California is chasing wealth that has feet
blog.landeconomics.org
blog.landeconomics.org
Economist Henry George in the 1800's, pointed out that taxing land, but not the property on it, incentivizes efficient use of land, because holding land for its passive (parasitic) return even when underused, becomes unprofitable when the land is taxed in proportion to the value it can enable.
And in turn, only taxing land, not property, incentivizes increased development, as higher property investment amortizes land tax against higher returns.
Greater investment in housing being just one way land tax, without property tax, incentives greater productive use.
So many things align for higher growth in ways that more evenly benefit everyone. But our relationship with land is over-complicated, and that is both the reason for change, but the reason change is so hard.
Small attempts have failed, but then, for the rich who can hold land and reap growth in value that outpaces the taxes they pay on it, that remains another inefficient/negative-externality, that pays off for them.
Also, even when not a necessity, taxes are often just more efficient than the alternative.
Think about taxi licenses before Uber. The government thought there were too many taxis. They made a limited supply of medallions therefore. The government gave them away to existing taxi drivers for free. Eventually they reached $1,000,000.
Eventually there were too few taxis. Existing owners complained about trying to expand the supply because maybe they just took out a loan to buy one. People were even renting out medallions. Something the government handed out for free.
The whole mess could have been avoided if the government just taxed taxis until the quantity matched what they wanted.
In a way, you'd end up in a position similar to just handing out the medallions for free. The differences are the government is getting the money and the rate can be more easily changed.
This is a pretty close metaphor for land value tax. All LVT really does is instead of paying the prior owner or a bank for land, you pay the government in installments.
For some people that’s a house full of crap that their kids need to clean out after the funeral and for others that’s a dilapidated apartment building that’s soon to be condemned and will require asbestos abatement and demolition.
Georgists want to tackle this with a Land Value Tax, I tend to think it would be difficult to make this robust against highly motivated attack and the better approach is long-term leases with similar duration to building depreciation schedules. In either case, the idea is that capital appreciation of the dirt (which is really capital appreciation of the right to exclude others from the dirt) goes to public coffers, improvement value goes to the people who made the improvements. That's fair.
Of course, there's also the question of how to get there from here, and one way to do it without guillotines would be to tie the extraordinary tax treatment of property to conversion into a 99 year lease (and then, after 99 years, new issuance could target the ~30 year range). "Sure, you can have your 1031 capital gains tax exemption and pay no tax on the money you obtained by holding on to the right to exclude others from an increasingly popular rectangle of land, but only if you sign up to eventually be part of the solution rather than part of the problem."
I don't think this is a reasonable deformation of the notion of ownership nor externalities.
Use of owned assets, within legal boundaries, allows exclusive of use.
If you're complaint is about the current asset allocation, that's wildly different than either Georgism/LVT or externalities. There is a philosophical there-there, but I really don't grok a feasible defense of your claim; your supporting points are reasonable under a Rawlsian veil defense.
If you make the legitimacy of property rights over land foundational to your philosophy, then of course they can't be challenged within that framework, but that's tautological and uninteresting -- I simply challenge your framework instead. Why should I accept it? In centuries past, a structurally identical framework -- ownership over human beings -- was used to rationalize and administer the institution of slavery, so unless you want to defend slavery then you must accept that the legitimacy of property rights is contingent on their specifics.
Further, relaxing land ownership doesn't make current occupation an externality, which was the original claim. It's a categorical error to mix externalities with morals.
I would argue that this is unpopular not only amongst retirees but everyone. And it would have tons of negative side effects.
Why would I fix up my house to look nice, if I’ll be displaced? Why would I invest in my child’s local school system, if we could be displaced? Why would I do any community outreach or support, or get involved in local politics? How can banks underwrite loans if the affordability can fluctuate wildly? Look at the life of people who live in mobile homes and trailer parks - they essentially rent the land, and it’s oppressive because they can’t afford to move (actually moving or repurposing land is hard) but their cost to stay is unpredictable.
The only people this is appealing for are people who fancy themselves analytically minded economists with no interest in the practical humanity of the people living there and renters hoping to finally do the displacing for their own affordability.
Most states in the US do not have Prop-13-like laws and get by just fine. For the few states that do, they are less restrictive taxation-wise than California's.
Prop 13 has completely distorted the housing market; it is, perhaps unintuitively, a co-cause of CA's housing unaffordability issues. (Prop 13 discourages new development, and is an enabler of housing NIMBYism.)
We of course shouldn't just abolish Prop 13 overnight, or lots of people will get displaced, also overnight. But we should absolutely reform it and phase it out over time, while building more housing, as fast as we can (something that will be a little bit easier to do as all the NIMBYs realize that if they keep shooting down housing projects, their property taxes are gonna go up a ton).
The problem is all the tax revenue being lost at the municipality level for decades. National tenure average is ~12 years. Los Angeles is 20 years, SF is 16.5 and SJC is in between. It clearly has a meaningful effect, it's just harder to buy into the market and keep the home over a long period of time.
And California has an income tax, whereas Texas doesn't.
Prop 13 has it's problems, but I don't think they're as significant as the rhetoric claims. It makes for a great excuse, though. Politicians can blame Prop 13 for why they can't spend as much on services as people demand, and now it's become the common wisdom--but for Prop 13 California could afford to spend much more than it does, and the housing affordability crisis would end, too. It's just wishful thinking.
And remember that that 2.5k/person is only for residential properties. commercial properties still fall under prop 13 and that’s about 50-60 of the other tax. So a full repeal would make it closer to 10k/person instead of the current 5k.
I agree the story on rents and home prices would be unclear because ultimately the people might move and just rent out their homes with property taxes baling into the new rental price.
In one sense that sounds like free money for the state. However, home equity constitutes the largest share of savings for people, and that's more true the lower down the income ladder you go. So you're taking money out of the working- and middle-class. In some circles home equity is considered a poor savings vehicle, but they don't seem to consider that it's the only secured loan most people can access for leveraged investment. It's the only investment available to most people that let's them leverage capital markets the way the very wealthy can.
And FWIW, residential rents also track monthly mortgage payments, so renters aren't likely to see any difference, either. On average renters pay roughly the same amount per month they'd pay as owners, just without building any equity. I suppose they might be slightly better off after accounting for transfer payments (i.e. public services, entitlements, etc), but they'd be even better off if they could become owners rather than renters.
That all depends on if people still want to live there, or can afford it. People tend to be sensitive to taxes, especially if they don't see it improving their lives. Businesses can be sensitive to this sort of thing too. And if they leave, people may leave too. California is already at a net negative when looking at joiners vs leavers. It's mostly been lower wage workers, but in recent years middle and high earners have also been leaving. The population is the same as it was 5 years ago.
"Property prices drop when property taxes go up, but mortgage payments tends to stay similar."
That might be roughly true for a person who just purchased and the federal property tax deduction is uncapped. A retiree who is getting a break on taxes is likely to see a big increase. Not to mention if the house is paid off, then there is no mortgage that could offset it.
Flock. We need more Flock.
Which isn't just a few percent but around ~10% (depending on income).
We live in a gerontacracy. Every advantage and tax break and handout is given to the elderly and the ladder has fully been pulled up for the new generations.
‘We need new shit! Let’s raise taxes.’ While not having to pay them yourself.
IMO this is a much more fair system than just saying "lol no taxes on the elderly."
I have heard this assertion with no proof or backing data a lot. There is an assumption but no explanation how kicking long time residents out of their homes due to tax pressure is a benefit to the community, or real estate market prices. Real estate agents and other service companies might benefit from more transactions.
There is also usually no mention that the main problem of Prop 13 is that it applies to commercial and industrial properties, not just individual primary residences. Individuals have a limited impact scoped to their life, but tax implications applied to long term corporations is what has an outsized effect.
California already has property tax deferment.
I find that forcing the elderly out of multimillion dollar homes and into apartments or even smaller homes is infinitely preferable to the human catastrophe plainly obvious on the streets of LA and SF.
One benefit of an equal property taxation system would b having workers close to the city centres where they work rather retirees.
If not from land taxes, where? Would you like to double sales tax? Or increase income taxes? Every solution costs something, what does yours cost?
Everything has real negative consequences. One side does not hold the monopoly on negative side effects.
Land is not cheap to repurpose. The Georgism dream that land can be optimally used is a farce. There is significant costs to repurposing land - to make those costs worth it because of the taxes would heavily distort current society, and I think the assumption that this would be desirable compared to the status quo is unproven.
> double sales tax? Or increase income taxes?
Why not the taxes we have? Where is the presumption that taxes need to be changed at all, never mind doubled?
Even if we decide we want to raise taxes, choosing where to do so is delicate. Again, the optimal answer from an economist is not necessarily desirable from an emotional perspective of the people being governed.
Any consideration of the consequences of taxes also has to consider the consequences of the current taxation.
But taxes have and will always be a transfer of wealth from the working poor to the rich and powerful. People talking about tax reform or more effective and just systems tend to forget this. It's like the lamb having an opinion on how the wolves should share it.
You're right about my estimate being off though and it was a disservice to the discussion. An equivalent revenue from sales tax would require ~2.1%. In SF, that would move the total sales tax from 8.6% to 10.7%; in Oakland, 13.8%. A large increase would likely bend some consumer behavior (chasing sales that have feet, aka move to the informal/grey market).
> Again, the optimal answer from an economist is not necessarily desirable from an emotional perspective of the people being governed.
This is the real difference between us imo. I believe the optimal answer is based on realistic projections on revenue collected and what prevents bankruptcy. The compromise answer is what passes a vote and in fact, the bankrupt answer.
I would prefer we didn't raise taxes and instead reduce spending. But given the complexity of reducing spending and the scale of our deficit, we will have to do both. On the side of raising revenue, a land tax offers a way of taxing a wealth that cannot flee.
Your friction is real - and already exists.
So the bar for improvement is not no friction.
The bar is less friction, and higher productive use of land, which benefits everyone. Lowering the costs of both housing and business space, while increasing economic output.
That is was economic alignment does, it doesn't just improve one thing, or improve on a one-time or fixed percentage basis.
And less passive, underutilizing, economically-parasitic investments from the rich. (Rich passive investment in land, uses land like Bitcoin for its deflationary nature, which compounds land prices while suppressing its full productive use.
Not raises. Compounds. The more the rich passively invest in land, the more profitable land becomes to passively invest in.
1. There are many states such as New Jersey or Texas that do not have Prop 13 style laws and their seniors are not suffering excessively. However housing is much more affordable for younger people in those states.
2. States that freeze property taxes have more volatility and boom/bust cycles. You are trading being shielded from tax volatility for increasing economy-wide volatilty and asset price volatility, so the gains are not as high as you think, and seniors are exposed to this volatility indirectly.
3. There are more targeted relief mechanisms available, such as deferring the tax liability until the owner dies for senior owners.
In California, it applies to multiple properties, you can pass it down to your children and it applies to property owned by businesses both commercial and industrial, which is absolutely crazy.
California has basically created a class of landed gentry.
https://www.redfin.com/blog/most-expensive-states-to-buy-a-h...
Of course I don't think that, which is why I didn't say it. That would be a silly thing to write. What is the advantage for you in mischaracterizing what someone wrote and then expending effort to "correct the record" for a statement no one made?
You created a strawman and then knocked it down.
What I actually said: "New Jersey or Texas that do not have Prop 13 style laws and their seniors are not suffering excessively. However housing is much more affordable for younger people in those states."
Both of these statements are demonstrably true. Let's look at the data.
* NJ price to income ratio for housing: 5.5
* mortgage cost burden: 31% of mortgage owners spend more than 30% of their income on housing.
* renter cost burden: 52% of renters spend more than 30% on rent
* CA price to income ratio for housing: 8.0
* mortgage cost burden: 38% of mortgage owners spend more than 30% on housing
* renter cost burden: 58% of renters spend more than 30% on rent
Now, let's look specifically at seniors.
In California:
* 68% of senior renters are cost burdened
* 35% of senior homeowners are cost burdened
* 59% of senior renters are cost burdened
* 35% of senior homeowners are cost burdened
Therefore if your solution is to look to Prop 13 style fixes to address cost burdens for either seniors or the general population, then you are not making a data based argument, and in fact the data goes against you, because there is no excess cost burden in states without these property tax freezes.
And no, I don't think prop 13 style laws would be helpful, it would just create more problems, as it has in California.
I don't know if it changes the result significantly, but remember the NJ has very high property taxes, more than double of California. So mortgage cost alone does not paint the full picture.
This is more significant for seniors, who likely have a paid-off home so their main expense is property tax. So being a fixed-income senior with a home is likely more affordable in California than in NJ. The worst thing after retirement is cost increases when you no longer have a salary that goes up with inflation.
Every tax is unpopular and undesireable.
Why would I work if government is taxing my income? Why would I invest? Why would I drive the car, blah blah.
Land tax is easy to collect, fast to pay, hard to avoid or game, and encourages productivity and efficiency.
And this cuddling of boomers who've benefited by piling up gigantic government debts and expect to be paid back (typically holding gov bond) is literally going to destroy the financial system. Part of the benefit of this tax is that if you can't pay for fair value of the land you're preventing others from using, you have to sell and get out, so e.g. a productive family can pay your for it, and use it instead of your now unproductive self. If you don't want that, you have to pay the same tax they would pay. Just because you're retired doesn't mean "your done with your duties to the rest of society and you can just expect free shit and do nothing" _especially_ that your "wealth" is just rent seeking on younger generations.
If boomers keep preventing younger generations from being productive and having opportunities, the economy will dwindle, the pile of of debt and other financial assets will collapse, hyperinfation is going to destroy their paper wealth and they will be starving or worse. Just watch, because I doubt at this point is avoidable anyway.
Of course, the solution to increased demand (driving increases in property market value) is to build more housing. Without Prop 13, a big chunk of the NIMBYs who are currently against more housing would likely change their tune if they had to choose between no new housing or much higher property taxes.
I think it would be reasonable and productive to phase out Prop 13 over time, rather than immediately getting rid of it. We could structure it so a property doesn't lose Prop 13 protection until the next time it's sold (and then it never has that protection again). We could completely remove the inheritance loophole (which was tightened up in 2020 but still exists). We could even set a date, say, 10 or 15 years in the future, when re-assessments at market value will start for everyone, regardless of whether or not they've sold. We could also phase in higher allowed assessment percentage increases over time (right now it's capped at 2% per year, but we could, say, add 0.5% to that figure every year for some number of years).
Hell, we could even leave Prop 13 in place as it is today, and just bump up the assessment increase cap to 5% or 10% or something like that. (Texas, for reference, has their own 10% yearly cap on assessment increases.)
There are so many ways to solve this, but all of them are politically unpopular. (Hell, we couldn't even reform Prop 13 as it applies to commercial properties.) As a homeowner in California, I get it, but I still support Prop 13 reform and eventual Prop 13 abolishment.
Where exactly? Not true for the midwest. E.g. (1,2,3)
1. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/933-Atmore-Ct-Indianapoli...
2. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/10916-S-Wabash-Ave-Chicag...
3. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3920-15th-Ave-S-Minneapol...
Here's what you might find 20 miles outside boston, this one is 350k:
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/55-Emory-St-Brockton-MA-0...
Source? This is completely inconsistent with my experience.
By land mass that's the majority of the country. Population concentration is the real issue.
I live in San Antonio, a metro of 2M people (city itself is one of the 10 most populous in the US). That's pretty sizable. Median home is between 260K and 310K. That is, of course, with the larger homes you'll find here vs SF/Chicago/LA/etc.
In fact that is all that really needs to be done to ameliorate the housing crisis in California: pass a single law that repeals every single zoning adjustment from after say 1960. Or pass a law that mandates a 4:1 ratio of zoned capacity to population. The ship will right itself if it is allowed to.
I mean, the way you make housing units more affordable is to make more of them, but for existing homeowners of SFH, building condo buildings in their neighborhood will increase their property value because the competition for the remaining lots increase. Given we build close to zero family friendly multi family in this country (ie, appartments buildings have zero family oriented amnenities), there isn’t much in there for nimbys. It’s the right thing to do but you can’t except nimbys to join in on a purely monetary basis.
This isn't always true. I've seen apartment buildings that have a playground and little astroturf field and some small goals. The kids also are using the pool pretty heavily in every apartment I've lived with one. Some have other facilities like basketball or tennis as well that kids could take up (or use the smooth surface for skating or something).
But I think the majority of the tax avoidance goes to not-old-people, like immortal corporations that can own the land forever.
