The issue with council tax is that it is extremely regressive: there are 8 bands with (very approximately) only a factor 4, from £1000 to £4000 a year, from lowest to highest. This means that a person in a crappy studio flat on a council estate pays £1000 and another person in a Buckingham Palace style mansion worth tens of millions with tennis, swimming pool, whatnot, pays no more than £4000 since that's the maximum.
This may explain why the wealthy in the UK never complain about council tax and tend to oppose land value tax...
If the incidence falls on the owner, but the occupier pays, they'll pay a lower rent to account for the tax.
If the incidence falls on the occupier, but the owner pays, they'll charge a higher rent to account for the tax.
This why I don't really like public discussions of taxes; they completely ignore incidence. For example, there's a call to "tax corporations more", which is all fine and well, but a corporate tax is sufficient to do so. You also need to make sure that the incidence of the corporate tax falls on the corporation.
Yes, I fully agree with that. I don't see how that refutes my point though.
If the maximum renters will bear is $X/mo before they decide to move to somewhere cheaper, and landlords are currently charging $X/mo and you impose a tax on renters, they'll either ask for their rent to be reduced, or move away.
If landlords charging less than $X, and the tax is imposed on the renters, they'll stay as long as the total is still less than $X. If the tax is imposed on the landlords, they'll raise rents to $X.
[0]: https://www.gov.uk/council-tax/second-homes-and-empty-proper...
> You may pay less Council Tax for a property you own or rent that’s not your main home.
> Councils can give furnished second homes or holiday homes a discount of up to 50%. Contact your council to find out if you can get a discount - it’s up to them how much you can get.
I'm sympathetic to the messy-move case, but discounting the tax for holiday homes seems quite regressive.
Fortunately(?), councils are basically all skirting bankruptcy, as a result of having their central grants slashed. So these discretionary discounts are becoming rare in actual practice.
1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=uk+total+government+re...
There are some practical advantages - if you've got a patch of dessert and charge tax on it you only can get so much but if you develop a luxury apartment complex on said land and rent them out you can get rather more. The state has an advantage over private developers as it can grant itself permission to build whatever.
I sometimes think you could do something like that in places like London - the state build lux accom to replace tax revenue rather than letting private developers clean up.
The idea that land has value even when unused is one of this quirks of reasoning that seems "common sense" until you actually stop to think about it, because it makes no sense at all. And is one of the driving forces behind disenfranchisement of indigenous groups in so many countries.
Other places take a very different stance, where land is just land, and you don't get to exclude people from it just because you own it. If you put the land to use, then that part becomes off limit, but merely "being the owner" doesn't confer the right to cordon it off, and people are allowed to freely traverse it. You only acquired the right to generate income from that land.
(e.g. folks can't go prancing about your crop fields, but if you own 100 acres and 80 of those are left alone because you live in a country where you value conservation, folks are entirely free to wander those 80 acres)
But it also shows off how much the idea that "land = value" has been hammered into you. By default, land's just land. It doesn't have value until someone slaps some kind of "land management scheme" on top of it.