Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

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I've never seen the numbers proposed in a way that makes sense.

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.

The problem with looking at it this way is that we can see what will happen in the first months or years of the new tax system, because values take a while to change.

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.

I don't think there's many people that want what essentially amounts to a 50-year revolution. It seems implausible that something like that would ever succeed; it would be long-aborted before then because citizens (rightfully) will not wait two generations for results.

More likely that we'll see a disintegration of the dominant 20th-century political order (anyway; independent of Georgism), and then a number of local communities will try different socioeconomic systems in the rubble. Hopefully some will try Georgism, they'll do better than their neighbors that try say socialism or fascism, and over that 50 year period the best economic system will win. If there's free migration between states then people will vote with their feet; if there's not you'll likely see successive state collapse and revolution in the states that do not have systems that meet the needs of their people.

When HG was writing, there were taxes on land, on buildings, on personal property such as watches, horses, carriages, umbrellas ... the poor paid the personal property taxes -- and widows and orphans paid them, because their trustee wouldn't swear off on less than the real amount. But on his own holdings, well, they were quite meager. Some interesting news articles compared the personal property of rich decedents to the personal property on which they paid annual taxes.

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.

One of the other consequences of an LVT is that it creates incentives to "right-size" the government, since the people who benefit from public goods are the ones funding them. It's very likely that the government is wrong-sized right now. We should expect a pretty dramatic change in the structure and size of government with the adoption of Georgism (or more likely, we shouldn't expect to adopt Georgism within the existing political system but it could be an option for a new nation).

and likely we won't need the huge safety net that is absolutely necessary now.

And tax revenues reach the government without middlemen collecting their share, so the cost will be lower to those who pay.

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