When you were new to arithmetic, did it remotely make sense to you that the number of integers and the number of even integers was the same?
If you find a surprising conclusion, consider reading the argument. Perhaps you will discover that you agree with the premises and the reasoning, and the conclusion will seem less surprising.
Here in the finite world, most of the money moving around is in services, while most of the land is disconnected from that economy. How are you getting 1-2 trillion in tax revenue from land without making, say, farming economically unviable? Will it just be riddled through with exceptions and carveouts?
An acre in midtown Manhattan might be worth $250 million to as much as $1.25 billion, before we look at the building that is on it. (An acre is a big lot in Manhattan -- a whole city block.) A tiny lot in Manhattan sells hundreds of thousands of dollars, due to its location, which the seller didn't create. The old building on it may be worth nothing.
And the 100x100 lot with a new hotel on it and the 100x100 lot next door with just a parking lot, or maybe just a chain link fence, would be assessed identically. The unimproved value of the land.
Farmers would pay little under LVT. In fact they'd be advantaged, because their buildings and equipment would not be taxed. The owners of sites in our major cities would pay in proportion to the value of their site. And frequently the land is already leased to someone who puts a building on it, which gives a sense of the value of the land at the time the lease was negotiated -- a value which is not always made public.
And why would we want to tax wages, or sales, if we could obtain from the value of land much of the revenue we need, while providing a boost to the economy via removing the deadweight loss of dumb taxes?
On that note, is the inherent land value of a lot in Bushwick way higher then 20 years ago now that they've gentrified? Is neighborhood desirability an 'unimproved' attribute?
I very much get where you guys are coming from in a philosophical sense, but I feel like there are a million wrenches in the works that everyone's ignoring because the theory is so nice.
We know what the total budget is right now, at a national, state, and local level. And we know where that income is coming from -- mostly a mix of income, property, sales, payroll, corporate, and other taxes. And crucially we know exactly what the breakdown of that taxation burden is on various people in various financial situations.
I want to see the numbers on this Georgian proposal that show the total revenue at federal, state, and local levels. Is the total amount of tax the same? Or are we talking about radically reduced tax revenue in total? And how does the distribution of who pays this tax change under the new system? Then, and only then, with these figures, we can look at the proposal and see if it remotely makes sense using the typical criteria of (a) is there enough funding for current levels of government services at all levels, (b) are the changes in who's paying how much in taxes fair and equitable, etc.
I really want to see a full proposal on exactly what a typical individual and corporate tax bill for a variety of common situations, and I want to see that those numbers all add up to enough revenue.
But what we really care about is what the system looks like a decade in, after property values have massive changes. And what it looks like 50 years in, after cities have been remade to reflect the shift in tax costs. I don't think any modern day Georgist argue for "single tax." Remember that income tax wasn't in place in the US when Henry George started writing!
So any modern plan will Lokey include shifting tax bases, over time, to rely more heavily on LVT and less on sales tax and other regressive taxes. This will require adaptation and policy change over the years and decades, rather than saying ahead of time that they can predict the future with absolute certainty.
It does not seem at all clear to me that most economic activity is in services and not in resources/monopoly ownership.
> farming economically unviable
Farming is already unviable, that's why we subsidize it so heavily.
I'm fine with taxing the hell out of Exxon, btw, or at least not giving them cash-in-a-briefcase subsidies, but you're not going to replace the income tax on that.
We collected 3.46 trillion in income taxes last year. How do you get there on a land-value tax? Do we weight it so Manhattan land owners are paying more in tax than the entire midwest?
