Unfortunately, most of the political changes that I want to see go against some special interest. Examples include liberalizing professional licensing, reducing medical paternalism, and streamlining the litigation system. I can think of a zillion ways to do this, but every one of them cuts out some toll booth with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, and our political system is not capable of dealing with such things in a reasonable way.
I am very open to be told strategies to fight this more effectively without becoming a full time career activist for years on end for one issue at a time.
The OP is saying, if you show up with a bill to fix one of these problems, in a scoped way — like, actual working text they can put to a vote, not a general ideal of what to do — and can explain exactly what you're trying to solve, you have a decent chance of them putting it on the floor.
Just in general saying "please fix professional licensing" isn't actionable, you aren't doing the work for them. You're asking them to turn a vague idea into law, when it wasn't their problem to start with.
I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh.
Also Georgism is 100% LVT -> A land tax alone has been the recommendation of many economists before and after George - From Smith, Riccardo, Mill to Friedman. Across classical, neoclassical, Keynesian, Austrian schools. If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.
Random thought, would be it be good to extend land tax to use of all common public goods. E.g. radio frequencies, mining, water, CO2 pollution. Things you own, licensed or consume that take from the common good. Obviously this need constant tweaking E.g. as new tech makes different things valuable.
Yes, it's been suggested that all scarce inputs to the economy should be taxed. And yes the idea of Georgism is to let market set the prices and tax based off of that.
It does become complicated when the scarce inputs are things like highly specialized labor. Georgism wouldn't tax that monopoly, though our current systems (progressive income taxes) do. Many people would want a system which penalizes businesses for buying up e.g. all the veterinarians in a city and charging monopoly prices.
Georgism is not about scarcity, it's about economic land: inputs to production with have a fixed quantity, rather than scarcity.
Taxing specialized labor goes against that spirit, because specialized labor can be created. And in fact taxing the labor would result in less of it being there, the exact opposite of the optimal result.
The good news is that as different things become valuable their value changes, I guess? So if radio frequency stops being useful, the LVT put on it also drops pretty hard.
The bad news is now you have to assess the value of a lot more things in order to do this (the value of clean waterways in a certain state, the value of IP taken away from the common culture) that may not have a direct market value.
How does one even put a direct financial value on clean water, clean air, lack of noise pollution, etc.?
These things have different values to different people. While most everyone wants them in some form, there is a huge spectrum between “it won’t kill me this month” and “living in pristine Mt. Fuji”.
Should private companies be allowed to pollute sparse remote areas with no population?
Does it have a financial value if nobody goes there?
Other replies supporting taxing externalities and scarce resources are correct, but it can be generalized as taxing undesirable behavior to disincentivize it.
The generalization I would use is that governments should tax any scarce resource based on the amount of revenue it should produce if used effectively, rather than the revenue a given consumer can actually produces. Whether that is land, radio spectrum, or clean air.
“Undesirable behavior” is overly broad to the point of being actively misleading, and gets you into sin taxes. smut or drugs are not the scarce resources anybody is talking about here.
Not misleading. Rent-seeking is an undesirable behavior, and it's the primary behavior a land value tax targets. Hoarding limited resources is an undesirable behavior. Making products that have negative environmental impacts is an undesirable behavior.
But that is what the land tax folks are doing. They want dense cities and transit. They tax the "undesirable behavior" i.e. parking lots and lower density usage.
It's the tax with the most positive impact AFAIK, especially when the other taxes are removed or at least adjusted accordingly.
But it probably is also a cooperation problem, thus we prefer a slow but accelerating apocalypse.
All these graduates need some value from their education after all, and if we reduce doing actively harmful things like the current tax system, others will be superior to us by transforming resources more quickly into waste.
Since the latter process is extremely profitable, and again, so many people have education in optimizing the resources->money->waste pipeline, it would be a luddite and anti-science thought to listen to the science and stop this.
Apart from that, there's a very common and profitable way of getting yield from people's everyday life while also rewarding them: cars.
Live somewhere, but everything you do requires a vehicle.
You'll see so many beautiful places.
But you also have to rant about the evil urban population that pays for your car, gas, roads, parking space and special subsidies.
It would be unlivable out there in the wilderness without this totally natural subsidization.
There was also a community in the deep south. And I once read a case study about a town that tried it in, IIRC, New Mexico.
Full LVT never works. It always ends up shot through with exceptions and loopholes and, in the case study, inducing corruption. And it's all predictable, too, if you know anything about taxation policy and American political culture. For full LVT you'd need to start from a blank slate, not just from a legal perspective but from people's expectations about property ownership.
The fact that economically right wing economists like Milton Friedman supported LVT is a great argument against landlord type labelling LVT as far-left and attempting to push the idea outside the Overton window.
I think the only valid argument against is it is that a significant LVT would punish those who've worked for their wealth as they've already paid significant income tax. But there are plenty of ways to introduce it gradually. Other arguments boil down to vested interests when I dig into it.
