BirdieNZ

11 ms·

91.
by BirdieNZ 4y ago
1950s coincides with the post-war building boom (mostly suburbs), along with projects like the USA's interstate highways and similar highway building projects around the Western world. Car dependent suburbia definitely got worse around
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
How does this differ from non-Chinese banking systems? For example, in New Zealand banks can generate money for loans separately from the central bank; they don't borrow from the central bank. There are capital requirements which preve
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
Tokyo is, yes.
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
Understanding Georgism/economic rents was like a revelation to me. So many of the common complaints against capitalism are actually complaints against rent-seeking, whether it's landlords, Nestlé extracting water for free and maki
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
In New Zealand, the government subsidises up to 20 hours of Early Childhood Education (basically preschool/daycare). However, daycare providers usually only allow you to take 6 hours of subsidized daycare a day, and charge an excessive
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
That's a similar conclusion Scott Alexander came to: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
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Land-valuation startup ValueBase raises $1.6M seed round(techcrunch.com)
2 points by BirdieNZ 4y ago|2 comments
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
Congratulations to Lars Doucet, a hackernews regular! This is exciting to see, as it helps remove one of the obstacles to a land value tax (land value assessment).
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
https://www.top.org.nz/higher-incomes-policy this is the closest we have currently. If you're a pensioner you can defer payment until sale of the property, which is technically "unfair" in that non-pensioners
100.
by BirdieNZ 4y ago
The only land tax proposal we have in New Zealand currently is from The Opportunities Party, which proposes a revenue-neutral tax shift away from income tax and onto land tax (0.75% land tax per year, with a shifting of the income tax brack
101.
by BirdieNZ 4y ago
There are plenty of ways of handling this; in New Zealand, local council rates (like a property tax) are used to pay for infrastructure, and after the city budget is set, each property owner pays in proportion to the value of their property
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
> Maybe it would be possible to introduce it slowly and fairly, but I can’t see how a government could actually do it and stay elected. Australia's ACT is in the middle of introducing a land value tax to replace stamp duty over 20
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
I don't think it's communist to tax land rent; Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Henry George aren't exactly communists and they all recognized the problem with land rents draining the productivity of society. Rather, it is much
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
Auckland specifically has a declining population, although it may change this year with immigration returning to pre-Covid levels. Aucklanders often move out of Auckland either overseas or to cheaper cities, when the economy slows, in a mil
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
I think it's way too early to say Auckland has fixed house prices. Auckland has made some improvements to zoning through the Unitary Plan, and the New Zealand government has 2-3 pieces of legislation which also increase the potential f
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
Regarding (2), it depends on what you mean by affordable. It is becoming more affordable to buy land compared to the last few years, because of interest rate rises making the cost of credit increase. It is becoming less affordable to build
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
People don't hoard houses, they hoard land. Taxing houses results in fewer houses, but taxing land doesn't result in less land. Check out https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
Why should it be an attractive financial asset if you do live there? Why shouldn't it just be a depreciating asset like a car (which it would be if land was taxed effectively)? That way, we could invest in productive assets instead o
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
Singapore
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
The easiest way to compare is to look at what a family of renters get vs a family of landowners. In a city with growing land values, the renters get nothing but the landowners get a lot, yet their contributions as "families contributin
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
Yes, everyone contributes to society in some way, hence "outsized to their contributions." If you sit on a piece of land and wait 10 years in my city, you might have made $500,000 of tax-free land value gains, but without needing
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
Landlords aren't in proper competition in supply constrained cities (most of them), so they aren't actually competing that much with each other. In reality, landlords are charging as much as the tenant can afford to pay (in aggreg
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
If he could do that after the tax, why not do it right now without the tax? Rents are already as high as the market can bear for most tenancies, so the landlord has to eat cost increases.
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
> For example, if utilities are included in the rent and the utility rates shift up, then the rent will increase due to that. This is an example of a tenant cost, not a landlord cost. In fact, the landlord may not be able to increase ren
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
Landlord costs aren't ordinarily passed onto tenants, or only in minor part, because landlords already charge as much as they can. If they could raise rents by some incoming cost amount, they would have already done it. I don't kn
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
Land value tax is one of the few taxes where the incidence is primarily on the land-owner, not the tenant. This is because it's an essential need that is of limited supply, so the price of the land rent is already set to the maximum. T
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
Land value tax would fix this!
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
Land/location is not a capital good and isn't affected by the same market rules as capital goods, because it is unique and possesses monopoly properties. It's essentially impossible for land and other natural resources to hav
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
Both are benefiting from the labour and value created by the rest of society, outsized to their contributions. Land receives its value due to all the infrastructure, people, businesses, and so on that are around the land, and everyone who o
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by BirdieNZ 4y ago
What they've identified is that the amount of profit a landlord who owns a house outright can extract from their tenants "feels" too high. Even if they can't explain the reasons, intuitively they feel there is some kind

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