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The 'Georgists' Are Out and they want to tax your land
- eqvinox 3y agohttps://archive.is/AGrqi https://archive.is/AGrqi
- toomuchtodo 3y agoPrevious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38240940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38240940 Nov 2023 (3 comments)
- tom_ 3y agoProbably actually Nov 2023.
- tom_ 3y ago"George-pilled"? UK-focused articles rebutting common arguments against a land value tax, written by an LVT advocate: http://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/p/index.html http://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/p/index.html
- tokai 3y agohttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-pilled https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-pilled
- tom_ 3y agoGood point, yes - if I'm surprised to see this turn of phrase in the NYT, and yet I implicitly assume everybody knows what it means, then maybe I shouldn't have been surprised in the first place.
- tokai 3y agoYeah definitely weird seeing racist slang from 4chan seep into mainstream journalism. inb4 its from the Matrix; only red/blue pill is. The [term]pilled is from /pol/.
- Lacerda69 3y agoI see what you mean, but in a lot of ways many mainstream memes have had their origin on 4chan (not only pol/b btw) and memes influence speech and everything else. Would be interesting to see a detailed analysis of this IMO
- gvurrdon 3y agoThat's a good blog. Sadly, Mark Wadsworth (the author) appears to have died within the last year. Edit: Link: http://www.yppuk.org/2023/03/mark-wadsworth-obituary.html http://www.yppuk.org/2023/03/mark-wadsworth-obituary.html
- JTbane 3y agoDumb question about land value tax- does it unfairly penalize people who own large tracts of land like farmers and loggers?
- rindalir 3y agoIf you own a farm in a city or area with high housing demand, yes, I think it would. (edit: and I'm not meaning this to be a sarcastic response -- there are urban farms).
- dfxm12 3y agoWhat makes you think this is unfair specifically to an urban farm? What about an LVT treats this urban farm differently from a parking lot or totally undeveloped lot?
- rindalir 3y agoOh my brain edited out the "unfair" part in the original question, I assumed it was just asking about higher value/tax. I think that an urban farm, baring some very extenuating circumstance, is an enormous waste of space. And I'm a part-time (non-urban) farmer.
- fasthands9 3y agoIt would "penalize" those people if they owned farmland in areas where there is high demand for housing (and the land itself is valuable). The whole point is to tax all land at the value people would pay just for the land - and as a result would shift activities like farming and logging into less populated areas. It's a fair concern, but also because property tax already includes some land tax it's not dramatically different. Those activities are already mostly done in areas where land is extremely cheap.
- lupusreal 3y ago[dead]
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- carbocation 3y agoThe article is nuanced, while the title is eye-catching and uncharitable. If you react to the title without reading the article, you'll get the wrong idea.
- csours 3y agoI invite you to play the metagame for agricultural exemptions
- 303uru 3y agoI'm a huge proponent of land tax. Here's why I think it's worth considering: 1. Economic Efficiency: Unlike income or consumption taxes, an LVT is non-distortionary. It doesn't discourage productive activities like work, saving, or investment. Land is a fixed resource; its supply doesn't change with price or tax fluctuations. Therefore, an LVT wouldn't distort market incentives, unlike other taxes. By shifting the tax burden onto land, we could potentially reduce the distortionary effects of other taxes and promote economic growth. 2. Wealth Inequality Reduction: Land ownership in the U.S. is highly concentrated. A significant portion of the country's land is owned by a small percentage of the population. An LVT would primarily affect these large landowners, redistributing wealth more evenly across society. Plus, land can't be hidden or moved offshore, making an LVT difficult to evade and an effective tool for wealth redistribution. 3. Sustainable Land Use: Many landowners hold onto vacant or underutilized land as a speculative investment, waiting for its value to increase. This leads to urban sprawl, inefficient land use, and higher housing costs. An LVT would make this kind of speculation less attractive, encouraging landowners to develop or sell their land. This could lead to more efficient land use, less urban sprawl, and potentially more affordable housing.
