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I remember my economics professor arguing that would be the most efficient tax after he explained how all taxes have the side effect of reducing the thing being
by eloff 5y ago
I remember my economics professor arguing that would be the most efficient tax after he explained how all taxes have the side effect of reducing the thing being taxed.
So taxing something bad like CO2, great idea. Taxing something good like income or creating jobs - bad idea.
Land tax would be simple, and very progressive, the tax rate of most young people renting world now be 0. It's more complex than that because the landlord pays the tax and hikes the rent appropriately. It enforces that land is used efficiently, which is so dysfunctional in many large cities.
It's a great idea in my opinion. You'd solve taxation, eliminate personal accountants as a class, and solve the housing crises with one stroke (there is still zoning, but this makes poorly zoned land undesirable to hold because it bleeds money - creating an incentive for the land owners to vote for zoning the land better). But politicians deal with popular ideas, not smart ideas. The odds of any country trying it seem slim.
- silexia 5y agoI actually love this idea, although I would just do a wealth tax. Anyone who owns wealth gets taxed a bit. If you only taxed land, then lots of people would just move all their assets into stocks instead of land.
- dodobirdlord 5y agoSomeone still has to be owning the land though, and paying taxes on it in proportion to its value. In most cases that’s going to be corporations. If I own stock in a corporation that owns land and the tax burden shifts from corporate income taxes to land taxes, on the whole this isn’t much different except for rewarding corporations that make efficient use of land and punishing ones that make inefficient use. Similarly, if I sell my land to a corporation, everyone who collectively owns the corporation is now paying what used to be my land taxes.
- ckw 5y agoSeems like the price of land would drop and the price of stocks would rise such that the yield on improved land (after taxes and mutatis mutandis) would match that of stocks.
- sagarm 5y agoLVT has been tried in Pennsylvania, actually: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/6/non-glamorous-gains-the-pennsylvania-land-tax-experiment https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/6/non-glamorous-g... It's worked well in some cities but been repealed in others because people were upset that mansions weren't taxed enough relative to smaller SFH.