2. LVT
3. Environmental externality taxes
That's all we need to fix the 21st century. Simple as hell so basically immune to regulatory capture, and will usher in a rate of progress we haven't seen in 100 years, if ever.
I'm skeptical of UBI. The idea doesn't include any kind of automatic stabilization system to set the UBI at a sustainable level. Because UBI is not market-based, there's little information that flows into the process that sets of level of UBI and other redistribution systems. In a market system, a distributed consensus algorithm governs both wages and prices and adjusts both continuously to account for changes in scarcity and utility.
Who decides how much UBI is enough? What procedure will that person or body use? What is the algorithm that prevents UBI increasing without bound? After all, the public voting itself unsustainable transfers from the state is one of the classic failure modes of democracy.
No matter the initial level of UBI, there will be someone who's able to gain political advantage by claiming that the UBI is insufficient for a dignified existence and that human rights demand an increase. Proposing a decrease in UBI will be political suicide. What prevents UBI increasing to the point that it captures all excess value production from all of society and redistributes it evenly? Wouldn't that system be tantamount to the planned economies of the 20th century?
Except it does: land value.
This right here is the basis of geolibertarianism, which calls for a minimal government that exists solely to collect LVT and redistribute it directly as UBI. The UBI distributed should be equal to the opportunity cost externalized by private/exclusive land use. The cap would be a 100% LVT, where all land is leased from society as a whole (or more precisely, this minimal government representing said society).
So:
> Who decides how much UBI is enough?
The land market.
> What procedure will that person or body use?
The appraisal of the market value of land (sans the improvements upon it, like buildings).
> What is the algorithm that prevents UBI increasing without bound?
Supply and demand of land.
e.g. SpaceX shouldn't be taxed on CO2 release from their Raptor engines if they are getting all their methane via the Sabatier process.
I'm not saying any of this is easy to do, but that's because politics and reform is hard. Not enough people can agree what to do != no one can know what to do.
With fields like "mechanism design" we've blurred the distinction between central planned and distributed economics too; never have we had a better menu of options.
If you want a steady-state economy, you're going to need far more reforms than this, and if you want capitalism without interest you're shit out of luck.
Wouldn't a less punitive system of welfare properly distribute the wealth with none of the requirement to be universal?
It wouldn't by being calibrated (preferably by being indexed to a revenue source and not to inflation) to be at a level where that wouldn't occur, which is a factor of productivity and other factors.
> Wouldn't a less punitive system of welfare properly distribute the wealth with none of the requirement to be universal?
UBI is a less punitive welfare system; any retreat from universality is restoring the essence of the punitive factor which also is the driver of wasteful administrative overhead by duplicating functions already performed in the progressive income tax system.
(the others, sure, much simpler)
The downtown parking lot, for example, probably doesn't have recurring carbon costs. The gasoline people use to drive there will be more expensive from the carbon tax on oil and gasoline production, and the cement or asphalt that takes electricity to produce will be covered by the source-charge on power plants.
Carbon tax can be made revenue neutral and will net benefit innovative companies and/or customers buying their products.
LVT is literally taxing non-productive, limited, legally hereditary but actually “common heritage” capital. No damage there.
I’m quite opposed to UBI myself but I think there’s plenty of other ways to improve the social safety net with less opportunity of abuse, the net benefit being that people are less concerned with staying alive (low Maslow need) and free to be creative (high Maslow need).
Trying to keep society progressing without improving land use and suburbia is like trying to improve CPUs while not improving upon 1980s processes/chip density.
See https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/01/why-taxation-is-neith...
LVT is good for state governments that don't have their own currency.
The jobs guarantee that goes with it I really don't like. It's stupid in 2020 to not be trying to reduce the total labor per person.
Sure, some infrastructure projects are really important, not profitable, and might even require the training of new labor to get it done. They should definitely still happen. But I see no good reason to hitch that to jobs guarantee.
And it is worse in the poorer states, because they don't have high home values to cushion the blow to the individual taxpayer.
When your sector makes up like three of the five most valuable companies on the planet, we probably should be taxing it more.
And Jeff Bezos does not need more money.