- zbrozek 3y agoAt least here in California, I'd be worried that it could get instituted with token or no reduction in other taxes. Otherwise it seems to make a lot of sense, particularly with regard to removing disincentives for development.
- PopAlongKid 3y agoCouldn't you remove the first five words of your reply and still make a valid point?
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoMaybe. But maybe California's government has given more reason than other governments to think that they would treat this as an additional form of income, rather than a replacement.
- 26fingies 3y agoWhy does this author insist on calling all of these people who think LVT is a good idea Georgists? It’s kind of an annoying angle for the article.
- FuriouslyAdrift 3y agoBecause land value taxation is one of the cornerstones of Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
- ulrashida 3y agoThat's true, but you can support a land tax without the other tenets of Georgism. It's unusually reductive.
- aketchum 3y agoI grew up in Fairhope, Alabama which was established as a single tax colony inspired by the theories of Henry George. One of the most interesting things to me is that on the bay, you can have two houses next to each other, both for sale and both equivalent in terms of house quality. One house happens to be on colony land and the other is not, so when you buy one house you own the land, but the other you get the 99 year lease. What I find interesting is that there is little to no difference in price between the two. The market prices the 99 year lease the same as owning the land. Just an interesting tidbit about this in practice that I have always found counter-intuitive.
- glitchc 3y agoFor clarity, does the lease term renew every time the home changes hands?
- dsr_ 3y agoA new 99 year lease is probably about the same value as buying the land. Does a new tenant always get a new 99 year lease, or is it the remainder of the previous lease? I would not consider a lease expiring next year, for example, to be of equivalent value.
- papercrane 3y agoThe leases are transferable and renewable. Other than the odd legal arrangement it's functionally not that different than owning land and paying property tax on it.
- 13of40 3y agoMy family has a "99 year lease" on a property from the federal government in the US, and even though it's called that, it really just renews something like every 20 years. Not sure if in the UK they literally count 99 years. (Edit: To be clear, it's been in the family since the 1930s, so it's gone through several renewals already.)
- stoneman24 3y agoIn the UK, you see homes in England marked as either freehold ( you own the land) or leasehold (someone else owns the land and you had a long term lease and traditionally paid a small fee each year called ground rent). The issue was if the lease didn’t have long left then selling or getting a mortgage on it was more difficult. Recently the home builders on new houses have sold the house and then also been selling the leases to a 3rd party as an investment. These 3rd parties have been radically increasing the annual ground to much higher levels. I’m never going for a lease hold property.
- strangesmells06 3y agoI personally think people's first property should be tax-free. their actual home. people own more than that The property should be taxed also corporation-owned properties should be taxed edit: i mean annual property taxes
- dukeyukey 3y agoThe indirect effect of that is subsidising (richer) homeowners at the expense of (poorer) renters. I really don't think that's a good thing.
- r3trohack3r 3y agoI’m not sure this is the right lens. Poorer renter isn’t a static label, we need to build paths that allow the lower and middle class to build equity. The goal of these policies, IMH(umble)O, should be to help poorer renters become richer homeowners. I feel like you do that by reducing the total cost of walking that path. Not by increasing their tax obligation every step up the socio-economic ladder they climb on their way out of the lower class.
- dukeyukey 3y agoEqually, you don't help people by taxing the poorer more than the richer. So maybe we should just tax land as land, and leave it at that? Being a renter is part of that path after all.
- strangesmells06 3y ago[flagged]
- r3trohack3r 3y ago> Being a renter is part of that path after all Renters are not building equity. They are spending their wealth every month and accumulating no equity in return. I don't agree with calling a "homeowner" rich. Owning the ground beneath your feet is a big part of having equity. With a mortgage, unlike rent, every month an increasing amount of your wealth accumulates as equity as you pay off your principal. Once you pay off your mortgage, you've significantly reduced your monthly burn rate and can start moving your accumulating equity into retirement accounts. Reducing the total cost of primary home ownership, reducing the cost of financing a primary residence to help build equity, etc. are all important parts of giving upward class mobility. These are not things you want to disincentivize. You want your renters to become owners. You want your workers to become small business owners. You want your communities to build equity in themselves. If you tell me that being a homeowner today makes you rich, I'll tell you that is part of the problem.
