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> but land value tax would probably be great. Unfortunately, people tend to vote against it. Which is a shame, since it's about as ideal of a tax as you can ge
by yellowapple 6y ago
> but land value tax would probably be great. Unfortunately, people tend to vote against it.
Which is a shame, since it's about as ideal of a tax as you can get:
- You can't move land to an offshore account
- LVT penalizes land speculation, which is one of the main drivers of suburban sprawl and rising housing costs
- It targets the rich, and marginally (if at all) impacts the lower and middle classes (replacing all taxes with LVT would almost certainly reduce middle class tax burdens and entirely eliminate lower class tax burdens)
- All economic activities ultimately depend on land in some way, so instead of taxing (and thus suppressing) those economic activities, it's ultimately more economically efficient to tax land itself
- The aforementioned economic activities can't readily price LVT into their own prices for goods and services, specifically because land value itself is a function of the goods and services that land enables, and because if those goods and services could actually fetch a higher price without reducing profitability (per supply v. demand), then they would almost certainly already be priced accordingly, regardless of LVT
And this is just from physical land in the commonly-understood sense (i.e. some chunk of the surface area of the oblate spheroid we call Earth). There are myriad other sorts of things with the same characteristics as land; everything from geostationary orbits to intellectual property to radio spectra to IP addresses (and just about anything else with an inelastic supply) represents economic rent waiting to be collected.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago> - It targets the rich, and marginally (if at all) impacts the lower and middle classes (replacing all taxes with LVT would almost certainly reduce middle class tax burdens and entirely eliminate lower class tax burdens) The lower class still live somewhere. If you go to a land tax, their landlord isn't going to just eat that. It will be passed on to the renters. - All economic activities ultimately depend on land in some way, so instead of taxing (and thus suppressing) those economic activities, it's ultimately more economically efficient to tax land itself Here's a software-only startup that works fully remote. How does that economic activity depend on land? It doesn't, except for the workers' living places. But they'd still have living places even if they were unemployed. But I kind of agree with your last paragraph. If you are going to go with a "land use" tax, well, Google owns some buildings with servers in them, but the most valuable thing they own is google.com.