It's also not like the money is never taxed. If Jeff Bezos wants to turn his AMZN shares into dollars, he'll federal capital gains on the appreciation. He pays nothing in Washington state because it has no income or capital gains tax, and that's Washington's choice. Corporate taxes are also a form of double taxation for this reason; the profits are taxed when the company makes the money, and taxed when investors realize gains.
Amazon also indirectly pays taxes in ways you're not thinking about. There's sales tax on sales, taxes on all the supplies it buys, property tax on all the land it owns, payroll tax for employees, and its employees also pay income tax (except in Washington), property tax, etc.
Taxes are actually getting collected pretty much everywhere along that chain. The usual criticism is with tax inversions, and even those mostly defer taxes, and because dividends and capital gains are taxed, I'm not convinced it makes sense to tax corporation.
The problem is that increasing the corporate income tax rate just doesn't provide enough revenue. Corporate income taxes are only 7% of the US government's annual tax revenue, for example. Even if we doubled the corporate income tax rate, that's still only another 7% of the total tax revenue, which is way too small to make up for the annual US budget deficit.
> Jeff Bezos does not need more money.
While I don't disagree with this, taxing the wealth of the rich also just doesn't provide enough revenue. Suppose we set a hard cap on personal wealth of $1 billion--everything over that, the government takes in tax at a rate of 100%. The net worth of the 400 richest people in the world is around $3 trillion, so we'd be taking $2.6 trillion of it. And that would fund...the US government for about 6 months. Or all 50 US states for...a little more than a year. And then the wealth is gone, and what do you do next?
In other words, all the complaining about low corporate tax rates and wealth inequality is complaining about something that, even if it were "fixed" (and fixed without depressing wealth creation, which is highly implausible), would not do much of anything about the real problem: that we expect governments to do far too much and give them far too much power. And that translates into chronic overspending and deficits, which end up being paid by the middle class, because that's the only source of revenue large enough to pay it.
Agreed. We should be ruthlessly taxing capital gains, and in general should look upon money earned without laboring for it with scorn.
Clinton was able to run a federal government spending less than 20% of GDP, since George Walker Bush federal spending has exploded to the 25 to 30% range. The reality is that 20% is plenty, and can solve all the problems government has the ability to solve.
Need to start by NOT
1) serving as the worlds policeman
2) building double the aircraft carrier tonnage of the rest of the world combined.
3) spending a trillion dollars on newest latest fighters not ready for service when we aren't at war
4) staging US troops and ships in the Middle East or Europe when both are immensely wealthy and able to defend themselves.
5) pouring $40B into a launch system design based on obsolete technologies and an overweight deep space capsule that needs a year to replace a single bad power unit.
6) subsidizing professional sports leagues paying millions a year per employee. etc, etc.
A good start would be requiring senators and congresspeople to recuse themselves from any legislation that specifically allocates funds for any projects in their states/districts. Get away from the thousand page earmarked pork funding bills and focus their responsibilities on legitimate national interests.
Have you looked at the federal budget? The expenditures you mention are insignificant. Social security and medical assistance programs make up 48% [1] of the federal budget. Defense only makes up 16%, and of that, only 27% goes to the navy. Another 8% is various assistance programs. 8% is interest on debt. 0.5% is all of NASA.
You can't really reduce the government's expenditure levels by cutting a few high-profile programs that some consider wasteful. The majority of the budget goes to supporting the most vulnerable in society. Cutting these programs is politically impossible.
> thousand page earmarked pork funding bills and focus their responsibilities on legitimate national interests.
Earmarks are dead already. But they shouldn't be: earmarks let lawmakers swap favors in a way that promotes the smooth operation of government and compromise in lawmaking. Yes, there's some corruption, but that corruption was a small price to pay for decreasing the overall level of hostility in the legislature and promoting compromise.
[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/policy-basics-w...
And most social security payments go to people with living standards at or above the US median.
First, a soldier wounded in Afghanistan and being treated in a VA hospital would have to have that cost excluded from the budget.
The department of energy dealing with nuclear weapon waste is excluded from that budget.
The office of a foreign US embassy serving as cover for a CIA case officer is excluded from that budget.
Interest on military deficit spending from last year is excluded from that budget.
In fact, add all these things up which don't fall within this theoretical 12% and it comes to hundreds of billions of dollars.
Defense Department base budget: $636 billion.
DoD Overseas Contingency Operations: $69 billion.