You can say that land tax might be better than income tax but it's hard to argue that both land tax and income tax is better than just income tax. This is the biggest reason why new tax modalities are considered unworkable.
This presupposes a balancing, when in reality it only ever goes up, and when it goes down it leads to lapses in services where the bill comes due later, with interest
We already have property tax + income tax, and property tax is land value + value of improvements. From TFA, the immediate proposal is just allowing the property tax to assess the land value and value of improvements at two different rates, with the rate on improvements decreasing to remove incentives against improvements.
Personally I’d rather Land tax revenue be distributed evenly as a citizens dividend, and separate from the taxes leveed to make the society which allows people to have income and wealth.
Those who use their fair share are no change, those using more see taxes go up, those using less see a rebate.
The more valuable Land a business uses the more they have to pay, encouraging more efficient utilisation. Their competitor using less Land has lower taxes and can thus out compete them.
Land of course isn’t just dirt, it’s any limited natural resource.
I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh
Yeah, I looked at the map in the article and thought, wait a minute, why is Pennsylvania not colorcoded if Pittsburgh has a land value tax? So the map is only showing states that do? I didnt know there were any states that tax land. But do remember being confused when I moved to Pittsburgh by there being two separate taxes - for land and for property.
I also think that the pittsburgh example shows that LVT is meaningless. All homeowners care about here is their total real estate tax. How it is split between land and property nobody pays attention to.
If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.
This is overstating the case by a lot. There is a lot of discussion about land value taxes being efficient for various means, but there are far fewer economists who would suggest that 100% LVT is a good idea.
It just wouldn’t be popular. It would instantly get filled with holes and exceptions and distorted until it tries to approximate something else.
Some of the high level economic features that 100% LVT advocates want, like forcing people out of their properties when they become too valuable for other uses, are actually extremely unpopular with people who actually live in homes. You would get a wave of cases where grandma got pushed out of her forever home because the LVT got too expensive and a developer bulldozed it to build a strip mall instead. Under the economic model this is a good thing because the land is being used for its best value, but people actually hate this stuff.
Land value taxes are also really bad at progressive taxation. The hardcore LVT people think this is a good thing because they talk about taxes as “disincentivizing extra work” but we all know that taxes have never stopped people from earning money. Going full LVT puts us in ridiculous situations where someone who earns $500K for a tech company but works remote from a luxurious house somewhere where land is not valued much will pay almost nothing in taxes, but a family with modest income who works a trades job (which generally requires being close to a population center) will have to live in some form of housing subject to very high taxation, therefore paying a lot in taxes.
If you still don’t see it, imagine the outrage when people realized that some billionaires are barely paying more in taxes than a family of four in a modest house in a city where land is valuable.
The more you read about Georgism you more you realize how it’s not as popular with economists as it’s portrayed. There is valuing in taxing land, but we already do that! The debates about eliminating other taxes and replacing them all with LVT is something else, and it’s not universally popular at all.
I’ve since learned that overly online keyboard warriors are the least important people to convince. The most important people are on your local city council or state legislature. Furthermore, instead of wasting time with hard cases or elected officials who are dead-set against your ideas, you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles. This often means giving up on your own city or state, at least for the time being, and pursuing a “succeed anywhere” strategy instead.
We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin.
The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.
I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.
Which is maddening, given how much damage these existing policies are doing, and how many other zeitgeist issues (homelessness, affordability, robust economic growth etc) are downstream of this.
I wonder if this movement needs a form of performative extremism somewhere (think bridges being forcibly closed for causes), so that then the mainstream notices the sensible compromise and pushes for it. The YIMBY's have never played Overton Window games, but maybe they need to hold their nose and play it.
Has irritating the Average Joe ever resulted in political support from Joe? I can't help but think that these guys sitting in front of traffic, forcing normal people to be late for work, are just doing damage to their own causes, in hopes of just getting some "visibility" to those causes. Yea, it's visible now--visible as something annoying and ultimately counterproductive.
Famously sit ins and marches across public streets and bridges did some work for the civil rights movement, but they were certainly not popular with the locals either.
Parent is not claiming that protesters generally gain support for their own cause. Parent claims that protests shift the Overton Window such that more reasonable stances can fall within and gain support.
Yes. Thank you. And actually, when you have a non-politically charged conversation offline with some of the political operatives that cause these bridge shutdowns, they will admit that this is their goal as well. They know it's ragebait, but bait nonetheless.
The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.
That’s the exact opposite of the experience I’ve had in my town.
It seems that money is the primary driver of turnout at town council meetings. I live at the top of a mountain with 1 real road and 2 smaller frequently closed roads down to the city below. Developers really want to build up here, but there’s no way to widen the road, and no realistic way to build more. There’s not enough flat land to build enough jobs, shopping, dining etc… up here, so increasing density just means more cars making the trip 30 minutes into the city.
