If I do nothing to my property, my taxes stay the same. If I add a shed, deck, pool, or whatever external feature to my property then the tax man comes and wants more money. The lesson? Don’t improve your property.
Well, it makes sense if you hope to be among the winners. But I don't see any Georgists here seeming very interested in addressing anything like that, just a couple who handwaved past it. [1] I'm not an economist, though, nor even very smart. I'm just a Baltimore homeowner who's heard a time or two before of such alternative tax scams. I mean schemes.
[1] And the ones responding at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826168, who seem thus far to present one argument each and retire discouraged by its failure. One hopes someone might come along willing to actually espouse this heterodoxy, rather than just try to feel "based" for namedropping around it.
Suburbs and rural areas nobody really cares about.
I'm very confused about the idea that taxing land ownership more heavily will somehow lead to more consolidation and _favor_ landlords, and simultaneously harm existing homeowners. It's just incoherent. Perhaps I too am not smart.
And yes, the amount of money to spend and how that money are collected are separate political questions. LVT is just about funding sources. Most Georgists are also for "pigouvian" taxes and taxing negative externalities.
If you buy a storefront, you can run a shop. If you buy the block, you can build a skyscraper and lease or rent out all the retail space, not to mention the apartments under the condos under the penthouses, all of which also make you money, of course.
But again and still, we see Georgianism as the "camel's nose" for a complete overhaul of the economic and fiscal underpinnings of American society, and while this is a good time for such conversations - everyone else is coming off the fringe! Why not the remaining L. Neil Smith fans, once they've got their trusses and orthotics all in order? - for generally similar reasons I wouldn't expect to encounter a tremendously credulous public.
It's worse than that. If you sit on the property, but your neighbours improve it, make it a better place to live, create businesses that attract people, OR the public treasury builds a park, or a metro stop, or a new road, your property value increases, letting you capture the value that others worked for!
1ac parking lot = easy and definite, just buy land, simple permits, etc.
.25ac parking garage = difficult permits with many more places for various parties to whimsically drag their dick all over it at great expense to you, etc.
Investing in a commercial structure carries massive financial risk because there are all sorts of steps along the way where the government has reserved the right to balloon your cost so 1mil of land, 2.5mil of structure and $100k of bullshit could potentially be 1mil,5mil,500k once everyone is done screwing you.
The parking lot on $4mil of land and $100k of construction and $100k of bullshit can only balloon to $4mil, 200k, 200k in the worst case.
Now, I pulled those numbers out of my ass but it's the basic workflow that underpins most of the "stupid" things we see being built.
I wish that was the case, but in both counties I've owned houses, the tax appraisal increases every year regardless. They don't even drive by, they just use automation to increase it. I protest every year and "win" which means the increase is reduced or eliminated, but it's a fight to keep your taxes the same regardless.
At least that's the way it generally works where I live.
The unintended consequence is that cities get much more in taxes from businesses tban residents. California has therefore overbuilt its business base while underbuilding housing. The result is a severe housing shortage and sky high rents.
The problem is a far more fundamental one, because just as I’m trying to get people to understand related to this movement or initiative to do away with property taxes, certain government and asset holder support for that is likely more about personal enrichment and/or expanding total tax receipts by other means, i.e., ulterior motives.
The fundamental issue here is the very premise of how the tax system functions not what kind of taxes are stolen and extracted where; and then redistribute to whom, usually for corrupted reasons and purposes.
The effectively unlimited and unbounded, detached, and inconsequential nature of the tax system now is really the core problem. It’s currently other people’s money and mostly even future people’s money, squandered without any meaningful limits, barriers, or even rules regarding conflicts of interests; and there are virtually zero actual and real, immediate consequences for malfeasance by people charged with the duty of responsible allocation of funds. It’s a corrupt and rotten system from the very top to the very bottom.
Unfortunately not enough people care, understand, or might even like it because they benefit from it and think they will die before the music stops. That’s how we get $37 trillion in national realized debt, another $74 trillion in unfunded liabilities, and another $9 trillion in state and local debt for a total national debt of $120 trillion in America’s public debt burden as of today.
It happens all the time.
Half the time you see a facility that's using "temporary" tarp shelters and/or containers and/or trailers for some amount of it's covered area it's doing it for the taxes. The other half the time is for the expediency and flexibility (a sub component of which is fewer government approvals and government mandated steps, so basically taxes of another form).
Any time you have a commercial development across multiple lots they run the numbers both ways and/or they'll subdivide a big lot or they'll buy adjacent parcels crossing a jurisdiction boundary to minimize expense (not just taxes, construction as well).