- belligeront 3y agoRelatedly, University of Chicago has a popular survey where they ask Economists their views on policy proposals (along with their confidence in their answers), and their most recent survey was on LVT: The question: > Shifting the burden of municipal property taxes towards land and away from improvements such as buildings - as proposed in the Detroit land value tax plan - will enhance the incentives for owners to develop their land and thereby give a substantial boost to local economic growth over a ten-year horizon. And responses: 7% Strongly Agree, 46% Agreed, 17% Uncertain, 2% Disagree,2% No opinion, 24% Did Not Answer https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/land-value-tax/ https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/land-value-tax/ (The link also shows the responses weighted by the responder's confidence, and the individual responses).
- shermantanktop 3y agoOne economist will give you an answer which may or may not be correct. A poll of economists sounds like a good source for /dev/random. In a field which has notable problems with predicting the future, adding more samples may not improve matters.
- readthenotes1 3y agoEconomists are simply modern-day astrologers. Sometimes they get it right.
- jjoonathan 3y agoHas someone written up a comparison of LVT vs Rolling Leases (i.e. perpetual land ownership is replaced by 30-40 year leases)? Rolling leases just seem to have more good flexibility and less bad flexibility. By "good flexibility" I mean options to convert from perpetual ownership without screwing current owners -- our perpetual ownership model involves extremely favorable tax treatment at certain stages (capital gains forgiveness, like kind exchanges, cost basis step up) and you could make these benefits contingent on a conversion to a 99 year lease or something. I believe there is data that shows people have a stated preference for perpetual over 99 year, but they have a revealed preference that is neutral between the two, and this is how you could achieve the conversion without seizing land. By "bad flexibility" I mean that LVT calculations seem easier to sabotage to blatantly favor the upper crust. If they can do it for income / capital gains tax, they can do it for LVT. Rolling leases, however, have a pretty transparent periodic price finding mechanism. Nothing is perfect, the treatment of improvements at renewal/auction time is a likely vector for skullduggery, but to my intuition it still seems better than LVT due to having more eyes and competing interests focused on the process. Anyway, this is a "butterfly idea" where I haven't put enough thought into it to have a strongly informed opinion one way or the other and I want to know if someone knows of scholarly work on the subject.
- orwin 3y agoRolling leases seems to be superior, and more logical than a land tax. You'll have to be able to factor in lease reduction (for primary homes, non-market housing, farming and strategic industry), but it seems easier to set up.
- dfxm12 3y agoDo you have more info explaining a "rolling lease"? I assume you're leasing the land from the state... On the face of it, what happens to/who owns the improvements on the land after the lease is up or you have to move? What happens with the lease if you have to move?
- jjoonathan 3y agoYou sell the lease if you want to move. As for imprevements, we already deal with pricing and depreciating them for tax reasons. The new leaseholder would have to compensate the old leaseholder. This process will be imperfect, but the imperfections seem mundane compared to the imperfections caused by tying a financial asset to shelter and especially mundane in places where land value trumps improvement value or where depreciation schedule matches lease duration (both of which are common). We are trading big problems for small problems.
- jampekka 3y agoEspecially contemporary Georgists seem to be fixated on land tax. In the 19th century a big focus on land kinda made sense because agriculture was such a huge part of the economy. What's missed is the general idea. It's not land per se but any ownership that can be/is used for "rent seeking" (i.e. getting money without contributing any work). Nowadays things like intellectual property, natural resources and major infrastructure are the major things that should be taxed in this spirit. Expanding this idea to that all means of production falls in the rent seeking category, one arrives at socialism.
