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by nostrademons
2209 days ago
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Land taxes are actually better in those regards than income or capital gains taxes. You can't hide land, and if you want the state to enforce your property rights, you can't alter your behavior in a way that lets you avoid paying the tax. That makes the land tax what economist call a "zero-deadweight" tax: it doesn't decrease economic activity or consumer wellbeing at all. There's also an economic theorem [1] that an LVT results in the optimal size of government: investment in public goods increases the value of land (and hence rent that can be charged for it), but also the tax on that land, so citizens have an incentive to vote in only those public works projects that increase rents more than their cost in taxes. Whereas if you put a tariff on iPhones at the dock, Apple will pass that tariff along to consumers, prices will go up, and fewer people that want an iPhone will be able to afford one. The "HQ in Ireland" trick revolves around avoiding dollars at all: profits from a company's EUs operations are retained as Euros and then used to pay European employees or exchanged directly for RMBs to pay for Chinese goods. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem |
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