Departments that support defense: $228 billion. They include the Department of Veterans Affairs ($93 billion), State Department ($48 billion), Homeland Security ($48 billion), FBI and Cybersecurity ($10 billion), and the National Nuclear Security Administration ($17 billion).
NATO is an organization of countries near the Russian border. The US could easily get by with 2% or less to defend it's own borders. If Russia invades Germany we can ship and airlift troops and meet them in France (given that Germany won't spend enough to defend itself).
This info is woefully out of date, and at least some attribute the sharp increase in partisanship and gridlock to the ban on earmarks preventing horse trading.
If it is, please explain the SLS. It's entire design was dictated by Congress to use specific components from specific contractors.
What I personally would do, if I could, is to target the unscrupulous rich by banning companies located in tax havens from operating in the country, unless they can prove that they have proportionally high enough of employees working full-time in the said tax haven compared to their assets. That, I would say, is very achievable goal that would affect mostly just tax-dodgers and give a strong signal that those practices should come to an end.
I think it is just unfair that normal people have pay taxes up to 50% on their earnings (depending on the country of course) while millionaires and billionaires can just bypass the whole system by incorporating a holding company in Cayman Islands. Or mega corporations that can even negotiate special tax privileges.
That's not what the article is proposing; it specifies a tax only on the land, not on whatever is built on the land. The point is to incentivize transferring ownership of the land to whoever can get the highest value use out of it; that only works if the tax itself is only on the land, so it makes sense to build higher value infrastructure on it since that raises the income from the land without raising the tax.
Insurers have no problems assessing land value and have been doing it for centuries.
One of the funner ones I've heard of is that the owner and payer of the property tax performs the valuation of the land: it makes implementation pretty much free and uncontroversial! The only caveat is that whatever value the owner lists as the value is an amount they must accept for the land in a sale (plus some meaningful fee to drive off trolls).
So, sure, you can list the value of the land of your Pac Heights mansion as $1 and pay a commensurate tax on that. If you do, though, someone can purchase it for $1 and start charging you a hefty use fee.
A captain could declare the value of the cargo whatever he sees fit, and pay the tax on that amount.
The customs reserved the right to buy the entire cargo at the declared price, at their discretion.
It's a bit harder to implement with large parcels of land, but should work well with home-sized lots.
It's only in trying to resist the above that the difficulties arise.
However, I'd love to be pleasantly surprised, and occasionally am, e.g., apparently Baden-Wurttemburg (the German state that includes Stuttgart) has recently passed a LVT scheduled to be implemented in 2025 https://libdemsalter.org.uk/en/article/2020/1382897/germany-...
If one can, by some miracle, pass simple policies like LVT and UBI, the resulting fronts and battlegrounds are a hell of a lot clearer.
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem shows "that under certain conditions [presumably including limited squandering, though I didn't check], beneficial investments in public goods will increase aggregate land rents by at least as much as the investments cost"
The government can also hand out cash raised from the LVT as a UBI.
Problem solved.
It's a flow of income (land rent) that can accrue either to everybody and be shared or to individuals. One way or another some party has to be the beneficiary. The question is who deserves this unearned income?
It would make little sense to have two kinds of property tax.
Today:
c(land value) + c(building value) = tax
eventually:
big(land value) + small(building value) = tax
Just interpolate between those the obvious way.
Almost automatically, the assessment of just land has to be harder than the assessment of land plus the property that's there. And assessing land for taxes tends to be politically hard. For example, the overall process of real estate taxation in California was politicized into a disastrous mess years ago with proposition 13. Just undo prop 13 would be a simpler matter and even that likely isn't going to happen.
Further consider, the objective land value of a parcel in Mountain View is probably less than the assessed value a lot of homeowners pay their taxes based on. I'd be in favor of measures that force more intensives use of that land but taking on home-owners with vast political influence is going to be a challenge.
The goal is essentially to separate the value of land based on local infrastructure like subway systems from the amount of effort put into improving the property. An empty lot that’s worth 10,000$ per acre may physically look the same as an empty lot worth 10,000,000$ per acre, but it’s clear society not the property owner generated that value is.
That said, there are a lot of edge cases like beach front property vs having another house in front.
