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Wait! We voted for more taxes on land owners not renters, why are the rents going up!?! Vox is a dumpster fire and the owners have been hyperbolic rage bait fa

Wait! We voted for more taxes on land owners not renters, why are the rents going up!?! Vox is a dumpster fire and the owners have been hyperbolic rage bait farmers for over a decade.

andrepd 5y ago
You need to read books on LVT and Georgism, it's been around for going on 150 years with praise from such diverse figures as Einstein or Tolstoy. Hardly invented by Vox, but judging from your tone you have pre-existing qualms about this particular news outlet.
- boredumb 5y ago
  I absolutely do have qualms with the entire organization and find ezra klein to be a snake. The idea that a self proclaimed anarchist who spoke against the state as being an exploitative entity, promoting increased state taxes on land, is amusing until you realize the context of him living in the period of Russian aristocracy.
  - andrepd 5y ago
    Anarchist thought has a long tradition of seeing certain things as "commons" which are illegitimately appropriated by private concerns. This includes things as land, air, natural resources, cultural heritage, etc. But more importantly, the part where you speak of "state taxes" makes me think you have no idea what you're talking about, since the original idea of Henry George was to distribute the LVT in the form of a citizen's dividend, equally among every person regardless of any criteria. A prescient form of UBI if you will.
    - boredumb 5y ago
      If the state is coercing you to pay taxes for the land you live on, it is a state tax. We can all collectively start referring to chickens as horses, we can even refer to aviaries as a prescient form of stables, but it is not going to change the nature of the bird. The naive idea that exchanging all the taxes for a single land tax will result in anything but all of the current taxes with an additional state tax on land is ahistoric to put it kindly. As of the time of writing we do pay taxes on land as well as taxes on labor, taxes on commerce, taxes on investments, taxes on inheritance, taxes on imports, taxes on value added to goods, sin taxes, tax stamps for government services, taxes on energy, taxes on roadways, taxes on gifts, taxes to enter or leave airports, and even taxes to live in certain cities. In the US these did not exist until after the civil war and since then they've become the rule and not the exception, to repeal all of them and replace them with a LVT is great, but to expect the modern state to not feature creep every single one of the current taxes back in place within a few decades gives me a huge pause.
- Hammershaft 5y ago
  Also Milton Friedman! Important qualification to recognize this is not just a leftist policy.
  - noahtallen 5y ago
    It really does seem like an extremely capitalist concept! The idea is to force the market to compete much more thoroughly. Not sure why folks are saying it’s a “leftist redistribution ploy,” when the main benefit is to force owners to make a profit on their land or sell.
    - lcpriest 5y ago
      Exactly. All it's saying is that you can do whatever you want with your land, as long as you can afford to. It forces landowners to account for the opportunity costs they impose on society by not utilizing the land optimally, even if (and especially if) those costs change over time.
    - tdehnel 5y ago
      What if they don’t want to do that with their land?
      - apendleton 5y ago
        ... 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 increasing the likelihood that more people have places to live.
        tdehnel 5y ago
        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.
larsiusprime 5y ago
Sounds like a testable hypothesis, let's look at the evidence: https://www.gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenants https://www.gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-t... The best empirical evidence available shows pretty strong signs that land value taxes are not passed on to tenants
- boredumb 5y ago
  If you save up money and buy a house to rent and your mortgage/interest/tax payment is 1100$ you will be charging 1100$, adding in a % to make sure that any routine maintenance and future renovation costs are covered. If property taxes are raised and my mortgage/interest/tax payment are now 1350$ you will raise rent accordingly unless you are running a charity or expect a roof to repair itself. I don't need a theoretical analysis from a game developer who has to imagine himself as a landlord as I have personally owned rental property before, have known people who have owned rental property and rented property before.
  - larsiusprime 5y ago
    > I don't need a theoretical analysis from a game developer who has to imagine himself as a landlord as I have personally owned rental property before, have known people who have owned rental property and rented property before. Great, because I didn't provide you with a theoretical analysis, I provided you with an empirical analysis that actually looks at the evidence from the real world. Regardless of my credentials or your credentials, I'm not particularly impressed with anyone who cites an N of 1 from their own personal experience and thinks it proves anything in particular.
    - carom 5y ago
      It is theoretical because the analysis you provided and the the Vox article don't account for zoning in any meaningful way.
- carom 5y ago
  >Imagine I'm a landlord, and I have a vacant lot I'm renting to a tenant who's got a mobile home parked there. What's going to happen if a Land Value Tax is imposed on me? Well, I'm already charging as much as the market will bear. If I charge any more, my tenant will move out. That's rich. As someone who is a landlord, I'm already charging what two owners ago was charging when they died and the city won't let raise the rent because of COVID and beyond that, there is a rent stabilization ordinance which will never allow my rents to catch up to market rate. I would like to see zoning fixed before we add more market distortions. This really doesn't account for the cost of construction as well. If you have a property that can earn $2,500 per unit, and it costs $300k, you can break even in $10 years. Now the government is taking half, it takes 20 years to break even. You just eliminated people who would invest in new housing. Does the LVT magically affect construction costs? So then land gets cheaper because the government is taking half the potential revenue (not even profit, which makes renting incredibly unprofitable considering expenses). What stops wealthy people from just buying it as single family homes then? You have just lowered the price of the land, so they will come in a scoop it up. It seems insane to me that we have these distortions that ruin the housing market (zoning, rent control) and the answer is to add another distortion (LVT) rather than eliminating the ones currently in place. You're disincentivizing people from renting their land if you cut into the profit of doing so. Make building not a bureaucratic nightmare and I will build. Revoke RSO and I won't shut down my property and convert it to a SFH for myself.