Every single time there’s an issue about development, you get dozens of real estate agents, developers, and people who work in construction showing up because their bank account depends on it. Every local election, you have candidates bankrolled by out of town developers.
“No” is much less well organized and will only occasionally turn out in larger numbers than “Yes” despite dominating in elections.
People say the same things here, where I know them not to be true, but I don’t know anything about your municipality. I know what the social science says about this, and the common sense intuition that never occurs to people to turn out in favor of apartments they’re not going to live in, but does occur to people who want to stop it. Your mileage obviously varies.
A new house makes every other lower quality house cheaper by providing an alternative. What matters is the total supply of the houses as good or better as the one you want.
But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.
General public debates with people who disagree do matter a bit because the electeds must believe that there is a group of people who will stand up and defend them (convincingly) from pressure if they take action. A certain amount of background buzz is indirectly helpful.
But yeah, seriously attempting to convince keyboard warriors or hard opponents is a complete waste of time. There often aren't a lot of them and once someone has spent enough time on a topic to adsorb most of the arguments then there isn't any reason to expect them to change their mind later on. Persuasion is for people who haven't formed a clear stance yet and there are occasional rare wins when someone changes their mind although it shouldn't be counted on.
I guess here's an issue. I bought 13 acres - mostly because I hate hearing basketballs bouncing, other people's TVs, and "boom cars".
So if we're going to start taxing me at a million per year, can I start taxing those loud people a million a year so I can live in the city to pay for medical bills for my brain to go through the bouncing basketball.
Mind you, everyone else in my area has 10 - 15 acres and it's just a dead area. Just people that ran away from the city. There's absolutely no "value" in this land as no one wants to even be here and drive 40 minutes to get to a grocery store.
Isn't the idea that it's a land value tax, and not just a land tax. The land in your example is not particularly valuable. Unless I have misunderstood the idea.
Then your land would likely be priced at the nominal amount per acre x 13 since the demand for that area is low and diffuse. Not a horrible outcome, and, could encourage you to make the land "productive" to at least cover the tax. Tree farms are lovely.
What about conservation? On my land, after clearing a bit around the house for fire safety and "pest" prevention, I kept most of the native rainforest. I planted a few syntropic lines of fruit trees, but they cannot cover the land tax I already pay. All my gardening and land management at large is a money sink (unless we consider touching grass an investment).
LVT is about assessing improvements, conservation can be understood as an improvement and valued as such. For the same reasons that urban parks should have a different tax assessment than low value surface parking lots.
I don't even think "unused" is helpful framing. I'd say, property taxes should be assessed on land, not productive imps. If you want to keep your expensive urban downtown land a parking lot, fine, but it shouldn't be subsidized by lower taxes than your neighbor with a high-rise.
One of the main points made in TFA is it's important to communicate that single-family homes outside of city centers will tend to see lower taxes if you go from property tax to LVT, because in the city most of the value in your home is the land, but that ratio flips the further you get from the city center.
Obviously this assumes a single tax-base; if you are not in the same tax base of the city, then you're probably still fine, since if everybody has similarly valued lots, the taxes will be shared similarly between them.
The LVT seems to me to be a lot like a carbon tax: a wonderful technocratic idea that is politically untenable. LTV would be great for humanity, but very bad for present homeowners. Since homeowners are wealthy and thus more politically engaged on average, I just don’t see how this could ever get passed. Instead of starting with an impossible task, why not start instead with a merely incredibly unlikely task: repeal proposition 13.
I think that GPs point still stands if you replace homeowners with the sort of organization that own en-masse the sort of empty lots that would lose out.
There's a lot here to absorb, but one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic:
Land, however, is not built. Land is inelastic in supply, and landowners don’t “provide” land the way laborers provide labor and investors provide capital; they un-provide land by excluding others from using it. Building supply can change in response to a tax change, but land supply cannot.
But many cities actually can increase their land supply via land reclamation. This can be done by filling in waterways or otherwise altering the landscape to make it suitable to build on. Chicago, for example, built the land under the Adler Planetarium by filling in rubble along the shore of Lake Michigan. Boston is an even more impressive example; Back Bay used to be a bay of the Atlantic Ocean, not an entire neighborhood of a city with very high cost of living.
Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise, or disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Other times a lack of regulation might permit pollution to make land unlivable or infeasible to build on. Land owners can't create natural disasters, but they can advocate for policies that strongly influence effective land supply, such as whether building codes allow building on certain kinds or soil or require resistance to earthquakes.
Does this change the calculus from a Georgist economic perspective? If not, why?
The key is that land is accidental in a way - people don’t want “land” per se they want to DO something with the land - and if the valuations are high enough you get multiple uses.
The reality is that in the vast majority of places the valuations just aren’t there.