You need a ball park figure for land value to work and even that is going to depend on the philosophy used for valuation. If Walmart buys the cheapest land it can find and builds a distribution center on that land, how much is that land worth? What they paid for it? What someone else would pay for it now? How bought all the parcels around it that now would be useful for housing?
Either paradigm is real estate valuation (at which point it become real estate tax) or the paradigm is something else with that something else up for grabs.
Good. That's the whole point. That abandonment of ownership gives other people the opportunity to make use of it for their own benefit.
That is: the very act of land ownership externalizes opportunity costs on the rest of society, and this is what underpins wealth inequality. LVT forces landowners to internalize those costs.
They’re also spending more than they ever have before in history.
> The LVT is not the same as a property tax, as it does not punish those who put the land to use; it taxes only the land, not the structure built on top of it.
I’m not convinced this is that different than what’s happening now. For a $1m house in the Bay Area, only a quarter or a third of that value is the structure.
> However, most of all, it is one of the rare taxes that does not diminish economic activity, and in fact stimulates it.
How do they arrive at this conclusion? A bakery that’s been around for 100 years finds itself in a hip part of town (which maybe it helped foster), and then has to move out because the only type of business that can support the LVT in the area is luxury apartments. The higher the LVT, the more risk of a monoculture in land usage, not the other way around.
So the first problem is zoning, but imagine if zoning is fixed. Now the taller the building is, the smaller the portion of the taxable value derives from the land itself.
The fact of the matter is single family suburbia is a scourge, and we need redevelopment not more development. We can subsidize affordable housing, or we can structure the taxes such that the only economical thing to do is massively denser buildings immediately. The latter is better because it is simpler and less subject to regulatory capture.
Which is sort of the problem, right? You have an area which is, say, two story buildings, in an area where you really need an average of three story buildings to satisfy local demand.
Implement LVT and everyone gets the bright idea to build twelve story buildings, because why wouldn't they? Three story buildings would have four times the tax per unit.
But then you get the opposite problem. Real estate prices crash, because there are suddenly twelve story buildings going up everywhere and the prices need to fall to the level that building more of them isn't viable even against the tax advantage. Which is well before you're saturated with tall buildings.
But now you have a thousand plots of land and 10% of them have new tall buildings while 90% have existing single family homes. Now the owners of the single family homes are paying a disproportionate amount of the taxes. They abandon their properties, which have already declined in value, because the tax is more than the newly lowered cost of buying space in one of the tall buildings.
The government is now receiving no tax from 90% of the lots because they've been abandoned, so the land tax amount has to increase by ten fold per plot. But that makes it profitable to build 25 story buildings instead of twelve story ones, to amortize the tax over more units, and the cycle repeats.
It seems obvious that this only works if the amount of the land tax isn't large enough to cause these behavioral changes.
The problem in the Bay Area is simply that taxable value assessed only at sale.
No, tax-basis value is assessed annually. However, increases in assessed value are limited to a maximum of 2% per year outside of certain events qualifying for full-value assessment of the property or particular improvements. (And this is statewide, not Bay Area specific).
That incentive already exists, landholders typically use their land in a high-value way. If you cast your eye on Europe there are a large contingent of undeserving people who have generations of wealth that they secure through owning land, which does not degrade over time. The big win of a land tax is about breaking ultra-low-risk inter-generational wealth transfer. If wealth is transferred between generations there at least has to be some level of competent management demonstrated by each new layer of the family tree.
The same principle seem to apply to LVT: A landowner would, it seems, be forced, by the taxes extracted from them, to generate a matching (or larger) income by the land, regardless if they might feel that the community would be better served by using the land for something which would, incidentally, make less money for them personally.
If the object of LVT is to prevent inter-generational wealth transfer, I would assume that there would be vastly more effective ways to accomplish this more directly. Or there could at least be some carve-out which limits the effect of a LVT to those instances.
But that's theoretically. Whether you could actually impose this regime is a different matter. What the "real" value of land isn't a clear thing thing imo. A town might that since it's zoning prevents building much, it's land isn't worth much.
I think the one thing is clear and I agree with is taxes increases capital outflow. But my biggest issue is with the central premise that is taken at face value. That the government needs more money. I don't think it does. The US government especially has far to much money and waste most of it.
