> but land value tax would probably be great. Unfortunately, people tend to vote against it.
Which is a shame, since it's about as ideal of a tax as you can get:
- You can't move land to an offshore account
- LVT penalizes land speculation, which is one of the main drivers of suburban sprawl and rising housing costs
- It targets the rich, and marginally (if at all) impacts the lower and middle classes (replacing all taxes with LVT would almost certainly reduce middle class tax burdens and entirely eliminate lower class tax burdens)
- All economic activities ultimately depend on land in some way, so instead of taxing (and thus suppressing) those economic activities, it's ultimately more economically efficient to tax land itself
- The aforementioned economic activities can't readily price LVT into their own prices for goods and services, specifically because land value itself is a function of the goods and services that land enables, and because if those goods and services could actually fetch a higher price without reducing profitability (per supply v. demand), then they would almost certainly already be priced accordingly, regardless of LVT
And this is just from physical land in the commonly-understood sense (i.e. some chunk of the surface area of the oblate spheroid we call Earth). There are myriad other sorts of things with the same characteristics as land; everything from geostationary orbits to intellectual property to radio spectra to IP addresses (and just about anything else with an inelastic supply) represents economic rent waiting to be collected.