> Imagine if businesses eventually buy -all- housing. You can tax them 10000%, they'll just pass it on to renters No, that's incorrect. For vacant, obsolete,

> Imagine if businesses eventually buy -all- housing. You can tax them 10000%, they'll just pass it on to renters No, that's incorrect. For vacant, obsolete, uninhabitable, and undeveloped properties there are no tenants. There is no one to pass the tax on to. In order to acquire cash to pay the tax the owners without tenants must either sell off excess properties at lower prices or lower leases to attract more tenants. The land fraction of real estate value is already monopoly price. Without direct property and land tax, and no public carrying cost, investors could hold properties off the market forever to maximize sales price and surplus extracted from buyers. Imposing a higher public carrying cost does not give them additional leverage to hold out for higher prices, it does the opposite decreases the time they can afford to hold properties off the market. And a pure land value tax which fully exempts replacement cost of improvements would also create zero market barrier to supplying new homes and instead reduce market barrier by making land more plentiful. And with a distributive tax it should also be clear that real estate investment trusts and foreign direct investors aren't getting the tax deduction because they aren't a permanent resident. U.S. has relied on levying direct property taxes at higher rates than other nations to prevent overaccumulation since early 1700s. If direct taxes weren't successful at reducing overaccumulation then the U.S. would never have become a superpower. Generally with most indirect taxes like sales taxes where the tax can be shifted the businesses which remain open rarely lobby against them once they are put in place. But in every age of history the large land holders have regular complained about direct taxes on landed property, precisely because they are much more difficult to shift.