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Sorry for the late reply. > 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. |