Does Georgism Work? Part 2: Can Landlords Pass Land Value Tax on to Tenants?
astralcodexten.substack.com
astralcodexten.substack.com
Serious answer: Mars. The outer space treaty prevents terrestrial nations from claiming sovereignty over mars, so mars itself would be in a position to set and collect its own taxes in an entirely new regime. And unlike today’s service economies, nearly all of Martian GDP would be derived from land (in the georgist sense: natural resources).
> founded in 1900 as a radical Georgist single-tax community by sculptor Frank Stephens and architect Will Price
http://cacommonground.org/pdf/2020-12_Transit_Value_Capture....
I for one hope it makes its way back into the political mainstream, as unlikely as that might be. It's really quite a brilliant and simple system of taxation.
You either adopt LVT or your civilization ends. With sky high real estate prices you can choose a fast death by civil conflict and war or slow death by having birth rates below replacement. Either way, you die. The next civilization repeats the cycle.
Even if we assume 10% of housing is consumed by people intentionally holding their property vacant (what is it that would motivate them to do this exactly?) would that really move the needle on anything?
Existing rentals are not going to lower their prices, so these new rentals that are coming into market are simply going to match the existing rentals, because otherwise they would be leaving money on the table
IMHO (or call it a gut feeling) the best way to ruin market value is not higher or lower taxation. You have to change the tax often and dramatically. Tie it to the difference between highest and lowest temperatures measured in the previous year every 13th full moon.
It’s a way to store money now, and drives up the appreciation. Sometimes the money is illicit or hidden from taxes or govs. Ask Vancouver how many vacant homes they have, yet “no housing”. The government is now making changes to stop it
> Ask Vancouver how many vacant homes they have, yet “no housing”. The government is now making changes to stop it
Seems like the government made changes in 2017 with the Empty home tax. Gotta say, the numbers do not look that interesting. 1,627 vacants in 2020 out of 195,012 residences. The doc notes that in 2017 there were 2,193 vacants, which indicates that the problem wasn't really that much worse than it is now.
https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/vancouver-2021-empty-homes-ta...
Is it possible that it's something other people intentionally losing money on vacant properties?
LVTs can't fix sky high real estate prices as that's principally a problem with zoning. In fact, communities can and will and do (remember, as the article mentions an LVT is hidden inside traditional property taxes) use zoning to prevent assessment increases.
Fixing zoning will do much more to address inequity than even a complete switch to an LVT. Don't fix zoning and LVT won't actually accomplish much of anything. That's why you see similar patterns of development across the board, regardless of LVT. When homeowners begin to feel the displacement effects of LVT, one of two things invariably happens: LVT is dropped (or otherwise moderated--e.g. geographically selective decreases in tax rate), or development is restricted through zoning and similar regulations.
LVT is undeniably a great solution, it's just a solution to the wrong problem.