All that is true and I suppose there could be tax policies to encourage land reclamation, but this is more likely to run into environmental concerns. It’s literally an edge case.
one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic
It isn't actually perfectly inelastic, but looking at land reclamation (and erosion!) relative to the ease with which places to live can be added to a locale, the supply of land is relatively inelastic. Even then, that kind of misses the core of George's argument about land value.
George himself distinguished land from labor and capital by looking at it through the lens of whether the economic value of a piece of land needed to be attributable entirely to improvements undertaken on that land. This is his "all natural opportunities or forces," and those are where the constraint lies.
For land reclamation in particular, there are two things to look at: (1) the value attributable to the land reclamation effort; and (2) the residual site value. (2) is land rent, and the Georgist model really is predicated on the relationship the surrounding community has with a piece of land. As it goes, if the community's feelings toward, say, a reclaimed waterfront are tepid, that reclaimed land won't have much value (even if the land reclamation were undertaken at great expense!), and won't command high land rents.
When georgists refer to land, they are referring to locations - not dirt.
Locations refer to the sections of physical 2D space that makes up a country. Why 2D when the world is 3D? Because parcels are allocated and segmented based on a 2D model.
Locations are best thought of as being similar to "spectrum" (what typically gets auctioned off every few years to the highest bidder) - there is a total fixed amount. Nobody made the physical space, and nobody will make more of it in the future. It all existed before life even began on this planet, and it will exist long after all of us are dead.
Georgism, or the tax on the unimproved value of the land, is the fairest tax I (and many others) can imagine. It directly counters one of the ugliest part of any economy/society - rent seeking.
Suppose you see an area in upward economic trajectory, you buy a bunch of land/properties, then do fuck-all for the next 30 years while the hard work of everyone around that land causes your land's value to increase. You contribute nothing, while benefitting from others' contributions. All this while someone who could have used that land/property for a more productive used is deprived of it. Georgism directly counters that by taxing any 'base land value' that you own.
Georgism and the 'taxing progressively higher any property a person directly/indirectly owns after first N properties' are seriously very much needed around the world, economic rent-seeking steals from future generations.
...the 'taxing progressively higher any property a person directly/indirectly owns after first N properties' are seriously very much needed...
I don't see it in the article, but the progressive nature of the tax is important. It makes it harder for large landowners to pass along the tax, since they must compete with smaller landlords. The net effect should also stabilize land appreciation, which will no longer rise with rapidly increasing wealth disparity as it has in the past couple of decades. And we won't need clunky, patchwork solutions like the ban on home ownership by private equity.
>> boring scut work of implementation. Now I realize that the boring scut work is actually what precedes, and even leads to, changing the consensus.
See every enterprise project. The code for s written, the app is promoted as working in this department and the the project gets funded and approved. Under some other manager
Yes, it works. It makes childless gloomy cities that are now also going bankrupt (see: Austin, TX).
Because why would you move into a shoebox-sized apartment that costs as much as a single-family home and doesn't have any grocery stores nearby (see: Manhattan)?
But don't despair! Your unit 31E will be allowed an individualized door knob and a space for a whimsical 4x5 inch placard.
A compelling review of the authors work, but I think there would be benefit from dropping the early references to UBI: LVT is an interesting approach and line of reasoning. UBI is a political hotbed with deeply acrimonious feelings on all sides.
When you align one idea with an external one, you are adopting all that external baggage - it's a cheap way to get a few additional people to agree, but at the cost of a bunch of other people seeing what they perceive as warning signs of a class of ideas they are suspicious of.
It's important to have confidence in your idea, on its own merits.
It's freakishly weird to see this at the top of HN. I had never heard or read anything about Georgism until last week, when I stumbled onto it after randomly seeing a photo of a 100-year-old billboard on the Wikipedia page for the term "speculation". I spent a few days researching it on and off. In fact, I just navigated to HN from the last page I was reading about it. It seems like a clever way to address a number of very pressing modern issues.
"Doing policymaker's work for them" is something like 80% of lobbying.
If you have something you want done in your town, and you come with the work done AND not asking for funding, you're likely to get it.
If you come with the work done and a PLAN for getting the funding, you also have a good chance of success.
Unfortunately, most of the political changes that I want to see go against some special interest. Examples include liberalizing professional licensing, reducing medical paternalism, and streamlining the litigation system. I can think of a zillion ways to do this, but every one of them cuts out some toll booth with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, and our political system is not capable of dealing with such things in a reasonable way.
I am very open to be told strategies to fight this more effectively without becoming a full time career activist for years on end for one issue at a time.
The OP is saying, if you show up with a bill to fix one of these problems, in a scoped way — like, actual working text they can put to a vote, not a general ideal of what to do — and can explain exactly what you're trying to solve, you have a decent chance of them putting it on the floor.
Just in general saying "please fix professional licensing" isn't actionable, you aren't doing the work for them. You're asking them to turn a vague idea into law, when it wasn't their problem to start with.
This works at the office too.
I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh.