EDIT: random link - it seems like residential owners don't benefit anywhere NEAR as much as commercial, rental and industrial entitites.
https://youngamericans.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
Berkeley Institute for Young Americans (2023)
what I attached was: "Who Benefits from Proposition 13?" (2023)
Page 2 of what I attached shows the results in a slightly different light.
Tell me you're not a retiree on social security (or know any) without telling me...
Social security gets adjusted up a very tiny percentage of actual inflation. Watching my elder parent go through this while managing their finances, I'm very aware.
This is bringing us back to the dark ages in terms of land rights.
Expectation that this comes with 0 cost just because it would suit you is a bit naive, innit
A few comments:
1) we already have property taxes so I don't understand the objection; a land value tax is just a property tax with a different way of assessing value.
2) I don't think this idea of "not owning property, only renting it" is actually that crazy if you take a long term view over it. Land is a finite, shared resource. We already acknowledge that you don't have absolute rights over land that you own in the same way you do over, say, a toaster. We place all kinds of restrictions on what you can do with it, we tax its ownership, we have eminent domain laws, etc.
The idea of treating land as a pure asset has had a lot of negative social effects and ultimately will lead to a kind of neo-feudalism where the megarich own everything and the underclasses are perpetual renters.
Everything is a finite shared resource.
That's the point of ownership.
>The idea of treating land as a pure asset has had a lot of negative social effects and ultimately will lead to a kind of neo-feudalism where the megarich own everything and the underclasses are perpetual renters.
The idea that land is not a pure asset leads to regular feudalism.
Yup. And despite the claims made that it's a solution for the common folk, the people who "own" and can make decisions about the land will be the megarich, so it will be feudalism, with rent due on the land you own.
I think the point is that (up to a limit that we're a long way from reaching) we can make more toasters to satisfy any additional demand that arises for toasters. But we can't make more land to satisfy any additional demand that arises for land. So we have to share the land in a way that we don't have to share toasters.
how is this any different from the statement "a property tax means that you don't own the property but rent it"
For all practical purposes property/ownership is a service provided by society, not a static "attribute" of stuff (the only exception is when you live entirely without any sort of contact with other people, in which case, however, the concept of property becomes void, at least practically). And any service carries a cost with it.
For instance, in our kind of societies, the institution of property requires, at the very least: (1) legislature that defines what property is and all the related rules, (2) the administrative part that handles property transfers and other issues, and keeps the record of who own what, (3) the judiciary system that interprets the legislation and resolves disagreements and other issues related to property, (4) the police or some other body that enforces and protects the whole system within the society, (5) the army that protect the property of the society against the claims of external groups. In our societies many of these institutions carry also other functions, but enabling the system of ownership is an important part of their job. And this service is very expensive --- so not paying any taxes on property means that those costs must be covered by some other sources (e.g. selling natural resources, income taxes, ...) and, usually, lead to a transfer of wealth within the society.
So the idea that you just "own" something (your house for instance) and any kind costs of that imposed on you by the society/government are unjust is completely and patently misguided. If anything, the opposite it true.
(That does not mean that the tax system must be necessarily constructed to reflect that, as there is no single and obvious correct way to design a tax system, and other important considerations enter that issue.)
This might be true if you have everything in cash in a safe at your house and plan on taking out fixed amounts for the rest of your life, I guess, but who are those people?
Most people are on social security, which is inflation adjusted.
Others with more wealth have retirement savings, which are likely mostly in bonds and stocks, which weather inflation not too shabbily. Interest rates go up, and banks start actually yielding interest!
Prop 13 passed mostly as a populist revolt against taxes, but in reality it does a lot more for people in their prime of earning and a toooon more for commercial property tax cuts than it does for retirees.
Every other state has better tax deferral mechanisms, and given the tiny fraction of Prop 14 effect that goes to retirees, I don't really buy this back formation of what was going on. If people really voted for such a lie, it wouldn't be the first time with propositions but from the media I've seen from the time I really don't think people were that duped and probably knew the broad effects of Prop 13.
Fortunately, this one did not spread which is very good news, because the long term effects have been absolutely horrific for housing prices in California. However, I hear of other states right now proposing adoption of California's housing crisis via similar tax measures... Hopefully they don't pass and learn the lessons of what has happened here.
Vancouver used to have a land value tax, which was widely credited with the its prosperity up to the ~1960s. However eventually enough homeowners and landowners got sick of paying their fair share and overturned it, which has resulted in Vancouver's housing situation which is possibly even worse than the SF Bay Area's...
It seems an astonishingly large number of people, including on here, talk as if that were the case despite their actual living and retirement finances. People really hate inflation.
Something about the lizard brain wants the exchange rate between shiny object and edible object to be fixed and gets extremely upset if it changes.
(Or, as is becoming increasingly relevant, the exchange rate between shiny object and flammable fluids)
The inflation complaints are people who prefer not to be taxed for saving currency and earning money in fiat. As far as it is a lizard brain thing it's more about principles of fairness in who should be paying taxes and the aversion people have to things taken away from them.
Right. Technically. And I have a bridge to sell you!
I was managing all the finances of one of my parents until they passed away. In 2022 inflation peaked at ~9%
That same year, their social security monthly payment went up by..... $10
That for sure covered all the rising costs (/s)
https://www.ssa.gov/news/en/press/releases/2022-10-13.html
So either your parents were getting $115 from social security, or you are trying to report increase of a year with essentially 0% inflation as if it were the year with 9% inflation.
This is not from a press release or news article, it's from the actual check that got deposited monthly.
This makes it exceedingly easy to ensure that old people are not affected by property taxes: if you are elderly resident, you simply get a discount. If you are an elderly landlord who owns multiple properties, your younger tenants don't get a property tax discount, and you pay income taxes (not discounted for age) on the rental income. If you are elderly and want to downsize, your property tax discount follows you into the smaller apartment.
The system has its challenges, but it is far superior to Prop 13 and achieves the same goal.
New York does it this way as well. If you are over the age of 65, you get a different rate.
Protecting retirees from getting kicked out of their lifelong homes is a wonderful thing.
But then allowing corporations to take advantage of that is insane.
Why should the typical old person or couple have a large home all to themselves?
I think (in a semi ideal world) individuals and couples should be entitled to small apartments or tiny houses, which would be cheap enough for an old person on retirement benefits. An average American home is for a family: as the parents age, some of their kids start financing the home, while other kids may move living spaces, or everyone splits up and the house goes to a new family (presumably a couple moving from a small apartment).
I do not feel sorry for the elderly person sitting on a large and expensive property who demands to spend their final decades squatting on land which could house a family and allow parents to get to work within a reasonable amount of time. They have options the young person does not. They can get a reverse mortgage, for example. They get social security, and draw down on whatever pensions and investments they've accrued over their lives. Their costs are much lower - they don't have children to support. Or they can move, and I'm sorry, but it's not impossible for a retired person to move. Millions of them do it every year all over the country. Often to really nice elderly communities full of activities and specialised care.
I say all of this as someone who leans more libertarian than collectivist. Society is interconnected and interdependent. We cannot function if he keep young people under our boots. Asking the elderly to move is a *very* small price to pay if we expect the young to shoulder the enormous tax and debt burdens said elderly have imposed upon them.
That line of thinking sounds insanely unpopular to me and while it might be more efficient in some ways, I think its unpopularity makes it unlikely in a democracy.
Injustice, because they refuse to see the other side of the coin, or the full picture, and a decision ignoring the full picture can be just only by accident (at least in common moral systems).
Stupidity, because it betrays a lack of touch with reality. In this regard I am reminded of a recent thread here, where an article about artificial meat was being discussed. An author of the article expressed their uncomfortable feeling when eating the artificial meat, caused by their thought about the unnatural, "lab" origin of that substance. If that article was sincere, that person have probably never visited a slaughterhouse, or killed an animal by their own hands in order to eat it. This kind of cessation of contact with underlying reality behind our everyday experience is quite common in our modern societies.
In order to be succinct, let me just say that historically it was common for elderly people to live in multigenerational households, sharing their space with a younger family and helping (as long as they could) with chores and taking care of children. While that is not the only viable way, and I am in no way against the modern pension system in general (although its current implementations in most if not all western societies have their problems; and also make many people to lose "touch with reality" in the way I alluded to above), it was quite a natural way of handling the issue of old age that reflected constraints under which a human society existed (and still continues to exist today).
Since I feel that the dominant sentiment of the commenters here is based on emotions and "morality" in a way that I believe is inherently evil, I will close this comment with a refrain from emotions and morality, and state a cold-hearted truth: A society that discards its old people might be a bad one to live in but might be able to survive. A society that discards its young people is destined to die. [To avoid misunderstanding: I do not argue that we should discard old people.]
Whether it makes economic sense or not, it is extremely inhumane and that matters (or should matter) far more.
This idea that it is ok to kick out (via taxes) someone who spent 40 or 50 years contributing to society just so someone else can make more profit on their home is very sad.
Once you are old enough it makes a whole lot more sense to move to places designed to care for the elderly. Living alone in a huge house isn't good for your mental health and it isn't for your physical health, either, once you no longer have the energy to maintain it.
This betrays some things. Not everyone is in a "huge house", and having this bias is going to lead you to bad conclusion. Most people don't have a huge house.
And, more importantly, tax should not be used to force people into one way of living in their latter years. They might be self-sufficient into their early 90s, and the last people who should be determining where they live are people who want to do it.
My 92-year-old mom has been the same way. Until one of her daughters moved in, she lived by herself in her house and garden. Just being able to go outside and experience the green space she planned and planted has kept her alive and healthy. If she were in some senior living place, she'd be dead by now. She would have withdrawn into her room and waited for her time.
boo hoo? My generation has never even had access to affordable housing. Sorry you have to take your millions and live on a smaller property for your last few years.
This will have some of the unfortunate effect of collectivism. We don't want the govt to tax you into poverty.
A simpler overall approach (I've left out the nuances) would be to have an equal amount of land per person completely tax free. Individuals can then rent out their land for others to use as needed. Forests/rivers/conservation lands etc. can be seen as truly a common inheritance of mankind and should generally have the least of commercial activity.
p.s - a govt will never agree to such an arrangement because it will not favor them.
This is not going to be easy. But it can be done even if it's done imperfectly. For example all the fertile land can be divided equally and the infertile ones equally - so an individual will have multiple plots. There are other issues also - for example what happens if someone decides to have 10 + children. In certain locations around the world people have essentially out bred the land resources that they have.
Of course one might ask why should one bother with all of this complexity I stated above? One has to compare it with the current situation which I think is the greater of the evils:
1) government decides the property tax. In many situations people are edged out of their own properties because they cannot afford the property tax.
2) it goes against the very principle that citizens own their land and not the government. The current state of affairs is the other way around.
3) People do not have ways to live off their own land like they used to in the past, now they have to have jobs. If they do not have jobs then they have to have a social security, which leads to a whole bunch of other issues.
4) tax complications.
Let me phrase the overall problem in another way - how do we prevent government from excessively controlling our lives, and have the citizens truly owning their own land without having to 'rent' it from the government?
If you just allow using X value, but tax free, then those who use less don’t get rewarded.
Effectively one non transferable share, one per citizen, with proceeds as a dividend.
IDK, governments tend to align with what results in the most economic activity being created / moved into their country ("growth"). If you were able to convince that overall economic growth would be multiple times higher over a few decades with the system, it might just become appealing.
A problem I see with implementation in the US, though, is that local municipalities are who tax land and property value, so entire rural counties and cities would have their funding stunted. And asking the government to buy into that while subsidizing low-growth areas for a long time (decades / forever, if a rural area never develops) is a really hard sell.
So explain the last ~50yr of state and local regulation of land development?
Weird framing. In any case, this would lead to less taxes for most folks, at least compared to property taxes.
I like the thought, but the challenge in most places is that the poor are already paying massive "negative tax" in the form of various social subsidies.
So if you add tax exemptions on top of it, it becomes increasingly impractical to raise enough taxes.
And no, it can't be done simply by taxing the rich more. That should be done too, in my view! But the math is simply such that we need a pretty broad tax base to support our spending.
What if I voted for pro-theme park politicians? Or what if I volunteered my time to clean up the community parks and shared space? What if I helped improve the reputation of my child’s school by volunteering and donating to the music department?
My taxes fund the maintenance of public infrastructure and services, and my actions support the civic good. If I vote to be cheap or generous with taxes, or choose to be lazy or ambitious in community support, that all contributes to the desirability of the land around me.
Two things are true: 1. I should have been more precise in my language. "You didn't do anything to make that happen" is a useful generality and not a prescription of every single individual in the community. In this case, we're talking about fairness - which I don't actually care much about myself, but is a point that people most often can emotionally identify with. But, to continue, if you're carrying all that water on behalf of your land value, then good for you! You likely have an existing stake in the community, other than the land that you own (maybe the businesses or houses or other property built on that land or you own a local services business). That is great! The fairness comes from owning the finite resource of land, and not something others can provide (housing, businesses, etc.). I hope you do continue to contribute to your local community and increase its appeal!
2. Your fixation on this point reveals a very fundamental misunderstanding of the goal of an LVT (surely partially my fault). It has to do with efficient taxation. Dollar equal, it's better that your taxes come from the value of the fixed resources of your community rather than things that can be increased. Because then you don't have a depressing effect on productivity and the things, other than land, that make your community nice. It's better that you keep more money from the things you _do_ for your community instead of the monopolies you hold in your community.
> "You didn't do anything to make that happen" is a useful generality and not a prescription of every single individual in the community.
In fact, everyone does contribute, positively or negatively, to their community. Either through involvement or absenteeism, or somewhere in between.
> Your fixation on this point reveals a very fundamental misunderstanding of the goal of an LVT
The goal is obvious and not a misunderstanding. The goal is a bad goal, precisely because it punishes positive involvement in the community. To improve the community means to increase your own cost of staying.
Imagine someone wants to avoid displacement due to their taxes increasing beyond their ability to pay. I don’t know why they would want to stay in their economically “inefficient” house, but perhaps it’s because home is where the heart is and they have sentimental attachment to their home.
If they want to keep your housing costs down, the best thing to do is poison the ground (metaphorically or literally) because it decreases the “productivity” of the land. Box stores in America famously pay low property taxes because building a box store actually decreases property values - they’re expensive to demolish and limited in utility, while being an eye sore that makes the neighborhood higher traffic and less undesirable. Mississippi as a state is cheap because the voters used the government to destroy public services - it’s in someone’s best interest to do this in a Georgism world if they don’t want to be regularly displaced.
Please just look at the pictures and decide if it peaks your interest enough to read the post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-five-yea...
Link with highlighted text (It's a single paragraph): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-five-yea...
> If they want to keep your housing costs down, the best thing to do is poison the ground (metaphorically or literally) because it decreases the “productivity” of the land
Yes, if you collapse multi-dimensional problems into a single dimension you can find many logical oddities. If I wanted an easier time finding a doctors appointment, I should murder every non healthcare professional in my local area until all of their calendars are totally clear. Wanting cheaper healthcare is evil! You're really saying things for the sake of saying them and I'm not going to engage further or explain to you when you're saying irrelevant things.
> it’s in someone’s best interest to do this in a Georgism world if they don’t want to be regularly displaced.
Under the majority of proposed LVT policies (and the ones I support) the vast majority of American housing would see a decrease in net property taxes paid since the majority of American's Building / Land value ratio is orders of magnitude higher than the average parking lot, land speculator, etc.
Crazy comparison to Walmarts lowering their own property tax because building a Walmart makes future land use less attractive.
(Same thing applies to gas stations which do literally poison their own land)
> I'm not going to engage further or explain to you when you're saying irrelevant things.
Don’t engage that’s fine, but I gave a specific example of a common way to use land (box stores), which explicitly breaks the LVT model. People today use land for many economic activities that are expensive to repurpose, or impose negative externalities.
The Federal Reserve's research suggests higher property taxes help the young and the working class by improving the immediate affordability of homes.
High property taxes pushing down the sales price of a house does not help the buyer or seller. The buyer is going to pay the same, just more in taxes vs the loan, and the seller is going to get less because high taxes have reduced the value of their home.
It means higher property taxes means lower sales prices, less debt for buyers, and younger people buying their first home and forming families.
A land value tax is better, because it doesn't raise your taxes for improving your home.
If you're an ordinary person who owns the home you live in, and they build Disneyland next to it, most of the ways that the value of the land your home is on increases are useless or actively harmful to you. It's actively bad for you if you have to sell your family home and move somewhere else because you can no longer afford the taxes on it. You're probably not a professional real estate developer who knows how to effectively use the land as an investment, after all, you just wanted to live somewhere stable.
