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Comment by adverbly | Hacker News Reader

This comment is a bit surprising to me. Your point seems to be that strong policies which impose significant good will face significant resistance and so there's no point doing them.

I don't think that makes any sense. Workers rights, regulations around dumping waste, capital gains taxes... There are a lot of things that we already have which some people with power have a strong incentive to remove. We had to fight to implement and to keep these, but goddamnit is it worth it!

I don't see why we shouldn't be optimistic here because historically speaking things have gotten much much better! To me, a gradual and consistent ramping up lvt would be probably the most progressive policy a country could pass at this point :D

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The problem (and for the record I favor LVT myself) is that many of the other things you mention -- the 8 hour workday, environmental regs, etc. -- have clear positive effects that an average person doesn't have to take action to benefit from. If you tried to take them away, people would notice and object.

For a typical homeowner, the effect of LVT would be pretty neutral, by design. Proposals I've seen advocate changing the _distribution_ of single-family home taxes between land and improvements, but not the _total_.

Yes, LVT would discourage speculators from buying land as an investment without improving it, which is a societal good. But it's not direct and short term like many of your other examples.

I think GP's point stands that rolling back LVT would be highly desired by big landowners (who could then return to do-nothing land appreciation and rents for their profits rather than be required to actually _do something_ with the land to earn over its taxed value), while the average Jane couldn't care less, because it wouldn't really impact her tax bill.

That sort of situation is not stable long term. To make it more stable, you'd need to set it up so that LVT lowered the average voter's tax bill. I'm not sure how feasible that is.

> you'd need to set it up so that LVT lowered the average voter's tax bill. I'm not sure how feasible that is.

Highly feasible!

https://www.commonwealth.ca/ < These guys propose a citizen's dividend/sovereign wealth fund

Alternatively, it would be easy to lower taxes in parallel with the increased revenue. The nice thing about taxes is that they are paid in dollars - meaning you can spend them all sorts of different ways ;)

Or if you want, "georgist" theory proposes lowering (improvement) property taxes/income taxes/capital gains taxes/sales taxes which introduce deadweight losses. A tax is fundamentally a disincentive so why are we disincentivizing working/building but not speculation? Plenty of room for improvement ;)

> which is a societal good. But it's not direct and short term like many of your other examples.

Excellent point! Reminds me of a certain climate-related topic ;) Again though - I think there is reason to be optimistic. Public awareness is gradually increasing[1], housing/zoning policy discussion is a hot topic these days, and young kids are volunteering/attending rallies at a higher rate than any previous generation[2]

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=land%20v... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1448606/us-political-act...

> I think GP's point stands that rolling back LVT would be highly desired by big landowners (who could then return to do-nothing land appreciation for their profits rather than be required to actually _do something_ with the land to earn over its taxed value), while the average Jane couldn't care less, because it wouldn't really impact her tax bill.

I think the average person actually cares an incredible amount about property taxes, especially when it comes to local politics. Local news stations talk all the time about "property tax relief", and there's a general sentiment from just about everyone involved in local politics that property taxes are a useless drain. Which in some cases they are - property taxes really only "work" when they roughly approximate LVT, but it leaves suburbanites feeling overtaxed (because they are, compared to the value of their land) and they have massive political power.

I think that if LVT was simply touted as a "Property Tax Relief Plan", you could make it have massive, massive support. It wouldn't be perfect, but you could give eveyr single person a massive tax credit based on what LVT revenues would bring in, and make up for that tax credit with the LVT.

For example - if you lived in a city of 100,000, and total LVTs bring in $200,000,000, you could give every single person a $2000 "Tax Relief Credit" deductible from all city taxes. You change nothing about how much money is raised, only the distribution, and in a way where 95% of people visibly see their tax bill go down. Good luck getting rid of that!

>Local news stations talk all the time about "property tax relief", and there's a general sentiment from just about everyone involved in local politics that property taxes are a useless drain.

That is because they are not marginal, and they are not land value taxes.

You basically get rewarded for leaving a large piece of land undeveloped in the middle of an urban area. You do no work, and reap all the gains of appreciation while society around you does the work of making the place desirable to live, hence making the land desirable to buy.

You also get armed protection via military, police, and courts, and all of their salaries are disproportionately paid by everyone else doing work.

Earned income instead of property tax is the biggest and most perverse subsidy from working people (especially young) to non working asset owners (and older people) and hence collect rent.

On top of that, we give lower tax rates to capital gains, and on top of that, we let land owners indefinitely defer taxes via 1031 exchanges. Exactly the opposite of what a just society would want to incentivize. We take from laborers and give to owners (and their descendants). And then dream about becoming owners ourselves.