Also Georgism is 100% LVT -> A land tax alone has been the recommendation of many economists before and after George - From Smith, Riccardo, Mill to Friedman. Across classical, neoclassical, Keynesian, Austrian schools. If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.
Random thought, would be it be good to extend land tax to use of all common public goods. E.g. radio frequencies, mining, water, CO2 pollution. Things you own, licensed or consume that take from the common good. Obviously this need constant tweaking E.g. as new tech makes different things valuable.
Yes, pricing negative externalities is a good idea. Unfortunately some are more or less expensive to price/enforce
Yes, it's been suggested that all scarce inputs to the economy should be taxed. And yes the idea of Georgism is to let market set the prices and tax based off of that.
It does become complicated when the scarce inputs are things like highly specialized labor. Georgism wouldn't tax that monopoly, though our current systems (progressive income taxes) do. Many people would want a system which penalizes businesses for buying up e.g. all the veterinarians in a city and charging monopoly prices.
As powerful as taxes are to create change, you don't need to use them to solve every problem out there.
Georgism is not about scarcity, it's about economic land: inputs to production with have a fixed quantity, rather than scarcity.
Taxing specialized labor goes against that spirit, because specialized labor can be created. And in fact taxing the labor would result in less of it being there, the exact opposite of the optimal result.
The good news is that as different things become valuable their value changes, I guess? So if radio frequency stops being useful, the LVT put on it also drops pretty hard.
The bad news is now you have to assess the value of a lot more things in order to do this (the value of clean waterways in a certain state, the value of IP taken away from the common culture) that may not have a direct market value.
How does one even put a direct financial value on clean water, clean air, lack of noise pollution, etc.?
These things have different values to different people. While most everyone wants them in some form, there is a huge spectrum between “it won’t kill me this month” and “living in pristine Mt. Fuji”.
Should private companies be allowed to pollute sparse remote areas with no population?
Does it have a financial value if nobody goes there?
Other replies supporting taxing externalities and scarce resources are correct, but it can be generalized as taxing undesirable behavior to disincentivize it.
The generalization I would use is that governments should tax any scarce resource based on the amount of revenue it should produce if used effectively, rather than the revenue a given consumer can actually produces. Whether that is land, radio spectrum, or clean air.
“Undesirable behavior” is overly broad to the point of being actively misleading, and gets you into sin taxes. smut or drugs are not the scarce resources anybody is talking about here.
Not misleading. Rent-seeking is an undesirable behavior, and it's the primary behavior a land value tax targets. Hoarding limited resources is an undesirable behavior. Making products that have negative environmental impacts is an undesirable behavior.
But that is what the land tax folks are doing. They want dense cities and transit. They tax the "undesirable behavior" i.e. parking lots and lower density usage.
You're kind of describing two different ideas: pigouvian taxes, and taxing The Commons.
What both have in common is that economists from all different schools of thought widely agree that they're the least distortionary taxes.
It's the tax with the most positive impact AFAIK, especially when the other taxes are removed or at least adjusted accordingly.
But it probably is also a cooperation problem, thus we prefer a slow but accelerating apocalypse.
All these graduates need some value from their education after all, and if we reduce doing actively harmful things like the current tax system, others will be superior to us by transforming resources more quickly into waste.
Since the latter process is extremely profitable, and again, so many people have education in optimizing the resources->money->waste pipeline, it would be a luddite and anti-science thought to listen to the science and stop this.
Apart from that, there's a very common and profitable way of getting yield from people's everyday life while also rewarding them: cars.
Live somewhere, but everything you do requires a vehicle.
You'll see so many beautiful places.
But you also have to rant about the evil urban population that pays for your car, gas, roads, parking space and special subsidies.
It would be unlivable out there in the wilderness without this totally natural subsidization.
There was also a community in the deep south. And I once read a case study about a town that tried it in, IIRC, New Mexico.
Full LVT never works. It always ends up shot through with exceptions and loopholes and, in the case study, inducing corruption. And it's all predictable, too, if you know anything about taxation policy and American political culture. For full LVT you'd need to start from a blank slate, not just from a legal perspective but from people's expectations about property ownership.
The fact that economically right wing economists like Milton Friedman supported LVT is a great argument against landlord type labelling LVT as far-left and attempting to push the idea outside the Overton window. I think the only valid argument against is it is that a significant LVT would punish those who've worked for their wealth as they've already paid significant income tax. But there are plenty of ways to introduce it gradually. Other arguments boil down to vested interests when I dig into it.
You can say that land tax might be better than income tax but it's hard to argue that both land tax and income tax is better than just income tax. This is the biggest reason why new tax modalities are considered unworkable.
I think land + income is better. It's what I have where I live, and I'd like to see the balance shifted more towards land.
This presupposes a balancing, when in reality it only ever goes up, and when it goes down it leads to lapses in services where the bill comes due later, with interest
We already have property tax + income tax, and property tax is land value + value of improvements. From TFA, the immediate proposal is just allowing the property tax to assess the land value and value of improvements at two different rates, with the rate on improvements decreasing to remove incentives against improvements.