In fact, the increase of value of your land and the consequent tax increase under Georgist land value schemes, would be so bad for you, that you might decide to protestthe construction of that Disneyland to begin with. This is typically called "NIMBYism", and it happens all the time even under current property-tax schemes because the negative externalities of many different types of construction are bad for the quality of life of existing homeowners.
The goal of the deferment is to stop a negative outcome (the resident being forced to sell their property because of higher LVT taxes) from occurring until the resident actually wants to do so.
I get it, people are inherently selfish, most don't want to give back to society more than absolutely minimum to keep them from prison, and this mentality is way more common in US or most of 3rd world than say Europe. But then don't complain when state institutions like public schools and healthcare are utter crap, something about cake and stuff.
But it's no problem of course that several generations of people currently can never afford to own a home of their own even though they contribute enormously to the economy and to society through their highly productive labour?
Ten times more people have already been forced to move away from where they grew up because of real estate prices than would ever have to be forced to move away because of land value taxes.
A hundred times more people can never afford a home because of real estate prices than would ever have to be forced to sell their homes because of land value taxes.
And besides, selling it earns you more money, so you're still not losing out (fair enough that you might not want to move out, but still)
Ben, with that argument, when someone wants to pay you $1M for "bengarcia.dev", you would not take it because you didn't do anything other than pay $12 to the registrar.
Sounds like Obama's "If you’ve got a business, you didn't build that" argument (though Obama might have just screwed up the words, or maybe he simply had a Kinsley gaffe, aka a Freudian Slip).
The land owner DID work for it. He BOUGHT that land (and also the option that it could go up, or down, in value) with the sweat of his hard earned work or savings, or that of their family or business partners.
OP's wording states that he would favor confiscating value generated by the acquisition if such value happened because the market's perceived value increased.
It's basically a communist wealth redistribution logic.
My point is that if someone were to offer $1M for OP's "bengarcia.dev" domain, that OP would not send $999,988 ($1M minus $12 bucks of registration) to the Federal Government.
Yes Ben, The US Government IS READY TO TAKE YOUR GIFT!
SEE: https://fiscal.treasury.gov/financing/gifts-to-government
I think you are confusing current utilization with economic productivity. There is an opportunity cost in hoding the land but land can also have economic value in the option. It’s the owner choice if he values its use even if it’s waiting for the option to come through and values it more than whatever alternative a self professed smart politician or OP’s abstract “society” might propose.
Whats’s next? Taxing you for your unused bedrooms, unused cars, unused clothes in your closet, unused nose rings, etc etc?
Just because some policymaker can identify a more productive use for someone’s property does not mean the policymaker knows the owner’s opportunity cost or future options or even risk better than the land owner.
An even better argument might be why do we need to tax at all? It’s not that governments are the pinnacle of capital allocation efficiency. After some useful level, governments are basically corruption machines ESPECIALLY IN CALIFORNIA. Just look at their homeless and illegals industrial complex.
If you don't want to pay the taxes, thanks to Disneyland you can now sell your land for a nice fat gain, buy cheaper land elsewhere, and pocket the difference. And whoever bought your land will likely use it for the social good (maybe build a hotel or something).
/s
It's just a reality of life that not every homeowner can possibly be entitled to fully control what gets done with the land around them, and that's going to cause some friction.
It's a difficult job to navigate who gets to decide what, while still enabling necessary development. LVT is just one of the more elegant ways to do this.
I would much rather see an overall assets tax that scales with the value of the assets. That would incentivize more smaller businesses, long-term thinking, and wealth distribution. It would hit big corporations in the same way a LVT would, forcing them to be more and more productive with their assets the more they have, without pricing out smaller entities.
This is far from reality. A home is family and life to most people, nobody cares if it went up or down in value, a home is about our life.
If only this were true, we wouldn't have homeowners constantly fighting against new development or construction. Many homeowners treat their primary residence as an investment.
You'll be very hard pressed to find any home owner who actually thinks in this cartoonish way.
When people oppose changing the character of their home neighborhood it has nothing to do with "treating their primary residence as an investment". It is because they selected a place to live, to call home, based on some criteria that they liked. Everyone does. A home is a big commitment, so you spend a lot of time researching exactly where you want to settle down for the next many decades. You pick an area you like, a neighborhood you enjoy.
For some people that might be quite rural, for some people distant suburban, for others near-city suburban, for others inner-city center. Whichever type of area you select, it is because that's the kind of area you personally enjoy the most. Somehow this obvious truth is controversial on HN for reasons I don't understand, but it is the truth. People select what makes them happy, no surprise.
So, when people oppose seeing their suburban area torn down to build highrises, it has absolutely nothing to do with home values or investments.
People oppose it because they very intentionally chose to live in a suburb far away from highrises and now they see those imposed on them. Of course they're unhappy. Basic human nature, nothing to do with investments.
If someone feels this is not so, I'd appreciate an explanation of your viewpoint.
I don't _want_ $1M, I want to live in my house that I bought and lived in for years. Getting money I don't need and having to live in a place I don't want to live in is _not_ a positive situation.
Maybe reverse mortgages are the answer, I'm not sure, I'll admit I'm not very knowledgable about this.
It doesn't need to be.
"No one can ever build any new developments" is also a very negative situation for everyone.*
The goal is to balance these tradeoffs, and it can't just be sunshine and roses for everyone all the time.
*It's also basically our present situation, which is why housing is so absurdly expensive.
Twice in one day for a topic as not specific as this seems intentional.
That sounds like a terrible idea to me. Efficiency isn't everything. Small stripes owned by many people or by many smaller companies it's less efficient than one hedgefond owning everything and yet it has disadvantages.
A forest is much less efficient than a mall and yet, the forest might still be more important.
There's also no way for a government to effectively determine the potential value of land. Asking them to do it means inviting disaster and corruption.
> A forest is much less efficient than a mall and yet, the forest might still be more important.
In a weird twist of irony our efforts to be lazy end up costing us a lot of work. But that's also because there's two types of lazy: short term and overall work. We used to say we want to hire programmers that are lazy because they'll find the most efficient way to do something. But now we don't revere that kind of lazy, we like the kind of lazy that procrastinates. Do the quick cheap thing now, telling ourselves that we'll make it better in the future, knowing that's a lie. That pattern isn't unique to programming, it's just marshmallows.
Point being: the government has been assessing land value for a long long time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax_in_the_United_S...
All other forms of taxation at least have arguments to ethically justify them, including land taxation.
I mention it right there in the very same sentence, you must have stopped halfway.
> I'd like to hear how you think land tax is ethically better.
First things first - "better" is a bit strong of a word since there has never been any argument made in favour for taxing labour except for "might is right" or "the end justifies the means". If you have an argument except for those to why it is ethically right by itself to tax somebody for working, then I'd like to hear it.
Now for the argument in favor of land tax:
Nobody has any inherent right to "own" land. The concept of "owning" is an invention and is also completely absurd once you think deeply and clearly about it. God created all land and it has been there for millions of years before anybody set foot upon it and claimed ownership. Claiming to own the land - and what more claiming to have a right to transfer that ownership to anybody but your children - is something of an abomination.
Compared to owning your labour and the fruits of your labour. Which is an extension of owning your own body. Or owning something you've purchased and can bring with you wherever you go.
The government itself is an extension of the concept of land ownership. So it is natural that they would levy taxes on their vassals - people claiming ownership of any land. The government vouches for your unjustifiable claim on this land and you pay them for the privilege. It also fits very well with the concept of governments being limited geographically in extension.
I don't claim that there aren't very good arguments against taxing land, but there are at least ethical and logical arguments for it, while taxation of labour have no such arguments in favor.
You can also argue ethically in favour of taxation on foreign trade - tariffs. Because in such, the government doesn't interfere in what people do within their country.
> You mention serfdom, which is most similarly linked to land tax as the serfs would have to pay the lord for existing on that place.
You forget that the serfs are given no right to sell the land, which is why they are serfs and not lords. That's the most important factor. The lord certainly did pay a land tax to the king.
The argument is not "pay taxes or we kill you", it's "pay taxes or get out of our town". No one is a slave, if the government asks for too much and provides too little, people will move.
I live in a town with non-trivial taxes. It was my personal decision to move there, no one said "move there or we kill you". When choosing a place to live, I could have moved to some other city/state/country with lower taxes, but I've decided not to. I like that we have working utilities, parks, roads, schools, law enforcement, stores. The town had a vote to increase town tax to raise money for schools and libraries, more than 70% approved.
I don't care about your ethical reasoning about tax types, if you want to live in my town, you contribute to the town's well-being. If you refuse to, on any grounds... well, maybe some other place will be a better fit for you.
You're arguing "end justifies the means" and "might is right". "My town" and all as you argue.
Unless you truly believe that people choose where and how they will be born, which of course might be the case. And then they only have themselves to blame, as you say.
"I don't care about your ethical reasoning" is a good summary of your reply.
As just one example, if I place becomes popular then suddenly the taxes rise and people have to move out. Lots of people hate that idea and so vote it away. And then LVT no longer works.
Now I have to pay for my own kindness.
lmao economists, really
To actually tax the land, the owner needs to sell it, but who is going to buy taxed land? You are forced to sell it to pay the tax.
So taxed land, in the end, loses value, because it's sold more and bought less, and the source of income goes away, because he was forced to sell the land.
A hedge fund or a lawyer office with with a huge income but a a small office pays some tax. A sandwich shop close to them which barely had ends meet pays the same amount of tax.
I believe we should tax hedge funds much more than sandwich shops.
If an island produces 2 burgers a day and has 3 inhabitants: one is rich, another is the poorest worker who can afford a burger, and the third is indigent, the rich person buys his burger, the poorest worker buys the second burger, and the indigent buys nothing, because there are only 2 burgers.
So a socialist sees this and claims he will tax the rich to give a burger to the indigent.
He taxes the rich as much as necessary to ensure that the indigent gets the burger.
As the worker tries to pay more for his burger, the price rises, so the socialist raises the tax as much as necessary to ensure that the indigent still gets the burger.
So the next day, the rich person buys his burger, the indigent buys another burger, and the poorest worker goes hungry, because there are only 2 burgers.
The result is the same if the socialist taxes the rich, prints money, or takes on debt. He always takes the burger from the poorest worker.
So taxes and public spending are always paid by the poorest workers. It does not matter where the socialist gets the money from: he always taxes the poorest workers.
In what sense can't it be passed to renters? Esp if all landlords in the market were faced with a new land tax that they had not previously planned for, why would it not be passed on?
Taxes can be passed on when the tax induces a change in supply. Conventional property taxes are partially passed through because the component of the tax that falls on the building. Tax buildings, get less buildings.
Taxes on land do not affect the supply of the land, this implies they are not passed on and the research literature largely agrees with this.
But for that to happen, land values need to go down. Landlords need to bid less.
Thats an incentive to rent out the property or sell up to somebody who will.
It would apply harsh market discipline on landlords - a demographic that has usually been rather coddled.
The existence of property tax (which on a single house in some areas of the state is upwards of $15,000 a year already) already makes it absolutely ruinous to just sit on an extra house you don't need and not rent it out.
> or who don't make efficient use of land
A little more convincing. Though I suspect most empty land in places where anyone would be willing to live in California, is empty because our insane zoning laws don't allow what would otherwise make sense there (I don't care that it's like what most areas have -- it's insane to have laws that would make it illegal to build a place like San Francisco, Brooklyn, or Boston).
The funny thing about those zoning laws though is that they're held up by a rare case of bipartisanship:
- The MAGA Boomer set who doesn't want any more development near them because "it'll bring traffic" or noise or crime
- And most of the "progressives" who don't want any more development anywhere because "we hate greedy developers" and "Not enough of this proposed development is low-income housing for the government to dole out in lotteries to a few lucky families."
15k/2M is 75 basis points. Its definitely profitable to just sit on land especially if you turned it into a parking lot or some other barely improved thing.
That doesn't follow. If LVT reduces the net return on rentals, it will disincentivize construction and maintenance of housing in the first place. If it creates a net negative or zero return on property ownership, it may lead to abandoned/undeveloped property instead of housing development, or more property being used for other purposes than housing.
It's also worth pointing out that the existing ad valorem tax system used for property taxes is functionally equivalent to LVT, and does have these influences on the housing market. LVT proposals are distinguished by their being rooted in (fundamentally flawed) Georgist theory, not by being unique as a form of taxation in practice.
These aren't a universal cost. When rates change, some landlords' costs go up. But some don't. That lets the latter set the marginal price.
If everyone's costs go up the same amount, it's collusion without communication. In an inelastic market like San Francisco's, you'd expect prices to rise.
Taxes may not affect the amount of land that physically exists, but they absolutely can and do affect the amount of land available for rent as opposed to other income-generating use cases.
On top of that, a tax that applies equivalently to all of the land available to the rental market in a given area will simply push prices upwards across the board, which is likely to just be absorbed by renters given the usually low price elasticity of demand for housing.
In fact, they are indeed arguments derived from applying well-understood economic principles to the specific -- and purely speculative -- claims posited by the preceding comment.
> Be sure you understand them first; your assertions do not hold in the case of LVT.
Indeed I have, and indeed they do. Rather, your own response attempting to dismiss rather than engage with counter-arguments betrays a likely ideological rather than pragmatic interest in the concept of LVT.
Most research asserts that a land value tax decreases the selling price of land.
If I buy land for $100k today, I can assume I'm going to make say $6k a year from renting it to someone and $2k a year from it increasing in value, giving me a 8% roi
If I instead had to pay just $4k a year in LVT, the price would reduce to $50k to keep that 8% roi. I'll still be making money for doing nothing.
Now if that LVT was returned to the population at large, it's quite possible the population has more money to spend on land, so I could increase the rental price from $6k a year, but then the LVT would increase, because the idea is it reduces unimproved land value to zero -- nobody should make money from occupying land, they should make money through improving it.
In reality though any LVT implemented would be full of loopholes which would introduce absurd incentives. Just like taxing income, and worse taxing earned income more than non-earned income.
In fact, I'd argue the majority of landlords are shit investors sat on fairly low yields
You're right that some people will get squeezed out, but in high demand markets there are enough people willing to pay that it doesn't matter. The number of properties available for rent in California isn't growing as fast as the total population is growing. Property owners will eat the 5% increase for a while - at least until the existing leases expire - but eventually they'll incorporate that 5% increase into the rent.
This absolutely happens in the UK where variable interest rates affect more people.
> When landlords' costs drop, do they drop the rent in response?
The price of everything is pretty much a ratchet. They never go down again absent some kind of competitive pressure.
If you think that's morally unobjectionable, fine, but I'd love to know what happens when all the landowners who own rural land that doesn't have a profitable development path attached to it can't pay their tax bills. Have the state seize it all?
Or do they just claim it's of negligible value and avoid the tax?
The market will bare it because people have no choice. The choice is homelessness or paying the higher rent.
It's principally the same when mortgage rates rise. Landlords with mortgages put up rent. Only it would be worse, since not all landlords have mortgages.
Property is already taxed based on its assessed value in California.
If it doesn't have a profitable development path attached, the price(and therefore "value") will go down, as will the tax burden.
Labour in the UK introduced a 20% inheritance tax on >£2M rural property.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/01/farmers-shoc...
Although the rules were later somewhat changed. Perhaps after pressure due to terminally ill farmers committing suicide (before the tax came into effect so that they could pass on their inheritance).
Is there really a market dynamic in rent pricing anymore? I thought that algorithmic collusion had eliminated the need for landlords to compete on price.
Well, that and non-enforcement of antitrust which is a big part of many of our current economic problems.
Massive corporate landlords like Greystar and Morgan Properties own so much of the market they can do a lot of pricing damage even without colluding with others (but of course they do that too).
The government, society, municipalities in the US do not build housing. They allow it to be built. Housing is built by developers, who are businesses that insist on making a profit.
So lets say you are one of the only couple of companies that can build a new 100 unit apartment in an area with tight housing supply. Great, you love money, you will look to invest in a development to capture some of that market and make money.
Do you build 100 cheap units for $X and make 5% profit over your planned ROI term, or do you build 100 absurdly upmarket units for $X + 10% dollars and make 10% profit over the same ROI term?
You already know the answer. The normal response is that "All new build is good and will lower price" but no, the rich people buying McMansions and $3000 per month condos in states they haven't ever been to can just absorb far more supply than actual local workers. And, well, they are so fucking rich compared to the average person that they can simply not care about how many of these properties they own, so there isn't downward pressure on them to sell off some of those locations.