So I'd say instead of trying to find sneaky ways of taking more of the citizen money maybe incentive it to be use to create more opportunities. Instead of taking from some to give to other incentive opportunities so those who have will willingly give opportunities to those who don't
What does this even mean? This is not a sentence :)
How would this same situation play out with a land-value tax?
The other difference is that proponents of LVT often argue it should replace other taxes like income tax. But regardless of theoretical efficiency criteria, it's a lot easier to persuade people that a large fixed portion of their earnings are the government's share than give them an enormous bill for the valuable land their house sits on and tell them if they're not earning enough to afford it they can always move (as long as they can find a buyer...). Which is why LVT has been 'inevitable' since before the Industrial Revolution without it being very widely experimented with
I feel like homeowners may become more resistant to city services and improvements in their area if it will impact their bottom line disproportionately. I guess it would come down to the value formulation.
Tax should be based on land value, not your improvements. So a really nice house isn't taxed more than a run down house. Fixing up the house, or knocking down a post war box and putting up a nice modern house, should not change your taxes.
Tax needs to vary with the maximum use of the land. A daily farm that is now surrounded by luxury apartments should pay taxes at the same rate per acre as those luxury apartments. This is where people start to flip out and get offended that they might be on the side of things that's disadvantaged by it.
Most property tax systems in the US have features that allow some land to be taxed at much lower rates than other land based just on historical ownership. Most notorious is California's Prop 13. The beneficial incentive system of the LVT is that it encouraging redeveloping now-valuable land. That means grandma can't afford to live there anymore. But, that only happens if grandma owns land that has appreciated, so she's probably okay overall.
I'm not really clear on whether LVT always goes with opposition to zoning or discretionary review, but I have seen some of that as well.
AIUI, they see a few benefits:
- it will ensure someone holding onto empty land for future use will have to pay at the same "rate" as you do. They don't get a discount simply because they choose not to use the land. If you aim to collect the same total amount of revenue, this would lower your tax.
- Use of land would be better optimized if there was no disincentive to build an expensive (eg bigger/denser) building. IMO this is flawed in that local land use rules are the bigger issue compared to tax policy.
To me, it almost sounds like this type of tax puts more power in the hands of big developers, which is a challenge many municipalities deal with right now - striking the right balance with that. If they want to force someone to sell the remaining property in a block they’re trying to develop, wouldn’t they just need to make enough improvements that the city drives that person out with taxes?
I can’t help but think it could incentivize municipal governments seeking revenue to approve big projects without input from people living there, and incentivize people living somewhere to being actively anti-development.
So I guess it can't be that way, as it would piss a lot of people off.
Most likely, it would be heavily based on zoning, neighborhood, and proximity to jobs and transit. Take Los Angeles, for example. I would imagine you could actually see taxes in predominantly SFH enclaves like Calabasas or Malibu 1hr+ from job centers go _down_ while taxes on similar single family homes in West Hollywood or Beverly Hills, being much more incorporated into the urban framework of LA, would go up.
Wealthy people can still have their expansive estates elsewhere, but the incentive is to move them off of land that would have a better use serving more people: just as it doesn’t make too much sense for the Empire State Building to be built in Aspen, CO, it doesn’t make much sense for a single-family, detached vacation home with a white picket fence and yard to be built in the financial district of Manhattan.
If you completely renovate the house, a property tax would go up but the lvt stays the same.
After the transition period, far fewer people can afford freestanding single-family buildings.
I'd also like to see more general resource use taxes (i.e taxes on raw materials like water, oil, aluminum etc.). They could be adjusted based on economic conditions (instead of playing shell games with interest rates) and adjusted for external effects. Make it formulaic. Open source, everyone can see how it works and who adjusted and how and it's not a closed door XX party with input from lobbyists.
Among other good effects I see this encouraging efficient use and recycling.
Take Google, for instance. Google owns some buildings on some land. But, in proportion to how valuable Google is, they don't own much land. What they own is a mountain of code, and multiple mountains of data. The single most valuable thing they own is the google.com domain. And out of all of that, we're going to tax... the land? Huh?
If all money came from land, then LTV would make sense. When it was devised, that was more or less true. But it's not the 1800s any more, and that is a long way from true today.
This sounds regressive. So someone with a bungalow on their property pays the same tax as someone with a 40 story apartment building?