- jjoonathan 3y agoEhh, but ownership is important for converting savings into investments and forcing investors to make decisions with skin in the game. Let's not throw those capitalism babies out with the class-conflict bathwater. It's better to focus one-by-one on comparatively small reforms that each close off a single avenue of rent-seeking and can each be justified on sturdy economic footing by economists with minimal direct relation to he-who-must-not-be-named. This approach is less revolutionary (we know how those go), more propaganda resistant, and generally better.
- jampekka 3y agoIs land tax really more propaganda resistent? There are justified concerns that it does disproportionally affect the less well off. And OTOH things like taxing wealth and capital gains are wildly popular. Isn't class conflict a direct and inevitable result of private ownership of capital? What kind of arrangement makes companies pay more for labor than they have to?
- jjoonathan 3y ago> Is land tax really more propaganda resistent? Yes. Capital interests have spent the last 50 years laying minefields around the concepts of socialism. "Socialism is when more taxes," "socialism is when unions stop your employer from paying you more than your lazy coworker," "socialism is when you own nothing (as in property, not just assets)." Focusing on small, concrete reforms allow you to navigate around the mines. > Isn't class conflict a direct and inevitable result of private ownership of capital? No, it depends on the terms of ownership. Finite terms and progressive taxation can prevent the exponential runaway that establishes and perpetuates class structures. > What kind of arrangement makes companies pay more for labor than they have to? Policy that makes labor less desperate and therefore have higher bargaining power. There are many levers to pull.
- automatic6131 3y agoI really like the idea of a Land Value Tax. However, the devil is in the details. How will it be calculated? Who will calculate it? How can they be held accountable? It could so easily go badly though, and be worse than the existing system. The arguments in favor though, are very compelling.
- dublinben 3y agoHow is a land value tax any different from the status quo in this regards? There are established means through which tax assessors appraise the value of properties. They are held accountable by means of appeals in the judicial system. Tax rates themselves are democratically determined by the electorate for whom they are applied.
- ruste 3y agoThe problem with this is that it's fundamentally incompatible with zoning. I own a chunk of acreage in farmland adjacent to my metropolitan area. The township won't allow it to be developed further due to density restrictions, I have my one house on it but that's all I get and I'm happy with that, but his tax would be implemented at the state level. The state would say "You have a lot of valuable land here right next to the city. We're going to tax you wildly on land you can't develop. Furthermore, this tax would just serve to increase speculative churn and encourage chunks of land that would eventually go on to become parks and public lands to be broken down by landowners into small chunks for the densest and most valuable uses. The whole problem is that what is valuable is not necessarily what is good for society and this does nothing to address that. I'm always struck by how weirdly free-market / Laissez faire land value taxes are given who typically pushes them.
- zozbot234 3y agoYou're disregarding the fact that landowners are already incented to devote land to its highest and best use, as measured by how much they can gain for it. The benefit derived from a local amenity, such as a park, is currently reflected in surrounding land values; LVT would harness this value for the community that created it in the first place, rather than leave it entirely to private landowners.
- ruste 3y agoI probably could have been clearer with my point. A park is never the highest and best use based on gain. A LVT would make it _harder_ to create things that may be valuable in ways not measured by the market.
- mwachs 3y agoHave been thinking about this article since last week. It’s so smart and intriguing. Obsessed.
- jkmcf 3y agoIn the spirit of private property[1], no tax on primary residence (i.e., must actually live there most[2] of the time). No one should lose their only residence because they cannot afford to pay the tax. 1. which I only sorta agree with depending on the context 2. 75%? To be figured out by someone more informed than I, and not declarable.
- r721 3y agoRelated recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37908268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37908268
- xnx 3y agoAre there any areas that try and tax more directly based on services used (electric, water, fire, police, roads, etc.) rather than how large your property is or how fancy your house is? The idea of assessors trying to make judgements about the quality of a building seems a pretty silly way to pay for city services.