The rich are just too rich and can easily outbid the rest of us forever for anything. They are so rich and their marginal value of a dollar is so low that they can happily buy up expensive housing basically for shits and giggles and sit on it and forget they even have it. They own ten properties they never visit. Because they can literally own a property just because they might some day want to visit.
Developers have mostly decided to only serve that clientele because they are so goddamned profitable, because they will negotiate less, will happily pay for box checking features meant to increase the price (like really really bad smart home implementations that they never even experience because they never go to that home). The rich guy who hired my dad to be his general contractor doesn't care what my dad charges and doesn't look at the bill, so my dad abandoned his plan to build 10 houses and instead just lives a relaxing life off of that man's excess, because why the fuck would you do a hundred times the work for less money?
That's one of the reason income inequality on it's own is so bad. Money doesn't work in a linear way, so having 2X the dollars as the next guy is more than 2X as "powerful". The uber rich can just own everything and you have no hope of outbidding or competing. You simply have no other choice than finding what little scraps they ignore.
Capitalism optimizes for best profit per effort. In a society where a tiny percent own the majority of all resources, why would you ever fight for the scraps the little guys have?
Profitable businesses in Portland are being forcibly evicted to be replaced with brand new hotels meant for Executives to visit once a year, all over the area, because providing any service to the uberwealthy is just that much more profitable than providing very necessary service to the average person. It doesn't matter how desperate normal people get, they can't afford to outbid the uberwealthy.
What sustains 'algorithmic collusion' in a non-market-clearing situation when landlords ultimately just want to rent their property out?
To put it another way, why would a property owner who has a vacant house leave it unrented in order to benefit other property owners at his own expense?
Why would they as long as they find a renter? The market always charges the marginal cost.
1) Cost of land per year (which won't change as you'd be paying $10k a year tax rather than $10k a year in interest on the loan taken to buy the land)
2) Cost of building per year (which won't change)
Not to mention that many real estate investors don't use loans, and that the banks giving out loans understand the lack of equity being built and demand higher interest given the inherently lower collateral (greater risk).
Currently the purchase price of the property includes a good deal of future land rent, you just pay the current owner.
If you spend $50k on some land and pay 5% a year you're paying $2500 a year in rent, but you're paying that to the existing owner.
Under an LVT you'd be paying $2500 in rent, but the land itself would cost basically nothing.
Whether it's a loan, or the opportunity cost from not putting the capital elsewhere, doesn't matter.
Land speculators profit from land values increasing, and they do nothing other than gamble. They don't increase the value of their own land, that's what their neighbours do. LVT removes that speculation, and indeed risk. If the area goes downhill (say in Detroit), your taxes lower
The downside of this is if you have taxes funding the government, you end up in a death spiral. That's what the UK has with council tax (which is very regressive, a 10m house in one area can pay less than a 100k flat in another, and even in the same area would only pay about 3 times the price), and I believe it's the case in the US.
That's why I'd rather see a citizens dividend than just cutting taxes.
> We also don't see landlords who own their properties outright (and thus don't have mortgage interest costs) charging lower rents than landlords in the neighborhood with identical properties who have mortgages. When landlords' costs drop, do they drop the rent in response?
If costs are uniform for each landlord (they have to pay for), it limits the amount of money they can invest in new capacity, and you will see the effects over a decade. If one landlord has cost advantage over another, then they will of course probably just take the extra money as extra profit.
> Taxes on land do not affect the supply of the land, this implies they are not passed on and the research literature largely agrees with this.
They provide friction with what can be done with the land, because the cost of owning the land has to be paid. If it is just a land tax, however, you can game it by building as much as possible on it so the landowners who can't build as much as you can subsidize your usage (long term, you either have to build as much as you can on your land, or sell the land to someone who can).
This is true, but the degree depends on elasticity of supply, and that depends a lot on profitability of the sector.
In fact - although that logic is usually correct - in the case of a land value tax it isn't useful because landlords do not supply land. Someone is still going to own the land and it is still going to be used for something. There is no incentive to leave it unused. There aren't any less resources in the overall system and resources haven't been diverted from a productive use to an unproductive use (quite the reverse, they're being redirected away from someone who was doing nothing to earn them). That is the theoretical advantage of taxing the land.
If it were anything else (eg, taxing the houses on the land) then the argument would be useful because the tax was on transforming less valuable resources into more valuable and there would be less productive economic activity and losses leading to less supply of something that the economy was signalling a need for.
There might be a reallocation from housing to some other purpose if an LVT is bought in, who knows. But it is a context-dependent change and not possible to reason about as a general outcome. It might be that the economy produces exactly the same amount of housing before and after. Less resources overall will be allocated to landlords, obviously, but not in a fashion that penalises building houses. Maybe that means house prices drop and more people own their houses outright. Maybe there is even more housing because resources move from landlords to housebuilders.
> If it is just a land tax, however, you can game it by building as much as possible...
I've never heard an entirely satisfactory process for valuing the land either. Although to some extent all tax systems have questionable underpinnings and compliance.
That's not gaming it, that's the tax working as intended. We need more housing, so if that gets people to build more of it, that's a win.
I was on the fence but your advocacy in favor of the land value tax has convinced me. Well played.
I think there are cases where we are in between for significant periods of time. Consider a positive shock to wages. Can landlords put up prices overnight? I don't think so, unless the landlords all co-ordinate to do so, prices will be sticky as there are always some properties in the market, so it's difficult to be the first to increase rent. Unlike a purchase, a landlord who waits for a buyer at the right price is forgoing income during the void. So the market price can be a Schelling Point.
A tax increase, however, happens at the same time to all landlords. All of them would prefer to pass it on, and they know that so they can assume all other landlords will try to pass it on. If the rent is currently below the maximum possible, they will succeed.
How long it takes prices to adjust I don't know. It is an empirical question, but I don't know what data would answer it. But it seems like it took decades for landlords to capture the two-income surplus after it became common for women to have a career.
Demand for apartments will be constant. Supply of apartments will be constant.
But I think what's going on here is that we are way off the equilibrium point. The supply of good places to rent is far outpaced by demand for them, at most price points, and especially so where all the value is (on the coast). So, this means if you're a landlord and you know you'll owe another $1200 tax to Sacramento this year, you should be very confident that if you raise rent by $100 a month, even if an individual tenant would rather move than pay it, someone who can afford $100 more exists and will almost certainly fill that vacancy promptly. It may represent a slight step down in what their buying power would buy. Like, they may have rented a $3000 apartment before, and they'll now rent what used to be a $2900 apartment from you for $3000.
Do you really believe that landlords will subsidize tenants for a long time?
More to the point, if landlords are losing money, why would anyone build rental housing? Instead, why wouldn't they take housing off the market?
This literally happens all the time in California.
You buy a house in CA. You move somewhere else. You hold on to the house because your property taxes are fixed and housing prices grow like crazy here. Maybe your kids will want it. Maybe you'll want to move back..
You can't charge enough rent to cover the mortgage and taxes os you end up taking a loss monthly.
Of course it does. The landlord's costs factor into the supply made available by landlords.
> When landlords' costs drop, do they drop the rent in response?
Competition says they do.
A landlord is usually in a different position. If their personal costs drop (eg, they paid off their mortgage) but the market price stays the same, how do they benefit by reducing the price they offer? Only by reducing the time it takes to rent out, which isn't a significant factor in exactly case when tenants would most like rents to go down - when prices are high because of demand.
The details of these mechanisms matter. Market can be out of equilibrium for a long time; maybe indefinitely.
Arbitrage forces say otherwise.
Only in one direction. If that rent, based on supply and demand, does not cover all of the owner's costs (+profit) then that rental property simply disappears off the market. No owner is going to rent out at a loss, so either the renter is paying for all expenses (+profit), or they get kicked out.
And one of the functions of supply is cost.
If they can't be raised, and the costs end up being ruinous to the landlords, they will find other solutions like mass arson. That isn't hyperbole; this was a serious problem in the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_South_Bronx_building_fir...
That was obviously not acceptable... but it was predictable.
All legal proposals should be viewed like a chess move. Presume others will respond, and make sure you're ok with that response. In a sense that's also the point of the original article too, a law was passed without adequqtely thinking through what would happen.
In fact it mentions insurance fraud as the cause...
Additionally it certainly wasn't increasing cost but reduced income which is a very different issue
Land's assessed value is based on what you could do with it. If can be rented at a profit, that's something you can do with it, and its potential matters. If it can't, then that is no longer a potential value of it.
That doesn't make lvt a bad idea, it's just that I think there's not enough acknowledgement of the trade-offs and limitations.
True, but an LVT is a cost. Changes in cost can change what is financially viable to do with a property, regardless of what is currently done with the lot, and thus can impact the land value.
The idea of cost-plus pricing is folk economics.
Tax incidence is very well understood in economics and has to do with relative supply and demand elasticity (supply of land is perfectly inelastic) and marginal costs which land value tax does not touch.
It's accurate to say LVT changes the price of land. But it doesn't change the profit maximizing productive use of land.
Other taxes that scale with production (sales tax, income tax, property tax) do change profit maximizing productive use.
Or the more likely option is they will no longer do investment properties as the return it too low vs the risk.
Landlords who have their entitlements to land rents or other natural resource rents they've captured ripped away from them would almost assuredly endorse the use of violence.
Land redistribution (of which this is a form) from the landed rentiers to the landless has historically resulted in brutal violence in order to protect their privileged claim on non-human created wealth.
Essentially taken to the logical conclusion, there will be people competing for more cash to pay their increasing taxes on the same land, it doesn't fundamentally solve the problem. It's such a joke.
You don’t seem to understand how it works or what it does.
It’s not wishful thinking it’s just a fact. Zoning exists because landowners want it. As soon as they don’t want it, it’s gone.
But in reality a land value tax incentivizes higher density housing. A single house and an apartment complex pay the exact same amount of tax, while the apartment building can split it up over many occupants. Land value taxes are a very natural hands off way of encouraging the right use of land, empty lots and car parks become unaffordable in highly desirable areas while apartments become relatively very cheap.
In theory the land value tax could be set so the overall taxation is the same as before, but but the distribution is such that the people with massive blocks of land in highly desirable areas foot most of the bill. This would over time make housing cheaper over time as more housing is built to reduce the tax burden.
Why would a land tax make the state more attractive to higher income renters than where they currently live?
That would only be true if the LVT replaced the existing property tax structure, which is not what TFA is calling for.
If these communists succeed, they will use the very fact that a landlord cannot synthesize money to prove the landlord passed the cost to the tenant and seize the land.
if landlords were able to raise rent, they would have done that already as its pure profit for them. The fact that they can't, means they will have to eat any marginal tax imposed on them
If I’m understanding the argument you’re making here correctly, wouldn’t what you’re saying be equally true for a property tax?
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I don’t think the author would agree with your point since I don’t see how your argument could be true for a land tax, but not for a property tax.
if they hike rents, whoever is more inelastic will eat the rent increase to the degree of her inelasticity.
the cost increase is shared between renters/landlords in the ratio of their elasticities. Whoever is more inelastic, will eat the cost.
Inealstic renters will pay up increased rent (like techbros in SF are eating up all rent increases).
Elastic renters will get up and move to Texas, if renter swill hike rent.
Elastic landlords will lever down and decrease number of low margin properties like rent-controlled properties, or unprofitable properties.
Inelastic landlords will eat the taxes and take a hit to profitability.
The author seems to say that costs can be passed on to the renters when the costs are a property tax, but they cannot be passed on when it’s a land tax. That seems like a really odd position to take and it doesn't align with your "costs are irrelevant" statement. I fully admit that I could be missing something, but I don’t understand how it can be true that only certain types of taxes can be passed on to renters.
I fully understand the argument you’re making and I’m neither agreeing nor disagreeing with it. It sounds logical, but I frankly don’t know enough about this topic really process it. What I’m saying is that regardless of whether you’re right or wrong, I don’t think your argument is the same one the author is making unless I’m missing something in your argument about why that only applies to land taxes and not property taxes.
From economics we know that increase in cost is split between Landlords/Renters in accordance to their elasticities. Whoever is more elastic - will eat the tax.
the cost increase is shared between renters/landlords in the ratio of their elasticities. Whoever is more inelastic, will eat the cost.
Inealstic renters will pay up increased rent (like techbros in SF are eating up all rent increases).
Elastic renters will get up and move to Texas, if renter swill hike rent.
Elastic landlords will lever down and decrease number of low margin properties like rent-controlled properties, or unprofitable properties.
Inelastic landlords will eat the taxes and take a hit to profitability.
My company rents a space in a commercial lot, and the contract states the property tax is split among the tenants. It's separate from the rent.
Apparently this is common in commercial settings. I wouldn't be surprised to see this start happening for consumers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence
It's literally econ 101 that says landowners will bear the burden of a land value tax.
Supply of land is perfectly inelastic and land value tax is not a marginal cost of production so does not change MR=MC.
renters rent apartments/houses, and these things are very elastic.
the cost increase is shared between renters/landlords in the ratio of their elasticities. Whoever is more inelastic, will eat the cost.
Inealstic renters will pay up increased rent (like techbros in SF are eating up all rent increases).
Elastic renters will get up and move to Texas, if renter swill hike rent.
Elastic landlords will lever down and decrease number of low margin properties like rent-controlled properties, or unprofitable properties.
Inelastic landlords will eat the taxes and take a hit to profitability.
You can feel free to solve the profit maximization problem of the apartment owner if you want.
A conversation with an LLM where you paste this exchange into the context is likely to clear up the reasons for your misconception.
It's only too late if you're timid and wimpy.
"I'm passing this law that is effective the exact millisecond I sign it, tough shit if you don't like it" is tyranny and despotism. But based on your comment I think you know that.
A wealth tax is not a retroactive law, nor something that targets an individual person. It's a "general law" in your parlance. Think about it.
> If you pass a general law (which could very well have reasonable objections), people have to have a chance to leave.
I don't think so. By what legal authority is that required?
> "I'm passing this law that is effective the exact millisecond I sign it, tough shit if you don't like it" is tyranny and despotism. But based on your comment I think you know that.
No, it's not, and don't be ridiculous. When they passed laws against date-rape, would you have judged it "tyranny and despotism" unless the law was delayed to give the date-rapers time to finish up the date-rapes they'd planned?
There's no justice in giving the wealthy the maximum opportunity to pick and choose the laws that apply to them.
ultrawealthy people just cant spend as much or give useful market signals the way the masses can
its hyperbolic to say laws that are active when passed are tyranny and despotism
They did give people that chance.. That's kind of what the entire article is about. They literally did leave.
if the voters and legislature have the “bravery” to pass the wealth tax law, it will be aggressively enforced by the FTB
the second-order effects, whatever they may be, would be clearly visible within a couple years.
This is to once again mistake net worth for money. Net worth is not real. It is not a good measure of the money someone may be able to realise. They do not have hundreds of billions. There is nothing to tax until they sell some shares.
Good way to find out it this is the case: take it away. Not real, right? Why would they mind?
Is it Zuck's networth or salary that makes it possible for him to own his ranch in Hawaii?
In the rare cases where contract law makes the transfer impossible legally the government could trivially step in to make it possible
And certainly ceejayoz was being a bit glib by suggesting we take all of it, but it would not be remotely insurmountable to tax billionaire wealth.
This is, ironically, more of a guess/estimate than determining Musk's net worth is. We don't actually know that!
whats the complication? if its not worth anything whos gonna worry, especially if the government then compensates you in dollars
Oh, are those real now?
Valuing assets is a routine, widespread thing.
You can't just handwave away the fact that the real world exists.
A painting can be valued. A vintage car can be valued. A movie script can be valued. My house's value changed a bunch during COVID; I'm still taxed on it! Each is an asset; none of these examples can be perfectly valuated; each may see its value change dramatically over time, but you can still estimate its worth pretty well.
Hell, I can put my house address on Zillow and get an estimate in real time.
these other assets like musk's stocks are still quite divisible, and theyre as liquid as the government wants them to be. just because musk hasnt written the liquidity into his government sponsored contracts doesnt mean the government cant say yes, 10% of your private spaceX stock is liquid and belongs to donald trump now
its real and thus it is taxable
Take what away? I'm saying if I own 51% of Tesla, you cannot tell what amount of money that amounts to until I sell it.
C'mon, man. We know Musk's net worth. It's public knowledge!
No we don't.
>It's public knowledge!
No it's not. We estimate his net worth based on public filings. We know next to nothing about his nonpublic holdings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_of_Elon_Musk
That the estimates vary a bit on the edges doesn't mean they've no value. It was public knowledge when his net worth confirmably hit a trillion dollars in share holdings.