Does a parking lot in Manhattan pay the same cost per acre than a 50 story apartment block does?
Author of TFA certainly argues that land and income is better than just income.
Personally I’d rather Land tax revenue be distributed evenly as a citizens dividend, and separate from the taxes leveed to make the society which allows people to have income and wealth.
Those who use their fair share are no change, those using more see taxes go up, those using less see a rebate.
The more valuable Land a business uses the more they have to pay, encouraging more efficient utilisation. Their competitor using less Land has lower taxes and can thus out compete them.
Land of course isn’t just dirt, it’s any limited natural resource.
Yeah, I looked at the map in the article and thought, wait a minute, why is Pennsylvania not colorcoded if Pittsburgh has a land value tax? So the map is only showing states that do? I didnt know there were any states that tax land. But do remember being confused when I moved to Pittsburgh by there being two separate taxes - for land and for property.
I also think that the pittsburgh example shows that LVT is meaningless. All homeowners care about here is their total real estate tax. How it is split between land and property nobody pays attention to.
This is overstating the case by a lot. There is a lot of discussion about land value taxes being efficient for various means, but there are far fewer economists who would suggest that 100% LVT is a good idea.
It just wouldn’t be popular. It would instantly get filled with holes and exceptions and distorted until it tries to approximate something else.
Some of the high level economic features that 100% LVT advocates want, like forcing people out of their properties when they become too valuable for other uses, are actually extremely unpopular with people who actually live in homes. You would get a wave of cases where grandma got pushed out of her forever home because the LVT got too expensive and a developer bulldozed it to build a strip mall instead. Under the economic model this is a good thing because the land is being used for its best value, but people actually hate this stuff.
Land value taxes are also really bad at progressive taxation. The hardcore LVT people think this is a good thing because they talk about taxes as “disincentivizing extra work” but we all know that taxes have never stopped people from earning money. Going full LVT puts us in ridiculous situations where someone who earns $500K for a tech company but works remote from a luxurious house somewhere where land is not valued much will pay almost nothing in taxes, but a family with modest income who works a trades job (which generally requires being close to a population center) will have to live in some form of housing subject to very high taxation, therefore paying a lot in taxes.
If you still don’t see it, imagine the outrage when people realized that some billionaires are barely paying more in taxes than a family of four in a modest house in a city where land is valuable.
The more you read about Georgism you more you realize how it’s not as popular with economists as it’s portrayed. There is valuing in taxing land, but we already do that! The debates about eliminating other taxes and replacing them all with LVT is something else, and it’s not universally popular at all.
I’ve since learned that overly online keyboard warriors are the least important people to convince. The most important people are on your local city council or state legislature. Furthermore, instead of wasting time with hard cases or elected officials who are dead-set against your ideas, you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles. This often means giving up on your own city or state, at least for the time being, and pursuing a “succeed anywhere” strategy instead.
We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin.
The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.
I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.
Which is maddening, given how much damage these existing policies are doing, and how many other zeitgeist issues (homelessness, affordability, robust economic growth etc) are downstream of this.
I wonder if this movement needs a form of performative extremism somewhere (think bridges being forcibly closed for causes), so that then the mainstream notices the sensible compromise and pushes for it. The YIMBY's have never played Overton Window games, but maybe they need to hold their nose and play it.
Has irritating the Average Joe ever resulted in political support from Joe? I can't help but think that these guys sitting in front of traffic, forcing normal people to be late for work, are just doing damage to their own causes, in hopes of just getting some "visibility" to those causes. Yea, it's visible now--visible as something annoying and ultimately counterproductive.
Local politics are very different, especially in responsiveness, to state and national politics.
Famously sit ins and marches across public streets and bridges did some work for the civil rights movement, but they were certainly not popular with the locals either.
Parent is not claiming that protesters generally gain support for their own cause. Parent claims that protests shift the Overton Window such that more reasonable stances can fall within and gain support.
Yes. Thank you. And actually, when you have a non-politically charged conversation offline with some of the political operatives that cause these bridge shutdowns, they will admit that this is their goal as well. They know it's ragebait, but bait nonetheless.
as a general case yes, people like things more the more times they hear about them.
trump constantly doing annoying stuff for instance, was good for him getting elected.
visibility correlates positively with likeability
That’s the exact opposite of the experience I’ve had in my town.
It seems that money is the primary driver of turnout at town council meetings. I live at the top of a mountain with 1 real road and 2 smaller frequently closed roads down to the city below. Developers really want to build up here, but there’s no way to widen the road, and no realistic way to build more. There’s not enough flat land to build enough jobs, shopping, dining etc… up here, so increasing density just means more cars making the trip 30 minutes into the city.