If the bungalow is out in the suburbs and the apartment building is downtown next to the transit station, the apartment will pay MUCH more tax as that land is much more valuable.
The land is our collective inheritence, so someone with 1 story bungalow on highly desireable land is actually extremely selfish and decedent in their misuse of the commons.
To get less moral and more mathematical, developers can lessen their tax only to the extent that the flood the market with floors pace, devaluing the good they are selling (floor space, not land space). This forces and equilibrium where the vast majority of people do better than today.
It's not regressive at all. You pay tax based on the value of the land. If you're not utilizing the full value of the land (by leaving it vacant or otherwise under built compared to the demand) then you're going to pay more in taxes than you get out of it. The whole purpose of LVT is to nudge you toward either improving the land so you can utilize its value or sell it to someone who will.
We can't make that determination without knowing how much profit a rented bungalow can receive versus the apartment building. A bungalow in midtown Manhattan might very well house one of the world's richest families.
Fundamentally, LVT is a wealth tax. If you hold a large amount of wealth (land) but have no income then the tax would seem regressive from an income-based perspective. But from a wealth-based perspective, its a perfectly reasonable thing to expect those that own to pay taxes not just those who labor.
This is exactly the point he is making: One should put the land to good use. Move the bungalows where land is cheap and tax is low.
Once you start assessing peoples property in such a wholesale fashion, you almost end up in a classic "managed economy" situation. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" failed due to the combined difficulty of assessment + corruption of the assessors. LVT is the same principle applied to land.
I think that LVT will end up as one of those ideas that is great in theory but doesn't work in practice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_...
There is no property tax, but we have capital gains taxes based on transfers of assets.
Income and/or sales tax.
What makes you think that poor people don't inherit property? There are lots of people with very low incomes but who own a house. And no they don't just sell it. Why sell the only house you have? Or maybe it is not their house but it is a piece of property that they have always owned and which they use as a garden or a yard or storage.
They don't sell it because they'd rather have a piece of land to enjoy then some money in the bank. It might be their only luxury in an otherwise frugal life.
What is a better use than property? I though property was the best investment one could make. The government taking property because of a lack of income to pay taxes is heinous.
Who are these people inheriting land who are too poor to use it, too dumb to sell it and losing it to the county?
I live in a high tax state and have served on nonprofit boards that have exposure to housing issues. This didn’t happen.
The common problems of this ilk were usually frauds where caregivers, relatives, powers of attorney or others squander or steal proceeds of reverse mortgages or borrow money against property without telling the family. The other issue that would come up is Medicaid recapture when money is given away.
Usually if there is a tax sale there is some bigger story why the property is worthless. You can borrow against the equity of anything.
You're not a "temporarily embarrassed billionaire", and if owning land one can no longer afford seems commonplace, it is entirely because the current real estate speculation scheme we prop up (CA especially).
Any realistic LVT would be phases in slowly, and give the prop 13 petit gentry plenty of time to sell and live a fine remainder of their life in a very fashionable condo.
You make a valid point about services that can be measured, but the point of a Georgist land value tax is that land is the thing that is least distortionary to tax.
I'm not fully bought in and think a transition would be very difficult, but this is one of the reasons I don't like California's Prop 13 (even if I think all the proposed reforms would leave us in a worse state).
Isn't that what property tax already codifies?
Also aren't market forces already essentially doing this? If I sit on an acre of land in a dense area I will have developers knocking at my door and everyone has a price.
Yes you should, that's literally the entire point of an LVT. If you can generate enough productive economic activity on the land to equal/surpass that of ten households, then the tax is no problem, otherwise you should sell it so the houses can use it better.
Why not? You may not be making use of the services because of your inefficient use of land, but you do benefit from those services being available in the form of higher land value.
There is a temporary transition period when shit is weird because we don't have the density/land value gradient to make farming not suffer. The best thing to do is re-plan where the density ought to be to come up with
> pre_plan(x, y) * current_value(x, y)
But I'm not sure how to do this in a way that isn't a political clusterfuck.
If you have real use for the land, paying the lvt won’t be an issue. If you can’t use it efficiently, an lvt will incentivise you to sell what you don’t use.
Also I think "occupancy taxes" as referred to by policy people means a tax on unoccupied land/homes (e.g. pied a terre laws). But I could be mistaken.