"with an estimated"
You made my point for me, thank you.
>That the estimates vary a bit on the edges
We don't know that. It could vary widely, intra-day even.
>doesn't mean they've no value.
I did not make this claim.
>It was public knowledge when his net worth confirmably hit a trillion dollars in share holdings.
It was "public knowledge" when his estimated net worth hit a trillion.
If your point is "we can't tax people because estimates aren't perfect", sure. But it's a silly point. We already tax people off estimates - if you own a house, your property taxes are assessed in exactly this fashion - an estimate of its value.
> It was "public knowledge" when his estimated net worth hit a trillion.
No. It was public knowledge when his known numbers of shares in his publicly traded companies reached a known price point.
Don't try to deflect or move the goalposts. My point is you stated "we know Musk's net worth" when we don't. This is a false claim.
>No
Yes.
>It was public knowledge when his known numbers of shares in his publicly traded companies reached a known price point.
An estimate based on the valuation of his publically known stakes at a specific point in time, not his net worth.
But even in California's case this doesn't feel like anything anybody would object to. Given how much California Billionaires liquidate using loans on their wealth, I bet, they could do a middle class tax cut too to offset it a little bit too.
I am little baffled as to why the politicos haven't latched on to this whole-heartedly. You can still proudly say you're taxing Billionaire wealth. Because you are! Just more sensibly.
And the answer to that was "if you're so afraid that selling will tank the value of the stock, then we [the government] will happily take your taxes as stocks directly, and we take on the risk that selling it will reduce its value".
Yes indeed. It's basically saying "don't bother starting everything because the government will gradually just own it all anyway".
It's harder for private companies sure, but who will stand in the way of govts if they said we will sanction your if you buy X or Y company?
This entire argument doesn't really hold IMHO
The SEC exists. As do many other mechanisms by which the government regulates direct and brokered securities trades and sales. You can make the case that some of those controls are poorly/ineffectively implemented, but you can’t claim that it’s not something the government routinely regulates, intervenes in, and sometimes prohibits outright.
https://www.sec.gov/files/forms-3-4-5.pdf
Here are Musk’s. https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1494730.htm
high frequency traders dont have a right to a business model.
if they want faster trades, they can take full liability for what they own
Because the building is standing right where it is, in the open, lit by the sun every day. If you don't pay your tax, the government can just take it.
This compensates for the several philosophical and moral problems with it, and I've seen several economists declare it the best form of taxation there is.
Your comment added literally no value except to whine.
Try holding yourself to at _least_ as high of standards as you hold others. People will be less likely to think you're a worthless asshole.
If a majority stock holder in a company sells all of their stock, the price first the first share sold is likely going to be completely different (and substantially less!) than the last share sold.
Personally my favorite idea for this stuff that I have heard thrown around is to allow people to self value everything. However, that self valuation then becomes a price tag. Let a billionaire's accountants put their own evaluation on their equity in a business. But that becomes a binding offer and some other billionaire could come along and buy them out at that valuation. That creates pricing pressure in both directions, the person is prevented from underpricing their assets due to the threat of another buyer coming in and a person is prevented from overpricing because it increases their taxes. And suddenly all the problems regarding how the government appraises these things disappears.
And that ignores that it trivially enables large-scale exploitation and looting by construction.
Once again, this is simply haggling over price. Name the premium you think is justified and add that into the law.
If the owner is required to invent a fake risk premium then it virtually guarantees that the risk will be mis-priced. Forced rampant mis-pricing is an exploitable arbitrage opportunity of epic proportions. Every quant worth a damn will make a fortune looting this. No serious policy can ignore this defect. It has the additional political downside that no one can ever own anything anymore in a meaningful way, which won’t be popular.
No one takes this idea seriously because anyone with a modicum of finance math background can see that the math doesn’t math. Political ideology doesn’t even figure into it.
For example, imagine we only apply this to people with a net worth over $500B. That's literally only Elon Musk. He has plenty of money to hire his own team of quants to price his assets. We can even be generous with this law and make the purchase price double the valuation. Hell, we can even restrict it to only apply to stock of publicly traded companies so the wealth valuations are highly informed by market pricing. We can just keep adding rules like this until you're out of economic reasons for why a wealth tax and/or this form of valuation can't work. At that point the debate is lost and "we're just haggling over price" because once we apply it to Musk, how can you argue against applying it to Bezos...
This type of forced sale happens all the time with public companies. For example, only like 60% of Twitter shareholders approved the sale to Musk, but the other 40% were forced to go along with it regardless of their preference. If Musk can do that to other people, why should some hypothetically richer person not be able to do it to Musk?
And to repeat myself for a third time, we don't need to haggle over price. If we only want this to apply to billionaires, assets worth $50 million, or whatever, that's fine. If one of the people impacted truly doesn't want to sell, let them set the price as high as makes them feel safe. I'm not going to lose any sleep over taxing the emotional desires of billionaires.
They signed up to that, though. Tagalonpg/dragalong rights are priced into the share price. That's not the same thing.
I think a lot of tax authorities also don't really aggressively reassess that regularly without a sale, so it also kind of ends up baked in that if you didn't pay that much for the property, it's only theoretically worth that much.
I don't like property taxes either, and at minimum would rather they were called something else, and preferably replaced with per-service charges where possible.
But either way they exist to pay for things, and not to just degrade the value of your property simply because you worked to own it.
It seems there are many many more people heavily invested in preventing land tax all of a sudden and are very informed whereas when that guy made a land tax visualizer a few months ago... crickets.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45425770
> but I struggle to even conceptualize what land value means
One of the first comments. Now there are dozens of people who are suddenly well versed in "georgeism"?
Another evident thing is that people will start retreating from the internet as this gets worse (With LLMs accelerating the trend).
I disagree with you on what is being drip-fed. It's factual that deranged levels of wealth inequality are causing problems, even the billionaire wannabes on HN are starting to see that.
This is circular. Wealth inequality:
1. Isn't real. It's a paper value that would not survive contact with reality.
2. Doesn't matter. What matters is the absolute level of poverty and whether that's getting better. Someone in poverty in the UK today will still get healthcare, eyecare and dental care beyond the dreams of Henry VIII.
3. Is genuinely a stupid measure. You could "fix" it by burning everyone's possessions until everyone has the same: nothing. Zero inequality, and yet somehow doesn't sound great.
> What the wealthy and powerful are funding is division, fascism, the far-right and immigrant hate, so that they don't have to pay more taxes. It's the same divide and rule playbook since forever.
This is just your media consumption showing.
And humans are wealthier than any time in history. They have access to robot slaves that can wash dishes and clothes for them. They can access fruits grown over 1000 miles away for 69c. They have potions that can cure cancer. They have the database of all human intelligence in their pocket, accessible from anywhere on the globe. They have individualized transportation that can travel over 2 miles a minute. They have super intelligent thinking machines for cents.
Life has never been better for mankind.
The last thing you should do at that point is vote for more policies that will destroy economic activity in the name of "fairness". That's how you got here.
If you have 100B to your name even if it's post IPO stock in a possibly ponzi company that's your current wealth and you can easily convert a staggering portion of it into material realized wealth depending on several factors.
If I use cash to buy 1B dollars in Microsoft shares today, am I not worth a Billion dollars...?
The value may not be exactly convertible agreed so let's just force everyone to book all gains every year, and force sell a net percent of your share.
Not 100B$ of share, but 2% of 100 Million units of stock that you own. Why does this not work?
If I take 2% of your shares why can't it work the same way? I can then pick and sell it over the next year or two however I see fit, in case of govt they can slowly sell back this share to not affect the prices too much.
I am baffled by the fact that we have a tractible quantity and people call it hard to use to measure money.
Paintings, Jewels, etc. are what's truly the hard part of the wealth equation not the stocks, which is over 99% of what a wealthy billionaire owns.
I am not even considering pro or against taxes on billions people make but it's ridiculous to say stocks aren't money? Then what is money really... Currency is also traded, it's value can also go up or down....
if the owner thinks its worth more than what the government proposes, they can pay tax on the higher amount.
its still not that hard
This is utter madness. What will happen is businesses will move en masse to places with economic systems not overrun by those driven clinically insane by years of listening to their favourite pundit blame billionaires for everything.
Who says that the price you paid per share was the actual market value of the shares? For example, let's say that you inherited 10 million options to purchase Microsoft stock at $1/share, and in so exercising the options (by writing a check for, say, $10 million to Microsoft), you then end up with 10 million shares, which on paper, with the current stock price close to $500/share, would be worth close to $5 billion. But could you actually get that much money from selling 10 million shares? Definitely not overnight - so many shares getting dumped on the market at once would materially affect the stock price. The $5 billion number is a hypothetical that depends on other people backing up the hypothetical numbers with their own money (i.e. buying at the hypothetical price) - it is not the same as "I have $5 billion in a bank account and could use that to go buy a yacht and buy political ads etc. with it"
On the contrary - it's trivial for controlling shareholders to direct the company to issue more stock to them and thus dilute the shares that were taxed. What do you propose, that companies can no longer issue stock after some of the stock has been taxed?
And what about non-divisible assets like real estate? There's nothing that prevents the government from forcing real estate to be held by LLCs instead of individuals, then shares in the LLC could slowly be taxed by the government. So what happens in 20 years when the government owns 50.1% of all the LLC shares that comprise the ownership of the $100 million Hollywood mansion? You're going to let a bureaucrat kick out the A-lister who lives there and put it up for auction? Attempt to sell it to someone who knows full well the same would happen to him?
It's very, very hard to design a wealth tax that doesn't end up being an assault on private ownership in all forms.
No. It will be higher. Say you spend your money on shares advertised at different prices, buying the cheapest first, like this:
800000 shares at $500 $400,000,000
300000 shares at $750 $225,000,000
200000 shares at $1000 $200,000,000
100000 shares at $1250 $125,000,000
33333 shares at $1500 $ 50,000,000
Total number of shares: 1433333
Net worth (1433333 * $1500): $2,149,999,500
That's why net worth is stupid.
Would you rather have 1M dollars in cash or 10B in stock that you can't sell?
> It is not a good measure of the money someone may be able to realise.
And as such, when you get into the higher ranges, net worth is quite a good indicator.
What is Cargill “worth”? Suppose the families announced they were selling 90% of it on Monday. Would they get that figure?
What is Jensen Huang’s share of nVidia worth? If he announced he was selling all of in October, why would he not end up with that figure?
It’s quite different for a bank to lend Jensen (or Larry Ellison or Elon) 5% of that notional figure. They don’t need to care whether the true value is 30% or 50% of the notional to make that loan.
Loans must be paid back. Loans are cash flow neutral (cash flow negative with interest) over the maturity. That's why loans are not counted as income.
When the market grows it makes the collateral worth more, which lets the borrower keep refinancing the debt instead of selling assets and realizing taxable gains. As long as the assets appreciate faster than the debt grows, the borrowing can effectively roll forward for decades. Eventually the estate pays the debt out of the assets themselves, but this is not necessarily out of taxable income earned during the person's lifetime. The US markets has seen exceptional genuine growth, but the trillions of 401(k), IRA, etc money flowing in to them over the last 40 years is no small consideration.
And even so, you could say it all settles out in the end, but that ignores the fact that there have constant constant efforts (and successes) in eroding away the e̶s̶t̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶a̶x̶ "death tax" during this same period.
Long maturity products still have to be repaid. There are no "infinite" maturity loan products for retail customers.
>It's questionable that whether such loans are cash flow neutral.
There's zero question: loans are cash flow negative (for customers) with interest. Banks are not going to offer products that are not cash flow positive for the bank.
> Especially with how the market has been lately, the gains erase any burden of the loan.
And when the market goes down, you get a margin call and get wiped out.
You’d think they’d jump over each other to lend money against such a stable, secure asset right?
Except they’ll say “sorry, this isn’t allowed. IRS treats borrowing against an untaxed retirement account as an early withdrawal, even if the asset itself stays untouched.”
Turns out the government fully understands the concepts of stocks, gains, unrealized net worth and more, and has laws on the books to make sure you are being taxed appropriately for them.
Meanwhile billionaires have convinced you – through their machinery of media, influencers, politicians and more – that this exact same reasoning absolutely cannot be applied to their own wealth. Because it’s “paper money”. It doesn’t exist. There’s nothing to tax. Just cannot be done, or it’ll bend the laws of spacetime.
Quite the opposite: Socialist politicans and their media lapdogs have dishonestly convinced you that wealthy people are escaping taxes en-masse by taking out loans and that this can only be stopped by eye watering wealth taxes. They frequently use a motte and bailey confusing unrealized gains (which certainly exist in huge amounts but are also significantly fiction) with tax escape via loans collateralized by securities.
But it's not true: were there meaningful tax escape that way it could be addressed by establishing rules with conditions where taking a loan against securities can be treated as realizing gains (and adjusting cost basis accordingly). Doing so would be minimally disruptive and distorting and have relatively little legal complication (at least compared to wealth taxes!).
But the reality is that the claimed tax escape isn't happening (at least not at any significant scale) particularly in the current interest rate environment, so a reasonable policy change to address it would be a no-op.
... and to grow and maintain their political standing they specifically need to push a NON-SOLUTION because they can't campaign on something that was simply done and solved, and to retain your (highly monetizable) attention they need to rile you up against an Enemy, and certainly never address the state's addiction to wasteful spending and buying votes with tax dollars as one half of the revenue vs expenses equation.
they dislike wealth taxes, which are an old roman concept predating socialism, because the wealth tax covers all the work arounds they can think of.
it is a proper solution to the overall problem which is extreme wealth concentration.
the obvious alternative is nationalization of all assets worth more than 100M.
DOGE has pretty conclusively proved that the government has been incredibly efficient with spending and doesnt have an addiction to wasteful spending. instead the problem is wasteful monopolization and wealth concentration. society writ large has an addiction to giving a small cadre too much power and control, and they arent the government
[0] https://factually.co/fact-checks/business/did-elon-pay-11b-i...
> buying votes with tax dollars
This was more convincing of an attack on "Socialist politicians" before Sept. 9, when Trump did it more openly than they ever have. I guess you could believe his claims it won't come from tax dollars. But if the government has $1 trillion lying around for this and chooses not to unconditionally lower taxes for everybody, is it any different?
The head of the anti-socialist, anti-wasteful-spending party is spending billions on a more impressive Air Force One, golf days, family vacations, vanity renovations, DHS ads starring a POTUS wannabe, DOGE effectively paying people not to work, etc.
Purely an accounting artifact. We can pass a wealth tax tomorrow and it’ll suddenly be taxable.
Net worth is real money, and is usually a very accurate measure of what people can realize. There are a few outliers who own so much that they’d move the market if they sold it all. Selling 2% to cover taxes? Not going to move the market very much.
That is what makes the timeline GGP laid out impossible:
> We can pass a wealth tax tomorrow and it’ll suddenly be taxable.
Unless we don’t share a common definition of “tomorrow” or “suddenly”. (For reference, the 16th Amendment process took about 3 years and 7½ months from Senator Norris Brown’s initial formal proposal to ratification by the then-necessary 36th state. [You would need 38 states today.])
The point is that we can do it if we want to.
When you meant "shortly before Memorial Day of 2030", it's not clear that 51% of the misunderstanding is on the reader.
Income for what though? Personal spending? Building a factory to great jobs?
Capital gains for what though? Personal spending? Building a factory to great jobs?
Property for what though? Personal spending? Building a factory to great jobs?
Inheritance for what though? Personal spending? Building a factory to great jobs?
What a strange question.
Which currently require interest payments of ~6-8% APR. Meaning that you need to be able to invest that money that is being borrowed back into the economy to hopefully get a return more than that. And if your investment fails you will have to realize a different investment. The interest being paid doesn't get hoarded either and is used to make other investments, pay employees, build products, etc.
The idea that a bunch of people are just hoarding their money and not reinvesting it back into the system is flawed. Taxes actually have the opposite effect to contributing to the system. Taxes are like if someone was to come and start hoarding money under their mattress for himself and not contribute back to society.
I don't know what point you were trying to get across with your link, so I gave my general thoughts on the article.
Forced liquidation hurts more than the sticker price, but with billionaire taxes, that's a feature, not a bug. They make the most sense as a check on concentrated power rather than a revenue driver.
Yes, businesses are allowed to buy and sell things without being taxed on the sales. If you want to change that rule, you are going to change a giant number of things purely to get at the billionaires you've spent the last few years being trained to hate.
> Forced liquidation hurts more than the sticker price, but with billionaire taxes, that's a feature, not a bug. They make the most sense as a check on concentrated power rather than a revenue driver.