Every single time there’s an issue about development, you get dozens of real estate agents, developers, and people who work in construction showing up because their bank account depends on it. Every local election, you have candidates bankrolled by out of town developers.
“No” is much less well organized and will only occasionally turn out in larger numbers than “Yes” despite dominating in elections.
People say the same things here, where I know them not to be true, but I don’t know anything about your municipality. I know what the social science says about this, and the common sense intuition that never occurs to people to turn out in favor of apartments they’re not going to live in, but does occur to people who want to stop it. Your mileage obviously varies.
I'm betting the developers are for single-family homes not apartments. The only NIMBY I'm for is anti-SFH.
High density is more profitable for developers, they have no interest in supporting SFH zoning.
Are there any public meetings with the developer stepping up and saying “I need to make money, please approve!”. That seems… counter productive
It’s usually them saying something more like “this will bring jobs”, “growth is inevitable” etc…
And by jobs what they mean is that they will import labor to build housing you can't afford in your neighbourhood.
A new house makes every other lower quality house cheaper by providing an alternative. What matters is the total supply of the houses as good or better as the one you want.
General public debates with people who disagree do matter a bit because the electeds must believe that there is a group of people who will stand up and defend them (convincingly) from pressure if they take action. A certain amount of background buzz is indirectly helpful.
But yeah, seriously attempting to convince keyboard warriors or hard opponents is a complete waste of time. There often aren't a lot of them and once someone has spent enough time on a topic to adsorb most of the arguments then there isn't any reason to expect them to change their mind later on. Persuasion is for people who haven't formed a clear stance yet and there are occasional rare wins when someone changes their mind although it shouldn't be counted on.
Especially since these days it is entirely unclear whether a given keyboard warrior is actually a human being at all.
id guess the arguments you had to convince non-existent readers also helped make a stronger case to the electeds?
I guess here's an issue. I bought 13 acres - mostly because I hate hearing basketballs bouncing, other people's TVs, and "boom cars".
So if we're going to start taxing me at a million per year, can I start taxing those loud people a million a year so I can live in the city to pay for medical bills for my brain to go through the bouncing basketball.
Mind you, everyone else in my area has 10 - 15 acres and it's just a dead area. Just people that ran away from the city. There's absolutely no "value" in this land as no one wants to even be here and drive 40 minutes to get to a grocery store.
Isn't the idea that it's a land value tax, and not just a land tax. The land in your example is not particularly valuable. Unless I have misunderstood the idea.
Then your land would likely be priced at the nominal amount per acre x 13 since the demand for that area is low and diffuse. Not a horrible outcome, and, could encourage you to make the land "productive" to at least cover the tax. Tree farms are lovely.
What about conservation? On my land, after clearing a bit around the house for fire safety and "pest" prevention, I kept most of the native rainforest. I planted a few syntropic lines of fruit trees, but they cannot cover the land tax I already pay. All my gardening and land management at large is a money sink (unless we consider touching grass an investment).
LVT is about assessing improvements, conservation can be understood as an improvement and valued as such. For the same reasons that urban parks should have a different tax assessment than low value surface parking lots.
LVT is assessed on land value. Your 13 rural acres aren't insanely valuable and would not be assessed a million dollars a year under a Georgian model.
Ok, that makes sense to me then. I thought I was going to be taxed for unused land.
The idea here is that unused land in a city should be highly taxed, but unused land in rural areas should not.
I don't even think "unused" is helpful framing. I'd say, property taxes should be assessed on land, not productive imps. If you want to keep your expensive urban downtown land a parking lot, fine, but it shouldn't be subsidized by lower taxes than your neighbor with a high-rise.
One of the main points made in TFA is it's important to communicate that single-family homes outside of city centers will tend to see lower taxes if you go from property tax to LVT, because in the city most of the value in your home is the land, but that ratio flips the further you get from the city center.
Obviously this assumes a single tax-base; if you are not in the same tax base of the city, then you're probably still fine, since if everybody has similarly valued lots, the taxes will be shared similarly between them.
The LVT seems to me to be a lot like a carbon tax: a wonderful technocratic idea that is politically untenable. LTV would be great for humanity, but very bad for present homeowners. Since homeowners are wealthy and thus more politically engaged on average, I just don’t see how this could ever get passed. Instead of starting with an impossible task, why not start instead with a merely incredibly unlikely task: repeal proposition 13.
In most cases LVT would be the same or lower than current property taxes. Only empty lots would pay more.
TFA literally shows how it is better for homeowners
I think that GPs point still stands if you replace homeowners with the sort of organization that own en-masse the sort of empty lots that would lose out.
Eh... After finishing the article, did I miss the section where the author discuss if Georgism actually works?
Did it actually increase the amount of housing? Reduce wealth disparity? Got enough taxes so cities can make commutes better?
Yes, you did. Re-read the end of section III, around the part with the final two color coded images.
Those are the change in tax rates between properties. And the wins on that section are about votes to change the tax policy.
