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Henry George was obviously a Single Taxer, but "Georgism" has a generally broader meaning than that. Some Georgists are single taxers, but not all, including Greg and I.
When we talk to elected officials, we don't even talk about Henry George all that much (I did in the ACX article series because it all started with the progress and poverty book review). We mostly speak of "Land value return" and our focus is mostly on pragmatic revenue neutral tax shifts to LVT.
They're free to prove me wrong by saying that they're in favour of sales tax or income tax or capital gains tax. That would prove to me that they're just taking the idea that "land value tax is good" without buying into Georgeism as a whole. But I'm confident we'll never see such a comment.
If I were offered to double your real wealth but also double Bezos's real wealth, of course I would take that deal! I would benefit from it. But if you offered to double the real wealth of everyone, what would that even mean?
Yes, unlike economics, politics is zero-sum. The solution to that is to fix the political system, not to destroy the things that are working great.
I'm not sure strict Georgeist policies hold up in a world where so much value is created digitally. It creates the perverse incentive to focus only on digital value creation rather than physical, and that's how you end up with a fragile or lopsided economy based solely on financialization (U.K.) or advertising (U.S.A.).
Maybe don't attack a straw man you've stood up yourself?
Income tax it's definitely something he'd not prefer because it reduces incentive to do something we want you to do. Better to tax windfalls and undesirable things
That doesn't mean LVT is a panacea.
I think that's a bit of a strawman and a false dichotomy.
You can tax certain things a certain amount and you get diminishing returns. For example, if you had a 50% wealth tax, it would stop collecting anything pretty quickly and would cause pretty big economic disruption.
Land value tax has the potential to collect a lot of money with less disruption.
There's like $20 trillion worth of capitalized land value in the USA. That could mean like $1 trillion a year on-going assuming 5% discounting. Land rent is a perpetual stream of wealth.
There's only $8 trillion billionaire wealth. So already 5%/year would be less. And there's a huge incentive and ability to avoid it by moving.
And I rarely ever even hear suggestions for wealth tax rates around 5%. So then if you had a wealth tax, well land is wealth, and you'd be leaving a ton on the table as you could still have the land value tax at 5% of the capitalized value.
That money could be spent on public services that poorer people will benefit from more like transit, schools, or even local hospitals and subsidized healthcare. A typical point by LVT supporters here is that these services have the impact of raising land rents.
Most taxes have this dynamic:
tax -> invest in public services poor people use -> land rents go up -> land owners benefit
LVT has this dynamic:
Tax land -> invest in public services poor people use -> land rent goes up -> tax land more so land owners don't benefit
Landlords, developers, builders etc. should earn the return on the constructed housing, not the land.
Leasing the land of the US? That's your big revelation?
listen to the other commenter, fixing it means reducing wealth disparity.
Idk but saying it's fixed when it's reasonable is really not answering the question.
Again, the onus is on you to describe a mechanism by which abolishing most forms of taxes will drastically reduce wealth discrepancy. I'm not arguing against LVT, you're the one who's arguing against everything that's not LVT.
Again strawman and false dichotomy.
I can't help if you think LVT wouldn't reduce the disparity sufficiently. I'm saying that it's possible it does. I outlined the process how. You don't accept it that's fine. But I do think a big LVT would make a heck of a difference.
Again, that doesn't mean I'm against every and any other tax that could also make a difference.