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Comment by bluedevil2k | Hacker News Reader

That’s a really regressive tax and would punish poor people, who have a much greater portion of their net worth tied up on land than a rich person.

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At least where I'm from, poor people typically don't own land. They rent. I guess the argument can be made that the landlords would put the rent up to compensate.

I've heard this claim before, but have never seen it supported. Anecdotally, across decades of experience, it's typically not the poorest people I know who own much land, if any at all. Where they do, they own only a little, rather than a lot. Can you speak to your evidence for your claim?

For most middle class families the most expensive asset they own is their house. Do you really need evidence of that? It should be pretty self evident.

What does that statement have to do with whether such a tax would be regressive or not?

It doesn't, I was replying to the comment that assumes that a property tax wouldn't hurt the poor because middle class is infinitely closer to being poor than they are being rich and this type of tax would hurt those people the most thereby causing them to fall into poverty.

Classically [0], land taxes aren't on the value of the house, but of the land underneath. But, let's say that both the house and the land underneath get taxed, as is currently done. As a middle class homeowner, my total property tax bill is a small fraction of my income tax bill.

Let's say the US collects 6 Trillion/ year in all taxes [I'm probably off by some percent, but not too much for an internet comment.] Let's say there are about 1.5 Billion acres of taxable land in the US (Reverse engineered from "The federal government owns about 640 million acres of land in the United States, about 28% of the total land area of 2.27 billion acres." [1]) That works out to $4000/acre. For my ~sixth of an acre lot, my Federal tax bill would be about $700. That works out to be less than what I pay in income tax, so it looks like a deal to me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_lands

For the 30% of Americans who rent it's not any of their net worth. But I agree it's weird to pick real estate as the only asset class. Introduce a progressive wealth tax and eliminate capital gains taxes in favor of taxing all income at one rate.

Land tax is one of those things that you can value easily and collect on easily. It also hurts people who just sit on land, waiting for the value to go up. It also stops negative gearing which drives up housing prices (see Australia)

I think taxing wealth is harder and then defining it is hard (how do you value illiquid shares, options, etc).

You can also have an exemption for the first $1m so that family homes are excluded from the tax.

I think a straight wealth tax should be the next step, because you will need to figure out how to stop people dodging it. Taxing someone who has a ton of debt and wealth might lead to issues.

How often outside a few cities in the world are people just sitting on land? How is the land valued? Where I live there’s an appraisal board to value land - they’re terrible at it and need investigations have shown their friends get lower appraisals.

It can be a land value tax with a progressive rate. And yah as other said, poor people don't own land anyways. Now the middle class would hate this.

Wait... land tax is regressive because poor people have a greater proportion of their net worth in land?

Literal nonsense. What is this economic wonderland you live in where poor people have land and assets?

As for land tax, you can make it progressive with 0% for the first 1m to cover people in high cost areas with only a family home.

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