I like this angle... Focus first on the fact that I'm having to pay taxes to put a roof over my head while the developer down the road is driving up land prices by squatting on an empty lot while paying pennies!

> I like this angle... Focus first on the fact that I'm having to pay taxes to put a roof over my head while the developer down the road is driving up land prices by squatting on an empty lot while paying pennies!

As a resident of the northeast, I've only owned 2 homes in the suburbs of a city. For those, the value of the land comprised 63% and 57% of the overall value of the property. I imagine that ratio changes as one moves away from the city.

Depending on who you ask, LVT would ideally replace all taxes, including income, so the property tax bill would be the only tax you paid. In this scenario, getting rid of LVT would be a significant undertaking, and very noticeable.

This is no longer actually possible. LVT at 100% generates less revenue than all other methods of taxation combined across all levels of government. This was the original idea but government is now too large for it.

Joseph Stiglitz proved what he called the Henry George Theorem which shows basically that useful government expenses will always show up as increased land value that matches or exceeds the cost.

Unfortunately, it is true that a fair amount of government expenses are not useful. (i.e. do not constitute a public good in the economic sense)

The Henry George Theorem also requires the public good to be local. Military spending for example is a public good that doesn't show up in land value increases.

Also in some cases (often with environmental spending) there is an external downward pressure on land value that is offset by an increase but you don't necessarily get an increase from the original neutral value if the pollution didn't occur.

Why do you think it's no longer possible? What does the size of the government have to do with tax rates of land?

If you add up the value of all the land, how does it compare to the budget of the government.

If the budget is, say, 100% of the value of the land, you're stuffed? I mean, obviously you can set a tax rate as multiples of value but land almost immediately becomes worthless and all multiples of 0 are 0.

100% LVT isn't 100% of land value it's 100% of land rents. If the bare land would rent for $2,000/month the tax is $2,000/month. You can't realistically raise the tax beyond this amount because you'd effectively be making land economically unhabitable outside of cases where the improvements were so large that you weren't significantly hindered by having some of the improvement rent absorbed.

At a 100% LVT the price of land is $0 (or more accurately equal to the price of the improvements on it). Above 100% LVT the price of land is negative so building any improvement immediately loses money and a whole host of other negative consequences.

Where would all the people go to live, out to the ocean?

I only give away the land, not the property on it. I assume in the real world we'd get some financial engineering to holding companies and peppercorn rents and so on - but as with every other tax there is a simply an inflection point where receipts drop to zero (if you tax income at 100%, people will simply stop working).

If you give away the land to someone else, but still own the building on it, the person you gave the land to would have to pay land value tax and they would pass that onto you in rent.

By definition the land has a market value of zero because that is what was paid for it

Who would pay money for an asset with zero returns at all (or indeed negative returns due to a bunch of administrative costs)

Rest assured, if you can extract value from something, the tax office won't value it at zero.

Neither does the market, btw.

The claim is that 100% of land rent in the US is smaller than income tax + sales tax + property tax + corporate tax. You can no longer replace every tax in the system with land rents unless you shrink the size of government.

If we eliminated all other methods of taxation, what do you think would happen to rents? Would they increase, decrease, or stay the same? How do you think this affects the amount collected through a Land Value Tax?

The value of the land is a function of the amount of money one could make off the land, which is a function of the overall economy. A coffee shop next to lots of office buildings can sell lots of overpriced coffee which affects the value of the land it occupies. If the economy gets bad the coffee shop will likely not make as much money, so the taxes off the land will be less as well.

I don't think you should read the above comment as a lack of optimism, but instead as warning that conviction is required to enact the optimistic vision.

Yes, strong policies which impose significant good will always face significant resistance because finite resources cause many to see the world as a zero-sum game. This is the progressive vs reactionary battle.

You've read it correctly.

> I don't see why we shouldn't be optimistic here because historically speaking things have gotten much much better! To me, a gradual and consistent ramping up lvt would be probably the most progressive policy a country could pass at this point :D

This is probably more feasible than you think. A hybrid or split rate combining both land and property taxes is not only possible but apparently exists in practice in some cities, for example Pittsburgh.

https://www.chicagofed.org/-/media/publications/chicago-fed-...

Not everyone shares the same value judgements of what is good and bad.

Are you trying to say that any kind of discussion around ethics or values is pointless because it's possible for people to disagree?

I think it's much better to discuss actual policies rather than to question the point of even being able to have discussions around what people think would make for a better world.

I think they are pointing out that if the first principles are completely different, everything that follows after will be different also. What is good/bad determines what policies should be pursued, and those actual real-world police’s may be as different as night and day.

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