What doesn't remotely make sense to me is the suggestion that LVT should be the primary or even only tax, which you see others arguing for here in the comments.
Not least because of their constant attempts to disguise what they do as productive.
It's not like people are in a coffee shop and seeing "% of this product that goes to rent" built into the prices. They tend to assume that the price of the cup is basically the ingredients (which is why people balk at paying for tap water in restaurants).
If a high (but arguably appropriate and fair) land value tax was implemented and captured like 8-10 % points of that, it would fund like 70% of the government.
(Edit: Fixed typo.)
The landlord, as evidenced by the fact that you are calling the land good or bad prior to having been developed by the landlord, should earn no profit based on that difference, because that difference would exist regardless of who – if anyone – is the landlord.
If the landlord makes some particular investment in addition to the "natural" or community-driven component of the land's value, she will keep all of the upside from that investment.
To repeat: All the gains generated by improvements upon the land – or enhancements in the "usability" of the land – will be retained by the landlord.
That is sufficient incentive for landlords to productively develop on valuable land. More importantly, it is a disincentive to speculating on that land (or withholding it from the market/withholding it from productive use). This is of course a behavior you see all over high value areas.
They provide access to their land, which is the same thing. This debate is not about who (or what) created the physical dirt. It is about the economic value of the property, which only exists as a result of human action.
> as evidenced by the fact that you are calling the land good or bad prior to having been developed by the landlord
You misread. The land is known to be good or bad in retrospect. At the time it was developed that classification was only speculative. This particular landlord thought the land would be good and thus worth developing. Others disagreed and didn't bid as highly for it. The landlord is rewarded not for others' efforts but for the fact that they were right when they predicted that this would be a good location for their development.
> All the gains generated by improvements upon the land – or enhancements in the "usability" of the land – will be retained by the landlord.
To the best approximation either of us will be able to come up with that is 100% of the market value of the land. However, you are speaking in terms of ideals. In practice only the cost of building physical structures on the land will be counted as "improvement". There is no need to guess; this is the legal standard which is already applied in the rare situations where improvements must be valued separately from the land. However, it severely understates the property owners' contributions to the overall value.
> More importantly, it is a disincentive to speculating on that land (or withholding it from the market/withholding it from productive use).
The fact that you fail to see the economic value of speculation is a depressingly common failing among LVT supporters. Putting land to a lower-value use now prevents it from being put to a higher-value use later, which destroys wealth. Speculation holds the land ready for the higher-value use, which is why it is rewarded.
Here's a hypothetical example: Say there's a plot of land which could be used for either warehousing or family homes. If you simply put it up for auction right now for a term of perhaps 50 years you'll get $100M from the warehouse representatives or $80M from family home developers. Whichever way you go you'll be locked in to that use for at least 50 years. However, trends show that the warehouse industry is in a decline, whereas demand for family homes in that area will likely increase to $150M within ten years—meaning that if you just take the highest offer now then you will be losing out on $50M of value and those families won't have enough homes. In the best case there will be a significant cost incurred to demolish the warehouses and rebuild. The correct answer here is to speculate based on the trends that a higher-value use will come along and allow only short-term, non-destructive uses of the property in the interim rather than auctioning it off immediately. Or even leave it vacant for a few years if there are no such uses.
They neither made the land nor made it valuable, so they're not "providing" it in any meaningful sense. They're relinquishing their state provided entitlement to expel users of the land with state-backed violence. In exchange for resources.
what turns iron ore into a car is labor, which you should pay the laborer for.
that is, unless you think you should have a greater share of mineral rights than somebody else for some reason.
What would you call money which accumulates in your bank account which you didn't have to work for?
(I could the portion of rent which would be left over after a rentier paying management fees here. Managing a property is work. Owning is not.)
To rent out property you must first own property. To own property you must buy property. Buying property requires resources. Accumulating enough resources to buy property requires a great deal of work, to say nothing of the effort which goes in to deciding which properties to buy or sell or the opportunity cost of deferring consumption. All of that work occurs before the first rent check is paid or any property management fees are accrued (assuming you hired someone else to manage the property).
The concept may seem alien to someone accustomed to a weekly or biweekly paycheck from their employer, but in many fields, including investment (in real estate or anything else), the majority of the work occurs long before any income is received. The income is no less earned merely because it does not occur in close proximity to the work.
Or inherit. Mayfair is rented out by the Duke of Westminster not because him or any or his ancestors did anything as crass as buying it but because he traces his lineage back to a mate of William the conqueror (note : not William the buyer. Conqueror. The distinction is important you see) in 1066.
Broadly speaking, all land wealth is derived this way, no matter how many hands it passes through on the way to its current owner.
