The difference is that someone created the products that I own and I payed them for it. However, no one (at least no one human depending on your religious beliefs) created the land.
This isn't going to change much about landlords. If anything, it will increase the amount of housing rented through landlords, because the land value tax will make it uneconomical for more people to own their own homes. In a high value area, the only people who would be able to do so are the very rich.
Even setting that aside, if the land value taxes on the land that someone owns dramatically increase then that means the value of their property has dramatically increased, and they can sell the land for a dramatic profit. Certainly it sucks that someone might have to sell; however, don't think that someone who becomes rich due to their home value appreciating is really much of a victim in the grand scheme of things.
All value stems from improvements made by people, either on the land, or nearby.
If somebody is sitting on a prime seat in the hot tub, and they don't really care very much about it, and there's a line of 20 people waiting to get in, we have a wasted resource. Revealing true preferences by having people put some skin in the game means that more people are happy, more people are productive, and society works better.
Why bother making a tub, a neighborhood, or a community if it can simply be taken from you.
Id rather burn mine to the ground than have it taken away just because someone else wants it more. They might not even want it more, but they just have more money.
The hot tub is the land in this metaphor, no-one builds it, someone just put their butt on it first.
> Why bother making a tub, a neighborhood, or a community if it can simply be taken from you.
Something the younger generation has been asking itself for decades, since things are set up so none of us ever gets to "own" a place to live.
> Id rather burn mine to the ground
That explains so much about how the older generation has been acting politically.
How could that possibly be true. The lvt would have to be high enough to replace revenue from all current income taxes, sales taxes, corporate taxes, and current property taxes.
It would also be based on land used, so Warren be buffet and someone working at Walmart would have the same tax bill if they both own houses in the same neighborhood.
It is incredibly regressive.
Elon Musk can live out of his small undesirable home in boca chia, so his total taxes would be close to zero
If they both live in the same size house in the same neighbourhood, sure. If a billionaire really wants to live in a closet to spite the taxman, that's fine, although I don't know why they'd bother having the billion. They aren't imposing on the community, they apparently made their billion without using any space (because it's not just homes, the whole point is that it applies to every kind of land use, good for them.
> It is incredibly regressive.
It's the opposite. Land ownership is the biggest thing separating the upper and lower classes.
> Elon Musk can live out of his small undesirable home in boca chia, so his total taxes would be close to zero
He'd still have to pay LVT on his giant factory and fashionable city-centre showrooms, so skimping on his home is not going to make a lot of difference.
Buying stuff that people make enriches those people and spreads the wealth around. It's good to encourage doing that rather than hoarding land. (While you can hoard individual old paintings, if you drive up the price of paintings then new and innovative painters - like Picasso - emerge, and produce new paintings to meet that demand).
> Elons giga factory would pay no land tax because the land vale is zero. It is in the middle of the desert surrounded by employ land that nobody wants.
Which is exactly where we want giant factories being built.
My point is that it's a terrible way to fund a government. The vast majority of economic value created does not require land and would go un taxed. The vast majority of value comes not from land or the raw materials derived from land, but from Human labor used to convert the raw material into Goods, or pure services.
It's also much more regressive than the current system. People like Elon Musk make a million times more than your average person, but they don't use a million times more land or eat a million times more hamburgers. Most of what the rich purchase is labor and human compute.
The value gets created by human labour but it ends up captured by landowners. I believe there's an economic theorem to that effect, but it's also pretty clear in Silicon Valley: some new innovation increases productivity, workers and investors get paid more, rents go up and all the gains end up in the pockets of San Francisco landlords.
> It's also much more regressive than the current system. People like Elon Musk make a million times more than your average person, but they don't use a million times more land or eat a million times more hamburgers. Most of what the rich purchase is labor and human compute.
In theory I take the point. Do those people actually pay a million times more tax under the current system though?
Sure. Most of the value comes from the efforts of people who have nothing in particular to do with the "owner" of the land though.
No. A land value tax doesn't make any difference at all to the ongoing cost of owning a given piece of land.
That's because land value taxes decrease the price of a piece of land (via market mechanisms), so that the sum of tax plus ongoing capital cost is the as before.
A simplified example: without LVT you might be able to buy a piece of land with a mortgage that costs $1000 per month. Afterwards, you can buy the same piece of land with a smaller mortgage of $200 dollar a month, but you are paying $800 in LVT.
If you own the land outright, you still have opportunity costs of capital. But it's easier to explain with a mortgage. Also, if you already own land then the introduction of an LVT will definitely put a one-off hit on your finances. (Unless the government compensates you.) But there's no long running impact.
If you can afford the rent for your home, you can afford to own it via a mortgage. (Assuming functioning capital markets and assuming low enough transaction costs.)
Something like this has to be true, because that's how landlords pay for their cost of capital and maintenance etc. If rent couldn't cover that, but for some reason home prices still stayed high, and sane land lord would sell the property and put the proceeds in some investment that does cover its cost of capital.
This does not follow. It assumes the landlord has the same cost basis and cashflow requirements as the person with the mortgage, which is almost never the case. Your mortgage interest payments alone can be higher than a rent that allows a landlord to make a profit. This is not uncommon. Rents in Seattle, for example, are far lower than the equivalent mortgage if you bought the place.
That said, most people struggle with financial and investment math generally, even when they sincerely attempt to make prudent financial decisions. I can’t really blame people for not knowing how to build and reason about financial models, it isn’t a skill you ordinarily pick up in day-to-day life.
Your residential mortgage will be at a lower rate and you will have property tax exemptions if the property is your primary residence and your insurance will be cheaper.
If you buy a place for $1,000,000 at 7%, you can’t compete with someone that owes $100,000 at 2.5% on the same place, which is often the reality.
> If you buy a place for $1,000,000 at 7%, you can’t compete with someone that owes $100,000 at 2.5% on the same place, which is often the reality.
Where does that 2.5% come from?
If mortgages cost more than the rental yield, then your landlord should sell the place and use the proceeds to get into the mortgage business. (If not, your landlord is doing the landlording as a charity, because they are leaving money on the table.)
Well, in the hypothetical system we are discussing there would presumably be no tax exemption for primary residences or other tax differences.
You do realize condominiums exist, right? You don't need to own an entire parcel of land to own your own home.