It's missing the planetwide jungle for the trees if you think giving politicians the ability to reach into ownership percentages of businesses and deciding how much they want to charge you for owning a business is a check on power.
You wont mind if we tax it then will you?
You do, of course.
p.s. liquidity != wealth. try not to confuse them.
You can't take net worth away because it's just an estimate of what someone is worth. It may eventually be possible to turned into dollars and cents without losing too much in the process, but almost universally it can't immediately be exchanged in such a fashion.
Even more so when we're talking shares in a company that is not yet public, e.g. a founder's shares. At that point the valuation is complete speculation, based on what the company may be worth in some hypothetical future IPO. There's no actual price discovery since there's no public trading of such shares.
illiquid wealth != unreal wealth.
as I said, if it were unreal you wouldn't mind losing it.
if it is illiquid, you clearly do.
economic illiteracy is not the best foundation for arguing against taxing the wealthy. by pretending the wealth "doesnt really exist" and "isnt there" to tax it highlights the underlying greed motivating the argument.
if you dont agree, perhaps elucidate on a more legitimate reason you might have had for confusing unreal with illiquid?
But sure, how do you propose to pay taxes with assets that can't be liquidated and may not even be possible to valuate?
Even if you somehow pay taxes in assets that can't be liquidated, now the government has the same problem instead. What is the government gonna do, pay its employees in unlisted stocks, yachts and famous paintings? How will it even know how much taxes it's gathered?
If the tax isn't isn't just satisfying some sense of petty envy, and the tax is intended to cover some budget deficit, I don't see how this would help.
there are plenty of ways to handle the problem of taxing illiquid wealth but I dont think there is much value in discussing it with somebody pretending that means it is "not real".
it would be like discussing the science behind vaccines with somebody who persisted in calling them "poisons".
most people have very little illiquid wealth, and its generally in the form of a house.
billionaires are a tiny propertion of people, and their situation is as atypical as it comes. theres no reason to make super special accomodations for them, when theyre responsible for making their own dumb situation where they have too many assets to make them liquid on a hurry
An overlooked issue in popular discourse is that notional asset values are tightly coupled to who owns them — it isn’t transferable. Concepts like “dead equity” have been in the finance literature for a very long time. Elon Musk’s equity only has the value it does because he owns it. He couldn’t convert it into cash even if he wanted to.
no it isnt. illiquid doesnt mean unpriceable and illiquid doesnt mean can't be liquidated. people liquidate their illiquid assets all the time to pay their tax bills.
it being "complex to collect" is a criticism of many taxes which are already being paid. sales tax and VAT are horrendously complicated (far more so than a wealth tax) to collect but we still do it.
>An overlooked issue in popular discourse is that notional asset values are tightly coupled to who owns them — it isn’t transferable. Concepts like “dead equity” have been in the finance literature for a very long time. Elon Musk’s equity only has the value it does because he owns it
even if it were true, it's not a good reason not to tax him.
in fact, it might even help bring some sanity to the capital markets if he and every other billionaire were forced to price their illiquid assets for tax purposes.
theres no efficiency or impossibility argument that prevents this. the only argument boils down to stamping one's feet declaring that it's not fair (that I would have to value my illiquid assets and might be forced to sell them if I underpriced them).
> He couldn’t convert it into cash even if he wanted to.
Elon musk has been converting his assets into cash recently and he has had no problem doing it.
Bill Gates similarly liquidated his assets to fund his charity and didnt have a problem doing that.
Why is liquidating their shareholdings suddenly a problem only when they need to pay taxes?
It's not, and I don't think anyone said it was.
The problem is in the calculation of "net worth". And, more importantly, the difference is that people choosing to put their money into something is not the same as enabling it to be taken by force.
Yeah you did. You wrote "he couldnt turn it [his illiquid assets] into cash even if he wanted to".
>The problem is in the calculation of "net worth".
That is not a problem.
Let them value their own assets. If they value their ming vase at $10k then the government reserves the right to buy it for...$10k. They might get away with avoiding paying taxes. Or the government might get a bargain. The incentive, though, is to be scrupulously honest and accurate.
Some people obviously wouldn't like being put in such a position.
> And, more importantly, the difference is that people choosing to put their money into something is not the same as enabling it to be taken by force.
Im not 100% sure but I think this falls under the category of just saying "wealth taxes not fair!"
Well then why are people able to borrow against it and then also deduct taxes on the interest on that borrowed amount?
Also I pay property taxes. Somehow the worth of the property goes up every year and gets gets taxed accordingly. Then why can’t wealth get the same treatment?
I doubt they can borrow against the full amount of it, because that changes. They'll be borrowing against a much smaller value, so the lender has a safety margin. Same as if you have a mortgage you pay less interest the less you borrow vs the value of your house, except I imagine it will be far more conservative.
> Also I pay property taxes. Somehow the worth of the property goes up every year and gets gets taxed accordingly. Then why can’t wealth get the same treatment?
Well, three things.
Firstly, as an aside, it's incredible that you would want this. That is a bad system. You should get taxed according to the services you consume, along with a flat rate for common services, rather than punished with taxes for daring to spend money on improving your house.
Secondly, "wealth" is far less tangible than property prices. Property prices are very well understood. A share price can fluctuate wildly, and saying "well your net worth for today is the number of shares you have times the last share sale price" is just a terrible measure.
Thirdly, what will those shares be worth to sell when they are taxed? Investing is a gamble. Housing is different: we need housing to live, and we want a nice house. No one wants shares. They want a return, and for it they'll stump up a giant amount of money, that will fund many jobs for years, and generate lots of taxes, and who will want to do that when their share will be eroded year on year? There's no benefit to shares except the return. Decreasing the return will have a direct impact on innovation and jobs.
This is a very strange claim when we have property taxes. Shares are property so they can be taxed just like houses and land.
Yes, everyone in the US can play the same clever little game by taking out a loan against a property and deducting the interest against their income.
> and the estate value is reduced so the heirs won’t pay as much (or any) estate tax
This is just madness. The estate value is reduced so their heirs won't get as much. You still pay inheritance tax on what you get. Anyone can avoid inheritance tax by just not passing anything on.
if you are claiming the high net worth, almost certainly you have raised significant actual money on things you own. a wealth tax means that if you dont actually think your business is worth a billion, you cant raise money as if it was.
thays a net good thing.
if peter theil is lying about being rich and he only has a couple hundred thousand bucks to his name, the publiv overall deserves to know, and it should cost him quite a lot to raise or borrow money.
these people are commiting fraud and should be forced into texas prisons without AC because theyre lying to banks about the value of their assets, and the bankers too beed to go to those same prisons because theyre defrauding their depositors.
this is only a good thing for routing how whos lying about their worth
That's tautological. I mean, it's true under current federal tax law. It's obviously not true under new California law, which is what the article is about.
Clearly the government can tax non-cash assets, and they do all the time. People act like "wealth taxes" are some moral horror or logical impossibility, while tossing their mortgage statement into a big file and pretending to ignore the property tax line on the escrow account.
Are there practical problems like "wealth has feet"? Sure. Taxation is hard and all systems can be gamed. But let's not pretend that there's a greater principle at work here.
Edit to point out a subtlety: this is an argument at cross purposes. If the economic impact of all this personal wealth growth is so high that liquidating it would move whole markets, then very clearly it represents significant missed tax revenue.
There are cases where taxes can hurt investment, but you're really talking about quite high rates. For instance, the US peak rate of income tax used to be 94%. That almost certainly _did_ hurt investment.
Why can't they pay tax in shares?* If net worth isn't real it shouldn't really matter...right?
*Please no pedantry about how the IRS doesn't currently accept shares as payment for taxes. If laws can be written to add wealth taxes on stocks and bonds, they can easily have a clause to allow payment in kind. Address the question I'm actually asking.
(I'm in agreement with the thesis of the article)
Read somewhere that SF spends roughly 50k$-80k$ per homeless person per year.
Taxing more doesn't solve a massively inefficient system at it's core. Just like US education, we spend more than any country on earth, why is it still bad?
Answering that question with a "if only we had more money" is a really poor argument. The CA tax fundamentals are bad, pooring more cash onto the fire will not fix that.
The population that's already living in those houses?
Note that "native-born Californians are ~37% of San Francisco County. That percentage has remained relatively flat over recent decades"
natural population change was positive in San Francisco County, CA, with births exceeding deaths by 574
I think it's more socialist/communist motivation to seize production I don't think they care about the rich as much as control.
In addition, there should probably be changes to laws/regulations to address companies that exploit the poorest.
And, many people who are poor have persistent mental/physical disabilities, so part of that spending is because many of these people have it the hardest.
With that said, we could likely fix all of these things and significantly unequal wealth distribution would still result in a lot of poverty.
This same thing was observed during the Gold Rush in California in the 1800s; extreme wealth also resulted in extreme poverty. And there's a great way to solve this: tax the land and redistribute it equally to everyone. Land can't be moved, it's something that belongs to all of us, and you can't make more of it.
Economic land is any capital that has a fixed amount, that you can't make more of. When the local governments in the Bay Area started capping the amount of buildable square feet, they greatly accelerated inequality by converting regular living space and working space into economic land, just like the real land it sits upon.
This is why economic inequality skyrocketed so much. Rentierism resulted in so much being stolen from anybody who doesn't own the land, and blocks out so many people from even having access to the economic system.
In contrast when you have enormously wealthy people like Marc Andreessen fighting against higher density zoning there is no such excuse and it's pure greed. Nothing could actually be an existential disruption to the wealthy in the same way. There is no reason to listen to the rich like Andreessen at all.
The equitable thing would be to focus on redeveloping wealthy homeowner areas and limit redevelopment in areas occupied by poor renters, but somehow that option never seems to be on the table. Only the reverse.
If anything, these "tenant" groups only advocate for the interests of a small subset of tenants, those who have their forever home, and do so at the expense of tenants in general. It's "pure greed" too, at the expense of others in their same general social, economic, and political class!
I say this as someone who continues to advocate alongside tenant groups on policy for better protections, for rent registries, etc. And as someone who spent many years giving small donations to local tenant advocacy groups. At least Andreesen is transparent in his greed, and not hiding it. I regret all those years of donations to the groups that hurt people, but when it comes to the few good things they do I'll be there with them still. Marc Andreesen and the wealthy funders of "tenant" groups are not harmed at all by better tenant protection policy, but boy are they harmed if real power were handed back to tenants in the form of having enough housing, and therefore ultimate power over the landlords.
> They are nearly 100% funded by wealth foundations that have exactly the same motivations as Marc Andreesen, and the people carrying out the wishes of the wealthy foundations are merely woke-washing really bad behavior.These "tenant" groups fight the types of change that would redevelop wealthy areas, precisely because of their funding sources, and they do it just as hard if not harder than stopping housing going up in other areas.
Certainly not the case in my jurisdiction of Vancouver, where such political groups (eg. COPE) have explicitly advocated for apartment development in the wealthiest areas of the city. Maybe this is the case somewhere but a big [citation needed] here. If there are somewhere tenant advocacy orgs that aren't in favour of turning low density detached homes into apartments for workers that's certainly not one I recognize.
> If anything, these "tenant" groups only advocate for the interests of a small subset of tenants, those who have their forever home, and do so at the expense of tenants in general. It's "pure greed" too, at the expense of others in their same general social, economic, and political class!
Yes this is the point of my last comment. The solution is to increase the amount of people who have their forever home. The most equitable way to do that is to "destroy" the forever homes of the very rich for whom that is really no big disruptive deal, not to destroy the forever homes of the poor for whom it would be incredibly existentially disruptive. It is not "greedy" for people to want to keep their toehold on their long term home. To be clear the stakes here are not simply moving somewhere else but being priced out of the city entirely.
Landlords could have collectively agreed to keep rents at $1K/month and not lobby against building more housing complexes, but they decided to be greedy instead.
I think one could argue that taxation should be higher, and harder to dodge, and I would agree with that.
But once you start saying that some people shouldn't have more than others to some degree, that's a very slippery slope. Where do you draw the line? Why is it okay for middle class Americans to buy nicer clothes and move into bigger apartments when people are out there starving? If it's not okay for someone to have the net worth of Qatar, why would it be okay for someone to live in an apartment that's worth more than a poor township in South Africa?
At some point we have to accept that inequality exists, and that although almost everyone could do something to minimize it, there's an ethical and practical line that needs to also respect individuality to a large degree, if we want people to feel incentivized to do things, to feel ownership, to maintain autonomy. And where to draw that line is tough to say exactly, but it probably shouldn't be a line, it should probably be smooth, or at least smooth-ish. So I feel like we're just coming back around to progressive taxation. Which we already have.
That, exactly, is the problem. It's not even about money and tax evasion but power. Why should one person have more say over the company they work for than 10,000 other employees? Or even worse they don't even work there anymore and just control it from outside?
Even if they are a perfectly good and business smart person who never makes bad decisions or abuses their workers. They will eventually die or sell their share, and in either case it will end up with people who care less about the company's long term health than the founder did. Profit maximizers with no ethics and no feeling of responsibility.
I think the concept of shareholders is the problem. Layoffs, cartels and price inflation happen when the people who make decisions get all the benefits but none of the downsides. If it was up to me I would ban stocks and replace them with time limited shares that give you a right to part of the profits for 1 or 5 or 10 years, but zero control over the company. Leave power to workers and returns to investors but never bind the two together.
Why shouldn't they?
That's how pretty much every organization works. Every military, every government, every sports team, every space mission, every classroom, etc., they all have some person or small group up people with more more decision-making power, or "more say," as you put it.
I fail to see the problem with that. In fact, there's a very real benefit in that it's generally more effective. For example, today people are completely free to create organizations that work differently, and they rarely choose to, and when they do, they rarely out-compete the alternative. So the proof is in the pudding that there's something less effective about it.
If I had to wager a guess: decision-making isn't something that scales well. Bodies might have dozens of organs, but they only really need one brain to control them all.
> They will eventually die or sell their share, and in either case it will end up with people who care less about the company's long term health than the founder did. Profit maximizers with no ethics and no feeling of responsibility.
1. There are plenty of counterexamples where the leader of a company ensures its long-term success after their tenure ends.
2. Even if this were somehow a downside of owner-led companies, you always have to ask the question, "...compared to what?" It's not like the alternative doesn't have its own slew of downsides, as evidenced by the dearth of competitive co-ops that compete successfully with owner-led companies. In other words, organizations are always going to have issues and errors and flaws, no matter how you set up decision-making.
After all, businessmen often use strategies like aiming to be acquired/purchased by a much larger company, merging with their competitors or partners, or anticipating bankruptcy by draining every viable resource and asset they can reach.
At the same time, observers such as JB Crawford have also pointed out that very large corporations function like a religion. For example, telecommunications. https://computer.rip/2024-09-08-private-lines.html
Of course I mean this metaphor internally, as if we were regarding each corporation as a sovereign microstate, which they aren't... hopefully...
If the ideal CEO has psychopathic qualities, and the ideal capitalist corporation is comparable simultaneously to a new religious movement and fascist organ, and the corporations are the primary unit of American culture, then where does that leave us?
If we need revenue to fund useful government programs, great, let's tax Larry. But I don't understand what problem is solved by expropriation qua expropriation.
it does have monopoly power and anticompetitive power all over the place though.
google bans are quite intrusive, but google could pretty easily with their graph knowledge apply secondary or tertiary sanctions, at which point you would not be able to do much of anything, same as if the US government sanctioned you
Yes. They should be broken up because competition is good for consumers and society. If we had functional anti-trust enforcement Google would not have a near-monopoly on search ads where they own both the ad inventory and the marketplace where you have to buy those placements.
The question of a fair tax burden for the ultrarich is a separate (but related) one from "how big is too big?" for megacorps.
In theory, maybe, but in practice that is not what happened over the past decade(s). Instead our retirement funds are paying it back.
When the market grows it makes the collateral worth more, which lets the holder keep refinancing the debt instead of selling assets and realizing taxable gains. As long as the assets appreciate faster than the debt grows, the borrowing can effectively roll forward for decades. Eventually the estate pays the debt out of the assets themselves, but this is not necessarily out of taxable income earned during the person's lifetime. The US markets has seen exceptional genuine growth, but the trillions of 401(k), IRA, etc money flowing in to them over the last 40 years is no small consideration.
> Well, why does something have to be done about this, exactly?