You no doubt believe that the act of buying and selling land and working with it somehow "morally sterilizes" it. It does not. If Mayfair was sold it would still be conquered wealth.
I am very well aware that investments do not necessarily pay off immediately and you know very well that that is not what I am talking about at all.
Nonsense. If that particular plot of land was stolen then the people it was stolen from are welcome to assert their claim. If they can prove that they have one, that is. A thief ("conqueror") does not through their theft obtain the rights to the property which is stolen, and cannot rightfully sell what they do not own. The buyer acquires nothing, and (if innocent) is welcome to sue the thief for fraud to recover what they paid.
However, leaving the ownership uncontested for this long would certainly dilute any claim based on ancestral rights. If there comes a point where no one else is claiming rightful ownership of the land then any prior claim can be considered abandoned, and whoever happens to be using it at that point holds the rights to it by default. Even if it was originally stolen. So the question becomes, has someone maintained their claim to the land and passed it down to their descendents from 1066 until now? Or was that claim permitted to lapse?
The duke of westminster doesn't use the land, though, he rents it out. If use of land begets ownership, why does the claim originally stem from william the conqueror murdering a bunch of peasants rather than me renting a flat since 2005?
This idea of yours makes no sense.
Then it should become obvious that some part of the profit is due to "work" i.e. investing money in an area by building upgrading, and some part is due to other people doing the same. So in a hot new area, a bunch of people moving in, opening hip restaurants, renovating old buildings, improving parks contributes to the landlords profit, because an empty lots value will rise as well.
Let's look at a hypothetical case for a moment. Say I buy some otherwise nice property for cheap because it's in the middle of nowhere and there is no easy way to get to it. Trees, lakes, etc. but no nearby roads. The LVT would be low, right? If you auctioned it off in that state as unimproved property you wouldn't get many takers. But say I build a private road to that area at my own expense, and then rent out the now-accessible land in family-size lots. The land hasn't changed, but its value is much higher now because of something I did. How would the "unimproved" value of those lots be assessed, and who receives the LVT? If the answer to that last question isn't "me" (and it won't be) then someone is receiving an unearned benefit from my work.
Even if you think it's somehow "unfair" for property owners to benefit financially from general improvements in their communities, LVT doesn't change the fact that someone is still getting an unearned external benefit. It takes from the property owner without doing much at all to ensure that the LVT goes to the parties actually responsible for the improvement.
Of course in reality it's not a private road or private sewer system or private fire service or private police force, it's all provided by government via taxes.
Taxes that people pay based on how much they earn, a far more obvious source of people being penalised for doing the right thing.
If you have an empty lot and you improve the district you can get your reward by selling the plot or opening your own business on it. Under LVT what you can't do is just sit on it for years at no cost to yourself, but great costs to others just in case it turns out to be a lottery ticket.
One assumes that the people I'm renting the lots to are permitted to use the road as part of their contract. But let's make this simple and say that I offer a perpetual agreement to let anyone use this road at cost, whether they rent from me or not. The road is a loss-leader; I intend to make my money by renting out the land, not by operating a toll road.
There are plenty of examples of communities with their own private roads and other services. Not everything of value to a community is provided by the government.
> you can get your reward by selling the plot
That won't work. Whoever buys it would be taking over the LVT payments, so that expense will come out of the resale value of the property.
> Under LVT what you can't do is just sit on it for years at no cost to yourself, but great costs to others just in case it turns out to be a lottery ticket.
And here we once again have someone failing to see the economic value of speculation.
The only reason to "sit on" the land and not use it would be that any use you could put the land to now would interfere with taking advantage of an even more valuable opportunity which you anticipate in the future. Not holding the land in readiness for that more valuable future use under such circumstances would be destructive.
When you were new to arithmetic, did it remotely make sense to you that the number of integers and the number of even integers was the same?
If you find a surprising conclusion, consider reading the argument. Perhaps you will discover that you agree with the premises and the reasoning, and the conclusion will seem less surprising.
Here in the finite world, most of the money moving around is in services, while most of the land is disconnected from that economy. How are you getting 1-2 trillion in tax revenue from land without making, say, farming economically unviable? Will it just be riddled through with exceptions and carveouts?
An acre in midtown Manhattan might be worth $250 million to as much as $1.25 billion, before we look at the building that is on it. (An acre is a big lot in Manhattan -- a whole city block.) A tiny lot in Manhattan sells hundreds of thousands of dollars, due to its location, which the seller didn't create. The old building on it may be worth nothing.
