23 karma · joined April 4, 2020
Asking for a friend who has Safari search suggestions disabled (so Safari does not crash) but encounters Firefox crashes regularly.
The land with the highest value is city land. Most of city land and the buildings on that land are private property so they cannot be auctioned “every year”.
Singapore and Taiwan lease blocks of state-owned land for (high-rise) residence buildings for a duration of 99 years. This land is auctioned to developers, who then build houses and high rises, then sell them to individuals. The land lease ends after 99 years, so the land can be reused. This obviously does not capture the increase in the value of land over 99 years, but the value of land at the time of the sale.
So both states have taxes on land - a property tax in Singapore and a tax on the increment in the value of land in Taiwan, showing that it’s feasible to estimate the value of land and tax that (value of land = total value - value of improvements).
Some people have very strange misconceptions about LVT & Georgism.
Ordering earlier and paying more would just have shifted distribution around, and would not have made more doses available. Every vaccination done in the US or the UK means one less vaccine dose for Europe.
And that is not "ducking responsibility", it is basic logic - as one cannot fit 10 pegs in 9 holes, one cannot vaccinate 10 people with 9 doses.
The development, evaluation, approval and monitoring process is described in detail here: https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory/overview/publi...
And on to of that Russia and China are much further behind in the rollout to their own population than the EU itself - see https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-vaccination-doses-p...
But what use is that when the availability of the vaccine will remain so limited for the foreseeable future? When the producers are unable to deliver what they have agreed to – or can only deliver much later?"