The something here is what's required to have a functional tax system. Without addressing this situation I do see an argument that we have one. How important that is to one is another question.
he doesnt necessarily have to pay it back either. he could just take out another loan against his same now higher valued assets to pay off the old loan
And this is not just theoretical. Larry Page has already sold and paid taxes on tons of stock in reality.
like, if a company's market cap gets too big, the law should stop applying to them? they should be allowed to start their own militaries and enforce martial law a la east india company?
how does a founder keep a single digit of their company after theyve been dead for a thousand years?
These arent nearly as absolute as you are making them to be.
a founder can keep their percent by paying their taxes with other money they have, or by decreasing the worth of their company. theyre a founder, they have control. Maybe founders wont be so keen to enshittify their products if theres a downside to continued growth forever. considering google dropped "dont be evil" in exchange for making larry page's 1% grow for the sake of growing, how's society at large benefiting from continuing to subsidize it?
Larry would still be rich as heck, but probably... less rich..
The broken tax system is that I get taxed about 50% on my marginal income dollar --- the system doesn't wait for me to spend it first --- but when his stock portfolio appreciates by a dollar, he's not taxed! Not until he sells in order to spend. Why are we taxing labor so much more than capital?
And no, I don't think that inventing pagerank really entitles two people to $200B. Although in their case I don't think they've done as much harm with it as some other billionaires.
And, sure, super-rich people can in theory use the appreciated stock as collateral for loans and not pay taxes, but in practice Larry and most other centi-billionaires actually sell loads of stock and pay a lot in capital gains taxes because having your status as super rich dude who owns a huge yacht be totally dependent on Google's stock price is a dumb risk to take on, and it's worth paying some taxes to eliminate that risk.
No.. many cents of it are withheld, by law.
Elon uses his vast wealth to influence, intimidate, and generally get away with lawlessness. He effectively took huge loans from banks to buy a giant bullhorn in Twitter. Those loans are collaterized by unrealized capital gains. And more generally, billionaires have the ear of politicians because of what they could do with their money. So you don't need to realize gains (gains which are taxed at a more or less flat rate!) to make use of your wealth.
Though like I said, Larry is not really a bad guy in the world of billionaires. I would only support taxing him more than I would support levying additional taxes on w2 income assuming CA actually had a provable need for more money. (Right now I think they waste most of the budget.)
Absolutely not. 100% you can take it.
$24 B unaccounted for and lost that was supposed to be for homelessness. $12 B already spent on high speed rail and they want $120 B more. $50 B in EDD unemployment fraud during the pandemic.
This is just in California in the last year or two.
How much more fraud and corruption and incompetence is there that we just don't know about?
There is no way I will agree to any increase in taxes just to see it wasted and going to corruption and political buddies on every side of the aisle.
Zero taxes is the only right answer. Any talk of taxation means that you have already given in to being exploited, because it's a slippery slope. Let's be realistic - corruption will never end. The only way to reduce it is to starve the beast.
The point is to lower the economic power of single individuals that compete against the entire rest of the nation.
"Let someone"? I guess the right to pursue one's happiness is not all that self-evident after all. One should first ask permission, and, if we are in a good mood, we might "let them" pursue their happiness.
yes... this is called the law...
Lots of peoples "pursuit of happiness" is hindered by the law because we've deemed it not good for society.
I actually lived in a society where this was illegal and we were all starving and freezing.
Meanwhile, when you're in an "already too late" situation, it's already too late. You still have to deal with it.
While stock markets provide useful liquidity for investors entering and exiting positions, they are also rampant with finbro kids doing nothing more than jumped-up gambling. We don’t know which market trades fall into the serious wheels-of-capitalism bucket, and which are gambling, because we don’t have to know. The real world works in dollars so, to date, the state taxes people on the realized capital gain in dollars.
If a bunch of kids are selling handfuls of leaves to each other for a nickel each is the state now valuing my unkempt forest at $99bn? The state is welcome to pull up a chair and watch me try to sell 5 kilotons of leaves to every kindergarten playground in the country. If I succeed then it will take its cut of the capital gain. If I fail, it will not.
When the state starts looking inside the market black box and guesses, based on little Johnny and Becky’s recent playground trades, that I might be able to get at least $300 a tonne for my damp, rotting leaves, then the state is doing something at best weird and at worst unfair, and states doing unfair things is really bad.
Fix the system properly: when you inherit stock, you inherit the cost basis as well. Rinsing off capital gains liabilities through “buy/borrow/die” is the real villain here.
And while the wealthy always threaten to leave when faced with higher taxes, the fact is that they never seem to actually do so.
The site is based around georgism whose fundamental premise is that taxing land is the universal solution (much like for republicans cutting taxes is their solution to everything: economy going great? We should cut taxes. Economy going poorly? Cut taxes. Deficit too high? Cut taxes.) I don’t put much stock in analysis by single-solution thinkers.
Around 2T worth of wealthy individuals left california when the wealth tax propositon was started.
That's not accounting for the Cali govt being also one of the best in the world at wasting money.
Without very strong oversight, you cannot trust these private companies to not simply suck down every single dollar the government is willing to offer. A private business whose only client is governments will never ever be cost effective. They'll always charge as much as possible while offering the most minimal quality possible. That's how they increase their profit margins.
The idiom is "film at 11."
Old voters like the house they brought 20 years ago for 100k being worth 1.5 million today. They also like not paying taxes on that 1.4m in wealth accumulation.
Not wanting to pay the property taxes associated with a $1.5M home is the problem.
Without prop 13 that house would probably only be worth 600k. What difference does it make if it functions as a home.
Too late to fix it now.
Edit - I’m wrong, I am uk based - just read up on US, wild that you can inherit a house that’s gone up in value massively then sell it and experience no gains or inheritance tax.
Snark is one of the last ways to deal with the death of the internet.
How would a land value tax accurately compute the land value?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-five-yea...
> but you see the same basic patterns everywhere. Land in the city center is worth much, much more than outlying areas.
The calculation of the "unimproved value" always perplexed me.. it seems like you're not taxed for the things you build on your land, but instead for the things other people built around your land. After all, why would property in a city be valuable if not for all the high rises, subways, and office buildings?
Correct.
The article includes a section on land valuation that gets into those details.
So you're completely correct, the value of the land changes with what's around it because it opens up new options for what someone might build there.
if you build even more and get more out of the land than whats around you, you essentially get a lower tax rate until your neighbors catch up.
if you lag behind, you pay a premium in taxes to not develop
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-homeles...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HTBkxB5bsAACmdi?format=jpg&name=...
1% of the budget. Is that supposed to be a lot?
214 out of 40 million people, there is no need to carry water or suck up to them.
Same shit happened when income taxes were first introduced.
The ONLY thing that works is making sure a tax never hits the books in the first place.
The state needs to earn the right to tax more by showing prudence and effectiveness in handling finances
Nobody would oppose taxes if that actually meant material improvement of public infra
It is possible to just ... stop spending ...
The easiest one to point to is property prices. Wealthy people buy land, and drive up the price of land and rent for everyone else. If a lot of people suddenly make a lot of money in San Francisco, in general, for me and most of the people I know, there's no "rising tide" that lifts our boats. Our income remains the same, but our rent goes up, and maybe our lives don't make sense anymore, and we have to move.
But if there's a wealth tax, and it encourages rich people to leave the state? Awesome. Go drive up rents in Texas or Montana or somewhere else. Or pay the tax, and then the state can use that money to build affordable housing.
Before you say anything: I lived through the 90s, and you can't trick me with "WOW YOU THINK THE GOVERNMENT CAN DO THINGS? WHAT ABOUT THE DMV???" Go somewhere else.
It's always funny how often people ignore this. 99% of the problem would go away if the outliers moved away.
And I'd ask them: "What about the DMV?".
Perhaps I'm uniquely able to read and understand simple instructions, or maybe I've never asked the DMV to do anything especially complicated, but I've never had the DMV fail to do what I came there to have it do for me. The worst I've gotten from a DMV was having to wait for literally an entire day when I made the mistake of going to the San Francisco DMV to get something done, rather than doing the smart thing and going to an office in one of the nearby towns. It's... very stupid that there's a single DMV office for a city of -last I checked- nearly a million people.
So sure, let's say for the sake of your argument that everyone who would be subject to the wealth tax moves away. That won't move the needle when it comes to housing affordability in California.
So, ok, change the wealth tax so it applies to a lot more people. Ok, so maybe more people leave. Do you really think driving people with money out of your state will actually be good for you and the state? That's just not how economics works.
If your state is selling 500sqft condos for $3,000 a month, then yes, it probably would increase the average quality-of-life for that state's residents.
Geography, post-secondary education, relative openness/acceptance/tolerance towards people who are different, religion, race, ethnic group etc.
The best decision my parents made was leaving Tennessee and Texas and coming to California thank you.
I understand why LVT is compelling. Wealthy people can subordinate or borrow state capacity and monopoly on violence, while driving legislation. There needs to be some check on power.
In your example, you are 100% correct. It doesn't stop at Austin; we have a transnational class of people who no longer care about the nation itself.
If you can cap individual wealth to eight or maybe nine figures, you take options like "bankroll major state/national elections on a whim" and "buy up major media and communications brands" off the table. As far as I'm concerned, these are things we can do without and probably have a healthier society as a result.
California's attempt might be well-intentioned, but it seems so weaksauce that it won't reach to the behaviour-modifying level.
The "why bother investing" mentality that's used to argue against Georgist land-taxes might be interesting applied to a high wealth tax too. If your stock portfolio is already approaching the cutoff line, will you press as aggressively for that last short-term bubble with long-term expenses?
"optimal" is an annoying term here.
That point is the maximum taxation burden possible, but it shouldn't be a target.
"optimal" might actually be a much smaller number, where prosperity what is maximized.
Red states have implemented low income tax with heavy property taxes (think Texas) with great results. and although I'm sure California would just manage to mess it up it's a great idea.
I live in Texas. I don't like the restrictive laws. Texas could learn a lot for California, just not in the areas of taxation
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/17/texas-city-budgets-c...
It even seems like it avoids a lot the pit falls the uber-wealthy use to avoid most progressive income taxes. Its easy to disguise income as something else. Property, though, is right out in the open. The state can easily audit and value property and send the bill. No matter how fancy the accounting, that bill will eventually reach the person "consuming" that property.
In practice, at least from what I've read, in TX, the largest/wealthiest companies get the biggest/best tax breaks (eg Tesla), and end up paying proportionally less, so it's somewhat regressive.
Even though all the states have their differences they all live relatively the same, in short, if you are an average person, you pay pretty much the same as any place else. It’s only the wealthy who get to hopscotch and dance over the top of all the bodies of the (working class) below.
Made me laugh while drinking; messy, but worth it for the smiles I'll have every time I remember it! Outstanding job, internet stranger.
Sure, the companies that made them wealthy do, but the billionaires themselves? Doubt.
So if the only consequence of this is that the billionaires flee to Texas, with its regressive taxes, and take the wealth inequality and corruption that goes with them… I’m not seeing that as a bad thing.
It's a (real) property tax. Adjusting rent accordingly seems pretty easy. And, as I hope we all know, property tax is inherently regressive.
Personally, this is why I am fine with higher income or sales taxes.
There complexity and overhead on sales taxes; more than on an income, retained earnings or wealth taxes.
Also, sales taxes take more percent of wealth away from the lower wealth bracket than from the upper wealth bracket.
And I’m very surprised nobody mentioned cooperative tax in this post. Taxing cooperative profits is the simplest and fairest solution.
They just want continually delivered services from the city funded by taking out increasing amounts of debt or selling off new land in a ponzi scheme to fund existing obligations.
Indeed, the working poor need to pay more in taxes.
The working class are starting to choke and drown in financial stress, and this will only get worse. Capital naturally accretes and we've never had this level of capital concentration in human history.
I am not even that mad that I personally have to pay taxes. I enjoy funding government programs! I think I owe society something! But it sure doesn't make sense that already being rich makes you immune to giving back to the society that made you that way.
In comparison to the majority of the population, you know the other 99%. That’s right, you heard it right. 99% of the population does not have $10 million free and clear without debt. In other words, if you are still paying off your house you are not in that upper bracket.
the rich are an astounding amount of wealthy such that they dont show up and still make a good poor wage in the first couple hours/days of a year by their assets increasing in value
you are poor, even if you are doing plenty well for yourself
If this is actually a common attitude, people are... ridiculous. Real property is a limited resource, and allowing people to own property comes with strings attached. This is a pretty normal thing in very many places.
But I do agree that raising property taxes in CA in particular is a politically toxic topic.
Taxation ain't simple. There are always second order effects.
I am not against land tax but using it as a kneejerk levy could have unintended consequences.
Instead taper onto a reasonable land tax. Just raise taxes if you need more money in a fair and progressive way.
Of all the places you can avoid flight from to avoid tax California must be the easiest.
And a lot of the time, it’s those truly rich people who own those vacant/underdeveloped parcels in downtowns.
If the government fails, then you briefly get anarchy and violence until people organize into groups and use more violence to quash the anarchists. This repeats until there is only one group remaining, and that group is the government going forward.
If this were to go ahead, how many people would actually move? "I'm going to uproot my life to avoid paying an amount that's kinda immaterial to me" would be mildly weird.
But we have a one-time billionaire's tax proposal on the upcoming ballot, and we don't have an LVT proposal on the ballot. Saying that the Billionaire's tax will be less effective than promoters say maybe true -- but we're definitely going to get exactly $0 from a statewide LVT for 2026. If the Center for Land Economics gets an LVT on the ballot in a future year, I would strongly consider voting for it -- but that's not on its own a reason to not do the Billionaire Tax this year.
What _would_ be a convincing piece of info, and which no one knows, is what the long-term impacts of a one-time wealth tax are. E.g. Zuckerberg is moving his residence to FL but Meta isn't going to stop employing Californians. And if the state is _credible_ in saying it's a one-time tax, will the billionaires who fled come back after it's done?
Once the money moves, it won't come back to where it can be grabbed.
That's why the USA has exit taxes when giving up green cards and citizenship.
They have been moving both themselves and their family offices.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/google-cofounders-sergey-b...
The author then goes on to talk about CA's property taxes ... but LAND HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THE BILLIONAIRE'S FORTUNES!!! Zuckerberg did make his money trading property, he made it through companies.
Nothing about California's property tax decisions have anything to do with 99.9% of Zuck's (and others') wealth not being taxed!
That may be true, but you appear to have missed the part of the sentence you quoted that came after the semicolon:
California reaches for exotic taxes because its normal one has been broken since 1978.
Because of Proposition 13, property tax increases in California will affect an extremely tiny slice of landowners, [0] so it must turn to other mechanisms when it needs more tax revenue.
In regards to private "wealth creation", it turns out that money is fungible and you absolutely can built a bunch of wealth off of a mortgage if the "market" value of that property has increased by a huge amount, but the costs of holding that property haven't increased much at all.
[0] This doesn't contradict what I've said, I've just left out some details. A quick summary:
Ignoring a few exceptions, when a property changes ownership its property tax is adjusted to be based on the current "market" rate. When nontrivial improvements are made to a property, the property tax is adjusted to account for the "market" value of only those improvements. [1] Some "clever" people have been known to get around the "property changes hands" trigger by making the property be owned by a company and distributing private shares in that company. Want out? Get rid of all of your shares. Want in? Get shares from someone who already has them, or maybe convince those who are in to make more for you. The property is still owned by the company, so its tax is not adjusted.
[1] It's important to note that repairs are not improvements. It's also important to note that the government can choose to ignore all of these rate-reset rules whenever it wants, as it did when all those extremely wealthy people in LA got their houses burned down in that big wildfire that hit LA.
Taxing billionaires is not a durable fix to budget deficits. The article very clearly explains why this is the case.
Is that right?
That seems unfair to people who recently moved compared to the people that stay in their house for decades.
Reading more it looks like California created alternative types of property taxes like Mello-Roos.
In my state we used to have property tax values reassessed every 8 years, then they changed it to every 4 years. But my bill goes up every year. I started off paying about $2000 25 years ago and now it is about $5000 but my property value has also increased about 3X
It seems like if you just taxed an ordinary house at a percentage and you taxed a billionaire's huge house at the same percentage that you would get more money from the billionaire without needing to create special laws and special taxes.
- some Kendrick guy
Over the past 50 to 60 years, wealth concentration in many Western nations—coupled with the relocation of jobs to East Asia—has primarily favored the upper class rather than the middle class. Similarly on a different battlefield, Brexit has not served the majority of the United Kingdom’s working class population the average citizen has experienced a decline in wealth. In Great Britain, most residents did not benefit from North Sea oil revenues, which were largely directed toward affluent groups—a contrast to Norway’s more unselfish. forward thinking approach of establishing a sovereign wealth fund which benefit it all to the consternation of the wealthy well connected conservative class within Norway.