Too soon to say apparently? They got some laws passed.
There's a lot here to absorb, but one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic:
But many cities actually can increase their land supply via land reclamation. This can be done by filling in waterways or otherwise altering the landscape to make it suitable to build on. Chicago, for example, built the land under the Adler Planetarium by filling in rubble along the shore of Lake Michigan. Boston is an even more impressive example; Back Bay used to be a bay of the Atlantic Ocean, not an entire neighborhood of a city with very high cost of living.
Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise, or disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Other times a lack of regulation might permit pollution to make land unlivable or infeasible to build on. Land owners can't create natural disasters, but they can advocate for policies that strongly influence effective land supply, such as whether building codes allow building on certain kinds or soil or require resistance to earthquakes.
Does this change the calculus from a Georgist economic perspective? If not, why?
The key is that land is accidental in a way - people don’t want “land” per se they want to DO something with the land - and if the valuations are high enough you get multiple uses.
The reality is that in the vast majority of places the valuations just aren’t there.
All that is true and I suppose there could be tax policies to encourage land reclamation, but this is more likely to run into environmental concerns. It’s literally an edge case.
It isn't actually perfectly inelastic, but looking at land reclamation (and erosion!) relative to the ease with which places to live can be added to a locale, the supply of land is relatively inelastic. Even then, that kind of misses the core of George's argument about land value.
George himself distinguished land from labor and capital by looking at it through the lens of whether the economic value of a piece of land needed to be attributable entirely to improvements undertaken on that land. This is his "all natural opportunities or forces," and those are where the constraint lies.
For land reclamation in particular, there are two things to look at: (1) the value attributable to the land reclamation effort; and (2) the residual site value. (2) is land rent, and the Georgist model really is predicated on the relationship the surrounding community has with a piece of land. As it goes, if the community's feelings toward, say, a reclaimed waterfront are tepid, that reclaimed land won't have much value (even if the land reclamation were undertaken at great expense!), and won't command high land rents.
You are confusing "location" and "dirt"
When georgists refer to land, they are referring to locations - not dirt.
Locations refer to the sections of physical 2D space that makes up a country. Why 2D when the world is 3D? Because parcels are allocated and segmented based on a 2D model.
Locations are best thought of as being similar to "spectrum" (what typically gets auctioned off every few years to the highest bidder) - there is a total fixed amount. Nobody made the physical space, and nobody will make more of it in the future. It all existed before life even began on this planet, and it will exist long after all of us are dead.
Georgism, or the tax on the unimproved value of the land, is the fairest tax I (and many others) can imagine. It directly counters one of the ugliest part of any economy/society - rent seeking.
Suppose you see an area in upward economic trajectory, you buy a bunch of land/properties, then do fuck-all for the next 30 years while the hard work of everyone around that land causes your land's value to increase. You contribute nothing, while benefitting from others' contributions. All this while someone who could have used that land/property for a more productive used is deprived of it. Georgism directly counters that by taxing any 'base land value' that you own.
Georgism and the 'taxing progressively higher any property a person directly/indirectly owns after first N properties' are seriously very much needed around the world, economic rent-seeking steals from future generations.
I don't see it in the article, but the progressive nature of the tax is important. It makes it harder for large landowners to pass along the tax, since they must compete with smaller landlords. The net effect should also stabilize land appreciation, which will no longer rise with rapidly increasing wealth disparity as it has in the past couple of decades. And we won't need clunky, patchwork solutions like the ban on home ownership by private equity.
See every enterprise project. The code for s written, the app is promoted as working in this department and the the project gets funded and approved. Under some other manager
Yes, it works. It makes childless gloomy cities that are now also going bankrupt (see: Austin, TX).
Because why would you move into a shoebox-sized apartment that costs as much as a single-family home and doesn't have any grocery stores nearby (see: Manhattan)?
But don't despair! Your unit 31E will be allowed an individualized door knob and a space for a whimsical 4x5 inch placard.
Sorry: serious question. What do you mean?
Austin does not have a land value tax.
You are confusing property taxes with land value taxes
A compelling review of the authors work, but I think there would be benefit from dropping the early references to UBI: LVT is an interesting approach and line of reasoning. UBI is a political hotbed with deeply acrimonious feelings on all sides.
When you align one idea with an external one, you are adopting all that external baggage - it's a cheap way to get a few additional people to agree, but at the cost of a bunch of other people seeing what they perceive as warning signs of a class of ideas they are suspicious of.
It's important to have confidence in your idea, on its own merits.
It's freakishly weird to see this at the top of HN. I had never heard or read anything about Georgism until last week, when I stumbled onto it after randomly seeing a photo of a 100-year-old billboard on the Wikipedia page for the term "speculation". I spent a few days researching it on and off. In fact, I just navigated to HN from the last page I was reading about it. It seems like a clever way to address a number of very pressing modern issues.
Serendipity, I guess.