And the 100x100 lot with a new hotel on it and the 100x100 lot next door with just a parking lot, or maybe just a chain link fence, would be assessed identically. The unimproved value of the land.
Farmers would pay little under LVT. In fact they'd be advantaged, because their buildings and equipment would not be taxed. The owners of sites in our major cities would pay in proportion to the value of their site. And frequently the land is already leased to someone who puts a building on it, which gives a sense of the value of the land at the time the lease was negotiated -- a value which is not always made public.
And why would we want to tax wages, or sales, if we could obtain from the value of land much of the revenue we need, while providing a boost to the economy via removing the deadweight loss of dumb taxes?
On that note, is the inherent land value of a lot in Bushwick way higher then 20 years ago now that they've gentrified? Is neighborhood desirability an 'unimproved' attribute?
I very much get where you guys are coming from in a philosophical sense, but I feel like there are a million wrenches in the works that everyone's ignoring because the theory is so nice.
Yes. Desirability and infrastructure near land increases it's unimproved value.
If you want to pay less taxes, you move to an area that doesn't do this sort of investment. If you want nice stuff, you can move in and pay for it, and be content that people who are against improvement are kicked out by higher taxes.
So we need additional correctives to the additional injustices that capitalism has invented since Henry George's time, like our NIMBY-promoting land use decision system. We could, for example, adopt something like Japan's more federal system.
What LVT proponents really want is some kind of oracle that will tell them just how much of the (estimated) market value of a property is due to the direct efforts of the past and present owners of the property and how much is external benefit from the actions of others. Two problems with this approach are (a) there is no such oracle and (b) the "unimproved" value includes external benefits property owners provide to their communities which are not included in the assessed value of any obvious material improvements to their own properties. There is something fundamentally self-defeating in any proposal which would result in taxing people extra for their contributions to the public good.
The idea that land has any "unimproved value" to be taxed is flawed from the start. In fact land has no economic value until someone claims it and puts it to use. If you walled off a piece of land such that no one could reach it, even an otherwise choice parcel in the middle of Manhattan, it might as well not exist. All economic value is the result of human improvements, though they don't always take the form of physical changes to the property. LVT takes physical improvement as a proxy for improvements attributable to the property owner(s), but this is at best a lower bound and significantly understates the owners' own contributions to the property value.
The situation is almost tautological. I mean, suppose Amazon builds a giant shipping depot in the middle of nowhere. The land was worth nothing before. Without the depot, it would be worth nothing now. Then town arises around giant depot. Town tries to raise taxes on Amazon says "still worth nothing if we leave". Who's right?
Edit: Some of this is more or less what’s happening when buying a property based on a mortgage. The bank decides what the property might be worth, and what the new owner will be able to pay in rent. It must be possible to do slight adjustments in this scheme so that the rent ends up as tax instead.
As Bushwick becomes popular, because of better transit, or community amenities or whatever, yes, the unimproved value of the sites served by them go up. A school develops an excellent reputation? Up go the land values. (Some say that in most suburban towns, the superintendent of schools is the highest paid employee, in part because s/he can influence "property values" -- more precisely, land values -- more than any other single person.)
My first acquaintance with Elizabeth Warren came from a book she wrote about 2003, whose title was something like "The Two Income Trap: How Middle Class Parents are Going Broke" and in part it was from seeking the best public schools for their children, and paying a huge share of their income for it, seldom to be matched by single parents.
We know what the total budget is right now, at a national, state, and local level. And we know where that income is coming from -- mostly a mix of income, property, sales, payroll, corporate, and other taxes. And crucially we know exactly what the breakdown of that taxation burden is on various people in various financial situations.
I want to see the numbers on this Georgian proposal that show the total revenue at federal, state, and local levels. Is the total amount of tax the same? Or are we talking about radically reduced tax revenue in total? And how does the distribution of who pays this tax change under the new system? Then, and only then, with these figures, we can look at the proposal and see if it remotely makes sense using the typical criteria of (a) is there enough funding for current levels of government services at all levels, (b) are the changes in who's paying how much in taxes fair and equitable, etc.
I really want to see a full proposal on exactly what a typical individual and corporate tax bill for a variety of common situations, and I want to see that those numbers all add up to enough revenue.
But what we really care about is what the system looks like a decade in, after property values have massive changes. And what it looks like 50 years in, after cities have been remade to reflect the shift in tax costs. I don't think any modern day Georgist argue for "single tax." Remember that income tax wasn't in place in the US when Henry George started writing!
So any modern plan will Lokey include shifting tax bases, over time, to rely more heavily on LVT and less on sales tax and other regressive taxes. This will require adaptation and policy change over the years and decades, rather than saying ahead of time that they can predict the future with absolute certainty.