Remarkably, adherence to sound financial principles—living within one’s means, settling obligations, and saving—can enhance long-term economic stability across all income levels and even at the governmental level.
Much like Proposition 13, voting in favor of Proposition 40 is a straightforward choice. Historically and currently, western political leaders have failed to act in the best interest of the majority usually, they have to be dragged along kicking, and scratching.
It shall be interesting will the middle and lower end carry water for the wealthy again and vote against their interests to save the lucky 214 billionaires in California, that’s right you heard it right, 214 out of 40 million people…
The billionaires won’t be going anywhere. There’s a reason why the West Coast, California, and Oregon are what they are, when compared to the rest of the United States outside the Northeast, climate, higher education, better business opportunities, better political climate for the population, particularly if you look a little different or have a different religion in comparison to a large part of the United States, particularly after 1945.
It's so tied into British classicism, and the generally pathetic nature of the middle class English, that trying to extend the results outside of the UK produces absurd ideas.
Essentially the British people took a (not particularly economically motivated) deal to reduce migration, at the cost of economic connection to the EU.
This upset the UK political class greatly, so much of the following policy was about punishing the population, rather than long term economics.
This is mostly slop. Don’t waste your time.
Billionaires are not struggling to meet their expenses. If you raise their taxes, they aren't suddenly unable to afford things. They don't need to change their behavior just to get by. A carbon tax forces average people to drive less, but doesn't affect billionaires at all.
Billionaires live where they want to because they can afford to. They're not going to let themselves be chased from jurisdiction to jurisdiction because of numbers that have zero impact on their daily lives. That's what happens to poor people. If California raises taxes on billionaires, very few will actually leave. They're where they want to be and they can afford to stay there. What's the point of having a really big number in your bank account if you have to move to the middle of nowhere in Alabama to keep it from falling just a little?
----------
Edit: Yes, some billionaires have changed their tax residency, but not necessarily their physical location. They likely still own properties in California and can likely be found on them rather a lot. This is evasion, in spirit if not law. Taxing land is just one way to make them pay. Others should be pursued as well. The argument that we shouldn't tax billionaires because billionaires are good at not paying taxes is complete hogwash.
That individuals won’t optimize their wealth beyond $100m, $1b, or really any number just doesn’t square with observable behavior.
The purpose of a business is money (otherwise you start a hobby or charity or something non-businessey).
Being very successful at business is a selection bias for people that are highly competitive at chasing money.
There's a bunch of traits in very wealthy self-made people due to the filter they have run through.
Tax too much, and we kill the golden geese of the economy. Examples abound around the world of crappy economies that can't afford good socialist stuff because they've demotivated the rain makers.
I agree with this. California’s climate and culture will keep many a billionaire within tax nexus reach of the state. Of course, this isn’t a strategy every locale can pursue, but I don’t see a reason for California not to exploit its advantages.
They can certainly afford it but they obviously like their money to stay theirs and like getting more of it, not less.
they're bad for the world around them, and you can add an exit tax if you want to
Not to mention your businesses need to be in relatively affluent areas where most people can afford your products and from an educational standpoint, most of the better schools are on the west coast or are in the upper east coast.
Worry. about the other 99% maybe more precise, the other lower 90% of American Society.
So if they vote with their feet and leave, then that's an even better outcome. Now they can't manipulate the government anymore. They can go manipulate and continue extracting wealth from some other place.
Let's hope other states follow suit and they keep on truckin'.
But in essence I do believe that I (and thousands of others) could have had at least $100k more net worth if they hadn't monopolized all user-acquisition channels and if they hadn't helped bring about the many laws and regulations which made this possible.
I have no ill feelings towards them but I just don't want them in my state competing against me for limited resources using money which they acquired through an unjust scheme which I was coercively made a part of but which I never agreed to and have been protesting for almost a decade (on deaf ears).
It's not personal or even saying anything negative about their character or abilities. From my perspective it's just pure self-preservation. They either need to contribute more tax to make up for the injustice or they leave.
When they sell their assets, it makes those assets more affordable for the rest of us. So any forced sale is good for society. I don't see any issues with it. We were/are forced to prop up their stocks through government contracts, grants and regulatory monopolies... So they should contribute something on their end too.
And I don't care about the "jobs they create" - They created jobs for my competitors to get easy money in cushy jobs. I want those jobs gone too! I don't want FAANG employees bidding up house prices in my area.
I only want to compete against people who are playing by the same rules as me! I don't want to compete against people who can rewrite the rulebook as we go, to suit them.
Of course you can. You just charge more. Yeah the market dynamics can put a cap on it but the Bay Area mints millionaires like there’s no tomorrow. They can pay.
But I think the proposal being discussed is 1000% more consistent with the principles of a free, non-communist society than the crazy "wealth tax," which sets the precedent that if the government thinks you have "too much" stuff, they can just declare that to be so, and come and take it. Given that the people in charge of drawing the line between "so rich that we need to take your stuff" and "not that rich" will be the same people who have blown up the state budget, I don't see why anyone would trust them.
(No, I'm not Zuck's sock puppet account -- I expect it won't be my turn for "wealth" confiscation for at least 5 years, worst case.)
its not particularly crazy and is far older than communism or socialism which have the much more straightforward setup of seizing the means of production rather than taxing it.
however, it didnt stop the ultrawealthy from seizing power for themselves
Last week California certified a Billionaire Wealth Tax for the November ballot: a 5 percent one-time levy on the state’s billionaires, paid out over five years, to raise about $20 billion a year for health care, food aid, and schools after federal cuts
Is just flat out crazy.
To pretend that politicians who are in a perpetual political battle for short-term survival will somehow use this weapon of mass financing responsibly and only once it comically absurd.
This will open Pandoras box.
1. If wealth was only motivated by taxes and was going to leave, it would've left already. Fact is, billionaires don't want to live in Tennessee;
2. Nobody is doing the right thing to tackle any of this, including California.
The article mentions California has land and that's the key point. Unfortunately, California homeowners have been coopted into voting against their own interests to raise property values. If the house you bought in SF in 1975 for $80,000 is now worth $3M, you still only own 1 housing unit's worth of wealth. And that housing cost is an input into everything you need to buy because all the workers required for those things have to be paid high enough to pay those exorbitant rents.
Let me repeat that: high housing costs are an input into everything that you buy.
So what needs to happen? We need to stop treating housing as a speculative asset. It's simply stealing from the next generation. Worse, it's diverting investment capital from productive output because land has become the asset with the best tax treatment, highest returns and most government protections. So what does this look like?
1. Some form of land value tax. The higher the value goes, the higher the taxes go. You raise the rent and your land value taxes go up because it's more valuable;
2. Punitively tax land hoarding including second homes. We could give discounted rates to primary residences of state residents. Nobody else should get a discount. This would mean repealing Prop 13 and that's never going to happen. As an example of this, I'll bring up Prop 19. In CA you can inherit a preferential property tax rate. Prop 19 proposed to limit this to only one property could inherit this preferential rate and it barely passed (51% IIRC). Do we think that 49% of California voters have multiple properties that have property tax rates set 40+ years ago? Of course they don't. It's an example of how people vote against their own interests;
3. Part of what sold Prop 13 originally was the idea of pushing seniors out of their homes with property taxes. Well, that gave Disneyland a tax rate that was set in the 1960s. California should do what Texas does: you can defer your property taxes until you die if you're a senior but there's no capped property tax rates like incumbent SF residents have and no inherited preferential property tax rates;
4. Wind back the preferential collateralization of property for mortgage debt over time. Residential property lending now dominates bank lending and earnings. It's significantly harder to get finance for any form of productive output;
5. Wind back over time preferential tax treatment for home ownership.
Do I think any of this will happen? No.
Oh, one of the worst things to do is transaction taxes, often called stamp duty. This is where you pay a percentage of the value on purchase. This really hurts mobility. I guess it's fine if it's only on the luxury end of the market (CA's is at $5M+?) but it's not a good idea regardless.
The other part of this is to provide social housing like Vienna. The government should be a significant supplier of affordable quality housing.
Something I've been yelling from the rooftops.
Housing can either be affordable, or it can be an investment that's bought, rented, and sold for the sole purpose of profit. It's not possible for it to be both.
People expect their house to appreciate faster than inflation, but all that does is rob the next generation of home ownership.
Alternatively, they keep the house, but get either a reverse mortgage or a cash out refi to survive until they die, at which point their kids can't afford to buy it from the bank.
Encourage building upwards to increase housing supply. This can be done via tax breaks or subsidies. Especially encourage multi-use buildings to make cities walkable. Stores/restaurants at the street level with apartments above.
This kind of assumes the only reason a house appreciates in value is because people are "treating it as an asset" rather than "the house I bought 30 years ago in the middle of nowhere is now smack dab in the middle of a very desirable area." At that point it's simple supply and demand, not some homeowner being greedy.
> The higher the value goes, the higher the taxes go. You raise the rent and your land value taxes go up because it's more valuable
This makes the fatal assumption that just because a house is worth dramatically more than what you paid for it many years ago that your income must have risen just as dramatically. "Oh well, too bad, sell your house and deal with it." Maybe people kind of like living where they've put down roots and don't want to be punished for something outside of their control? Any proposal that boils down to "pay more or fuck off" is not going to go over very well.
What you mean is voting against what you think their interests should be.
This phrase is incredibly condescending and undemocratic.
You're being too generous. California is full of envious dysgenics who want free stuff and don't care how they get it.
Billionaires aren't going to leave, they're going to acquire more property.
This is an asinine claim - any cost can be passed along to a willing payer.
California already has a property tax, about half of which is based on the land value, and the other half on the structure on the land. So this is not some brilliant idea, just a renaming of what we already have.
If the author is suggesting to repeal Prop 13, that is also not a new idea, and has been discussed for decades. Good luck.
not good believer in christ would ever participate, when jesus made it clear you are supposed to freely give away everything you own to the poorest among us
There are plenty of other taxation schemes that are progressive and more durable and effective than a wealth tax.
The main reason we're here is because talking about reforming Prop 13 is political suicide, even if that's the best way to fix CA's budget.
But, you're right, when someone suggests that we poor are just envious of the ultra-rich and that is why we want to tax them, I assume that they think we ought to look elsewhere than the wealthy for taxes. Which kind of suggests tilting toward a more regressive, less progressive tax system.
Introduce a ballot measure that removes the allowances of Prop 13 on retail real-estate and I suspect you'll find it's not political suicide at all.
ROFL what? I'd bet the author a lot of money that costs WILL roll downhill, the source matters not.
At what price will they sell? At whatever price a buyer who thinks will make it work. And by "work" there are many definitions, from continuing operation at current rents, to building more units on the land so that it generates enough income to pay the tax.
Land value taxes shift tax burden away from productive use of land and on to unproductive uses of land. The people who pay more are land speculators and those with empty lots, and the people who pay less are those productively using the land, which is 99% of homeowners and businesses.
At less of an extreme, there are still buyers, but they offer less money so they can still make a profit. So, the property tax basically comes out of land values. The current owners lose money on the property. It's the opposite of the windfall profits that California property owners have gotten from rising land values, taken out of whoever owns the land now.
For the next owner, their mortgage expense is lower, their property tax is higher, and maybe rents and profit margins stay about the same.
Notice that if the demand is there, falling land values doesn't result in lower rents. If your complaint is that the rent is too damn high, higher property taxes won't fix it. Only more housing does that.
I'm a bit skeptical that it would really work out that way. In California, we can have the odd situation where the current owner pays low property taxes, the new owner will pay higher property taxes, and yet property prices get bid up, and whoever buys it has to pay both more property tax and a higher mortgage. But they can still afford it, because there are a lot of rich people out there.
If the assessed land value is incorrect, then that would need to be fixed.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab5ca51-3e0c-83e8-a232-892d3e4ef9...
People can also sell their land/homes and move. It's less liquid than other assets, but less doesn't mean people won't sell/leave.
I would be surprised if most land consumption taxes (whether structured as property or land) would not get directly passed through to the beneficial consumers of that land quite quickly, or for their privilege to consume that land to be terminated/non-renewed at the expiration.
My primary concern is that there are generally no market comparables for undeveloped land in developed areas.
If I believe it’s over-stated, I can appeal my property tax assessment by using comparables for nearby developed property. There is no equivalent market-based process for land values alone.
There's several anchoring sales nearby, you can regress out from all sales, etc. etc. And it's smoothly varying for nearby parcels, with very little change!
A much better explanation than what I can write can be found in the "Estimating" section here https://landeconomics.org/reports/california-billionaire-wea...
This highly local variation in land value does not seem to be adequately addressed n the California link above either (other than “The estimation runs at the level of each property category within each California county or census tract, using parcel-level data”, which does not seem fine-grained enough to cover waterfront property).
Surely the land value overlooking La Jolla or Malibu is worth far more than the lots just one block back. And those lots are likely to have more expensive improvements on them in any taxation system, but at least in a property taxation system there is a direct market reference to come back to rather than just an assessor’s judgment.
How much is the dirt at 28824 Cliffside Dr, Malibu worth? $5M? $25M? $50M? $75M? What does the census-tract level estimate come up with? How does that compare to 28867 Cliffside with an ever-so slightly larger lot, both in Census tract 8004.12?
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/california-high-speed-r...
Given the current situation, I do not agree that "we need more taxes", but would welcome your clarifying exactly what you mean.
I would much rather see people keep more of their dollars and use them to 'vote' for the products and services that benefit them most, via their purchases.
Would the resources have been better spent on a more efficient legal system, then leverage that?
(And in CA, fixing Prop 13, and knocking out more hurdles to housing development in desirable areas.)
Most companies take profit eventually, but if it's possible for a company to decide to never take profit and grow/acquire perpetually without paying any taxes on gross income, that's a problem.
That'd be like individuals being able to deduct living expenses and having uncapped pre-tax 401k contributions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve#Income_tax_rate_a...
The straightforward answer is there is no correct ratio. The best tax regime is the one that allows for sufficient funding of necessary and desired services and long-term economic investment while also balancing wealth creation with wealth inequality. That number isn’t fixed and it’s clear that it shouldn’t be evenly borne by the population as a whole.
But leave it to the ineptitude of California liberal politicians to always find a way to steal from the citizens that have the ability to produce and save, in order to transfer the wealth to illegals, politicians friends, druggies, and foreign powers.
I didn’t mention gentrification in the above sentence. Does that mean I’m ignoring the problem?
Imagine being worth billions USD and rather than being a part of the solution to support the state that helped build your wealth, you spend your money to just get around paying your small share.
It is trivial for the wealthy to buy another house elsewhere and “move” their primary residence.
I wonder how much they spend on lobbying compared to what their tax bill would be.
Comedic article related: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-pay-any-amount-to...
We're already way past the point where a creative cocktail of 10 different progressive taxation schemes could feasibly fix the root of the problem, and you feel this especially if you were born after the year 2000. You're more likely to see results if you pick up a red scarf than if you pass a higher wealth tax, sales tax, land tax, consumption tax, estate tax...
In your telling, how does the resulting famine that killed of tens of millions fit in?
I think not. Your framing thus far is so wildly inaccurate that I believe this is a propaganda account, and hesitate to engage further. But in case any not familiar with the history read this in passing, I will leave a reference to an actually reputable source:
"Mao’s violent collectivization and forced labour campaigns during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) led to as many as 45 million deaths in what is widely regarded as the worst famine in human history." [1]
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/arti...
My understanding is the famine was essentially the middle managers of these collectives over stating yields and being too afraid to admit their lies. To maintain the lie, they shipped off food while the farmers starved.
Painting it as if Mao era collectives are the same as the state quotas that exist today is highly misleading. The HRS was 1979:
"The household responsibility system replaced collective farming." [1]
Broadly speaking, the collectives can and should be blamed for the famine, just as in the Ukraine. Getting into the weeds on the specific mechanisms is fine, but using it to undermine the broader lesson is apologetics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_responsibility_syste...
> To put it bluntly, it is necessary to create terror for a while in every rural area."
Let's not glamourize the Mao's land reforms. It required the killing of 1-2 million people. Even then, the collectivization was a massive failure - not only did the peasantry not get to enjoy the benefits of land reform, a further 15 million people would die from the resulting famine.
The deep irony is that Taiwan was actually able to do the same reform but with much better outcomes, with much less loss of life or political violence.
Mao pretended to do it but then introduced the familiar Stalinist collectivization that had killed everyone in Ukraine - as he knew.