Wait! We voted for more taxes on land owners not renters, why are the rents going up!?! Vox is a dumpster fire and the owners have been hyperbolic rage bait farmers for over a decade.

andrepd 5y ago

You need to read books on LVT and Georgism, it's been around for going on 150 years with praise from such diverse figures as Einstein or Tolstoy. Hardly invented by Vox, but judging from your tone you have pre-existing qualms about this particular news outlet.

boredumb 5y ago
I absolutely do have qualms with the entire organization and find ezra klein to be a snake. The idea that a self proclaimed anarchist who spoke against the state as being an exploitative entity, promoting increased state taxes on land, is amusing until you realize the context of him living in the period of Russian aristocracy.
- andrepd 5y ago
  Anarchist thought has a long tradition of seeing certain things as "commons" which are illegitimately appropriated by private concerns. This includes things as land, air, natural resources, cultural heritage, etc. But more importantly, the part where you speak of "state taxes" makes me think you have no idea what you're talking about, since the original idea of Henry George was to distribute the LVT in the form of a citizen's dividend, equally among every person regardless of any criteria. A prescient form of UBI if you will.
  - boredumb 5y ago
    If the state is coercing you to pay taxes for the land you live on, it is a state tax. We can all collectively start referring to chickens as horses, we can even refer to aviaries as a prescient form of stables, but it is not going to change the nature of the bird. The naive idea that exchanging all the taxes for a single land tax will result in anything but all of the current taxes with an additional state tax on land is ahistoric to put it kindly. As of the time of writing we do pay taxes on land as well as taxes on labor, taxes on commerce, taxes on investments, taxes on inheritance, taxes on imports, taxes on value added to goods, sin taxes, tax stamps for government services, taxes on energy, taxes on roadways, taxes on gifts, taxes to enter or leave airports, and even taxes to live in certain cities. In the US these did not exist until after the civil war and since then they've become the rule and not the exception, to repeal all of them and replace them with a LVT is great, but to expect the modern state to not feature creep every single one of the current taxes back in place within a few decades gives me a huge pause.
Hammershaft 5y ago
Also Milton Friedman! Important qualification to recognize this is not just a leftist policy.
- noahtallen 5y ago
  It really does seem like an extremely capitalist concept! The idea is to force the market to compete much more thoroughly. Not sure why folks are saying it’s a “leftist redistribution ploy,” when the main benefit is to force owners to make a profit on their land or sell.
  - lcpriest 5y ago
    Exactly. All it's saying is that you can do whatever you want with your land, as long as you can afford to. It forces landowners to account for the opportunity costs they impose on society by not utilizing the land optimally, even if (and especially if) those costs change over time.
  - tdehnel 5y ago
    What if they don’t want to do that with their land?
    - apendleton 5y ago
      ... 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 increasing the likelihood that more people have places to live.
      - tdehnel 5y ago
        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.

larsiusprime 5y ago

Sounds like a testable hypothesis, let's look at the evidence: https://www.gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenants https://www.gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-t... The best empirical evidence available shows pretty strong signs that land value taxes are not passed on to tenants

boredumb 5y ago
If you save up money and buy a house to rent and your mortgage/interest/tax payment is 1100$ you will be charging 1100$, adding in a % to make sure that any routine maintenance and future renovation costs are covered. If property taxes are raised and my mortgage/interest/tax payment are now 1350$ you will raise rent accordingly unless you are running a charity or expect a roof to repair itself. I don't need a theoretical analysis from a game developer who has to imagine himself as a landlord as I have personally owned rental property before, have known people who have owned rental property and rented property before.
- larsiusprime 5y ago
  > I don't need a theoretical analysis from a game developer who has to imagine himself as a landlord as I have personally owned rental property before, have known people who have owned rental property and rented property before. Great, because I didn't provide you with a theoretical analysis, I provided you with an empirical analysis that actually looks at the evidence from the real world. Regardless of my credentials or your credentials, I'm not particularly impressed with anyone who cites an N of 1 from their own personal experience and thinks it proves anything in particular.
  - carom 5y ago
    It is theoretical because the analysis you provided and the the Vox article don't account for zoning in any meaningful way.
carom 5y ago
>Imagine I'm a landlord, and I have a vacant lot I'm renting to a tenant who's got a mobile home parked there. What's going to happen if a Land Value Tax is imposed on me? Well, I'm already charging as much as the market will bear. If I charge any more, my tenant will move out. That's rich. As someone who is a landlord, I'm already charging what two owners ago was charging when they died and the city won't let raise the rent because of COVID and beyond that, there is a rent stabilization ordinance which will never allow my rents to catch up to market rate. I would like to see zoning fixed before we add more market distortions. This really doesn't account for the cost of construction as well. If you have a property that can earn $2,500 per unit, and it costs $300k, you can break even in $10 years. Now the government is taking half, it takes 20 years to break even. You just eliminated people who would invest in new housing. Does the LVT magically affect construction costs? So then land gets cheaper because the government is taking half the potential revenue (not even profit, which makes renting incredibly unprofitable considering expenses). What stops wealthy people from just buying it as single family homes then? You have just lowered the price of the land, so they will come in a scoop it up. It seems insane to me that we have these distortions that ruin the housing market (zoning, rent control) and the answer is to add another distortion (LVT) rather than eliminating the ones currently in place. You're disincentivizing people from renting their land if you cut into the profit of doing so. Make building not a bureaucratic nightmare and I will build. Revoke RSO and I won't shut down my property and convert it to a SFH for myself.