There were also significant tariffs on imported goods. Sugar and tea, which the poor liked as well as the rich. One of HG's books was "Protection or Free Trade" which Milton Friedman called his favorite book on the topic. (Then again, Friedman repeatedly called land value taxation the "least bad" tax, but never found the motivation to promote its application.) I had occasion to dip into POFT last week, and found it pleasurable and interesting reading. Its at Schalkenbach's website, among other places.
Yes, a shift could be quite gradual, though I suspect that once it was begun, and people began to see the beauty of untaxing buildings, wages, sales, it would likely be sped up.
And tax revenues reach the government without middlemen collecting their share, so the cost will be lower to those who pay.
It does not seem at all clear to me that most economic activity is in services and not in resources/monopoly ownership.
> farming economically unviable
Farming is already unviable, that's why we subsidize it so heavily.
I'm fine with taxing the hell out of Exxon, btw, or at least not giving them cash-in-a-briefcase subsidies, but you're not going to replace the income tax on that.
We collected 3.46 trillion in income taxes last year. How do you get there on a land-value tax? Do we weight it so Manhattan land owners are paying more in tax than the entire midwest?
That said, you roll out the new policy gradually by reducing labor related taxes while increasing land and monopoly related ones.
After several iterations you should expect convergence to a new stable position.
It's better to prefer iterative deployment over big bang changes. Not only in software.
And when the Single Tax was conceived, it was already abundantly clear that urban land values were far above rural land values, and rising much faster.
Few tech companies will want to locate where there isn't already broadband, good schools, cultural amenities, a range of interesting restaurants, and ready pool of the talents they need, not to mention infrastructure such was water, sewer, medical care, etc. And to the extent that they create jobs in such places, they will probably be quite welcome.
Though, wouldn't an LVT that encourage companies to push all their employees to work from home, where possible? There are certainly benefits to that, but it might mean that certain industries get taxed much more heavily than others. Is it ok if distributed work-from-home software companies pay no tax at all, because they have no offices? The workers would pay tax on their own houses and apartments, but the company wouldn't.
I guess it depends on whether you want to consider taxes to be a tool for limiting rent on scarce resources, or for balancing out wealth disparities. (aside from the main goal of raising revenue, of course) The two things are related, but not identical. The first seems like more of a proxy for what we actually want to do, which is to prevent concentration of wealth. Or is it more about the fact that collecting rent isn't an economically productive activity, so if we incentivize everyone to gain wealth by producing value, it'll make us all wealthier?
To be fair, the hurdle that LVT has to pass is not to be perfect, but just to be better than what we have, which isn't a high bar. But it is worth thinking about the possible loopholes and edge cases.
Should we also assume that switching to a single tax wouldn't exclude things like cigarette taxes and carbon taxes? These taxes are designed intentionally with particular incentives, just like the LVT, and unlike property taxes and income taxes. It would be a shame to take away the single best tool we have for fighting climate change, for example.
Anyway, no obligation to reply, a lot of these questions are just me thinking out loud.
Solar energy is an infinite resource, so there is no reason to charge for it, but for scarce or finite resources, pay for what you take.
A LVT will generally greatly decrease the concentration of wealth. The massive concentration of wealth in the Bay Area economy comes mostly from land owners extracting an inordinate amount of wages, something far greater than the 30% that is typically considered livable. Tech takes from others far less than the landowners take from laborers.
Tech is flashy and gets all the attention these days, but it's not the big story when it comes to exploitive capitalism in the Bay Area. What's really driving poverty and homelessness and evictions are the housing austerity imposed by wealthy landlords and landowners and homeowners to maximize their financial gains.
It is a form of sharecropping.
And then we must pay the dumb taxes on top of it. Sales taxes, wage taxes.
Taxing land value fully would bring the purchase price of a home down to the depreciated value of the structure plus something for the lovely mature landscaping. Instead of a downpayment on the land and building, one would, in effect, be purchasing the building from its current owner, and taking over the stream of location-based payment to the community. No down payment on that. Mortgages would be smaller, and shorter, and the sum of the mortgage payment and one's land value tax would be a lot less than the current sum of one's housing-related costs plus the dumb taxes. If one wanted to move from one city to another, selling one's home would be easier because more people could afford it, and in one's new city, one could afford a similar home, because wages in the new city would support the higher tax on the higher land value there.
Today, moving from Peoria to NYC or Silicon Valley is a whole other ballgame.
Phase this in, removing the dumb taxes, one after another, and collecting an increasing share of the annual value of the land, and our children will have better opportunities to thrive.
Those who do leave will likely be replaced by others seeking those things.