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by TimPC
1517 days ago
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I think this is fundamentally untrue. It seems plausible for condo owners in large buildings where each unit represents a tiny portion of land. For single family residences consisting of detached or semi-detached homes on slices of valuable land in a city or suburb of a city that's almost certain not to be true. Most of the people you're taxing in a land value tax are residential uses. Taxing the money doesn't magically multiply it and it's impossible to return nearly all of the tax money to constituents since governments have substantial other expenses. My estimate is that a current home worth $1.5 million in a suburb of Toronto has land value of roughly $1.25 million and is likely to be taxed at 10% of land value. This suggests an LVT of $125,000. If the general trend of all residential real estate follows this government raises only 2.688 trillion dollars from residential property. To fund federal government we'd have to raise another 1.362 trillion and then we'd have additional amounts to raise for each other level of government. I'm not certain whether we can do this from the additional amounts on commercial and industrial property but it seems to be a close approximation. The point is the funds leave very little left for the citizen's dividend unless we want to vastly reduce existing government programs. |
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> Most of the people you're taxing in a land value tax are residential uses.
You're forgetting the sheer quantities of land (and land value) consumed by commercial and industrial use; this land, too, would be taxed. Such land is arguably far greater (in terms of value) than most residential land; consider every office building, every factory, every warehouse, every store, every parking lot/garage, every mine, every farm, and you'd see how that 1.362 trillion (and then some!) would be possible.
Another factor here is ATCOR (All Taxes Come Out of Rent), the idea that since non-LVT taxes suppress economic activity (because they tax things with elastic supply, artificially raising their prices), replacing all taxes with LVT would remove that suppression, spurring greater demand for land and therefore higher land values (and therefore higher LVT revenues). Basically: we're already taxing land indirectly and less efficiently, so we might as well just tax land directly.
Further:
> The point is the funds leave very little left for the citizen's dividend unless we want to vastly reduce existing government programs.
Which is very possible. A citizens' dividend, like any other sort of UBI, makes a lot of existing welfare programs redundant. Most Georgists/geolibertarians (myself included) frown upon the insane amounts of "defense" spending here in the US, so that'd be another thing we'd push to cut.