is better than simply raising the tax on rent and property sales. The article goes into the advantages of a land value tax over other types of tax, including a property tax: The big question land value taxes help answer is: How can a government raise funds without distorting choices and possibly leaving people worse of…

> We should not have a scarce natural resource sitting idle or under-utilized. Does it make sense to always optimize for nothing but maximum ROI for each plot of land? For example: imagine how many untold billions of extra value and tax revenue could be generated in Manhattan by tearing down Central Park and building it all full of dense housing towers. But would Manhattan be a better place to live as a result?

I would much rather have Central Park, an enormous and high-value piece of public land which is a crown jewel of the community and managed by the government as such, than a partial public-ish interest in "open space" or something on each privately owned lot, which is constantly being negotiated between landowners and a planning commission and ends up "meh," and where you aren't allowed to actually go, just look at.

I think this would be an important component of a YIMBY or Georgist future, to have public open space and park resources owned and managed explicitly rather than implied on each parcel.

Re: Tax the Land

#560

Post by closeparen »

belorn wrote: post #410
CryptoPunk wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this necessitates having that attitude toward owning things in general. Owning scarce natural resources is very different than owning man-made resources that have an elastic supply that can be expanded through production. A coherent moral framework can support the former being taxed, while maintaining that the latter should not be. Private ownership of the latter is both just, because the original owner…

I have a hard time distinguish between people owning gold and people owning land, and in this discussion, we are not just talking about owning land but people owning a house on that land. Similar in how gold is turned into a jewelry that people form emotional attachment to, a home is built on land which people form emotional attachments to. In both cases we have a man-made resource, ie a jewelry and homes, and in bot…

George's moral framework would align with taxing the ownership of gold - "land" is not just literal land but all unimproved natural resources. On the other hand we don't seem to have pressing problems with gold that is needed for productive purposes instead being hoarded as a store of value. Its main function is to be expensive, so we don't mind as much that it is.
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