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by jppope 26 days ago
Just going to put this here to open up discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
1 comments

Which is a tax on only one kind of wealth. Back when that was the kind that mattered most, that made sense. Today? Not so much.
Still, seems like table stakes.

Start with georgist/pigouvian taxes, and then expand to other kinds of income/wealth afterwards.

But Georgist taxes can go really far I'd imagine.

No, why? If we're going to do a wealth tax, then do a wealth tax. Why single out only one kind of wealth, and the kind that is not even the most important these days?

(What's more important? IP. The value of Google, say, isn't in the land it owns. It's in the code, the database of web pages, and the google.com domain name.)

> Why single out only one kind of wealth

Because of some very good reasons. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smi_iIoKybg

> kind that is not even the most important these days

uhhh source on that? I'm pretty sure land is literally the largest asset class in the economy. Real estate is by many estimates over 2X as large as the entire combined global market cap of all publicly traded companies. https://europhoenix.com/blog/part-ii-on-asset-classes-size-o...

No, I'm not going to watch a video to see what your point is. Either tell me, or don't.

Re your last paragraph: I admit I'm surprised by that. Still... Georgism calls for a tax only on the value of the land, not on the improvements. Of all that money in real estate, how much is in the improvements, and how much is in the raw land?

> This figure includes only high quality retail property, offices, industrial, hotels, residential, other commercial uses, and agricultural land

From this I gather that a large chunk of it is the improvements.

And, if real estate is the biggest category, why focus just on the land part of that, and ignore all the improvements on it?

This article is about a wealth tax. The arguments for Georgism are about something else - about social policy. It may even work as social policy, though I have at least some doubts. But as a wealth tax, it's not very effective. (If I were a rich person, I could buy a $100 million apartment in New York, and have the rest of my assets in stocks and gold and art, and my tax liability would be for my pro-rated fraction of the land that the high rise that held my apartment occupied. As a wealth tax, that's got far too many loopholes to be useful.)

it's more than that, because it's the one kind of wealth that has an (almost) completely inelastic supply
Same is true of gold. So why single out land?
the same is not true of gold.