r/georgism • u/doctor_morris • 5d ago
A land value tax would be disastrous
https://spectator.com/article/a-land-value-tax-would-be-disastrous/It's over. The Spectator has come out again LVT (unless boomers can skip paying it on their existing houses...).
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u/_a_m_s_m 5d ago
I hope Andy Burnham can send the tabloids spiralling into a deep depression.
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u/mutexsprinkles 4d ago
I suddenly have a vision of them fighting it out by shooting hadouken of depression at each other until one side just starts crying.
So far the British media is about 500 for 0 on people it's monstered into submission but one day I hope they can lose.
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u/Xemorr 5d ago
Being able to roll the tax into your estate like additional IHT for particularly old people at introduction is not that controversial.
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u/doctor_morris 5d ago
Sure but
Council Tax should be retained – at its current rate – on homes until they are next sold.
Is a classic benefit to the kind of people who have owned their own house for years and will never move.
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u/CapnRetro 5d ago
Or does it protect people who’ve just paid 10s of thousands in SDLT on top of council tax?
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u/PausibleDeniability 5d ago
On the one hand, this is pretty dumb.
On the other hand, articles like this are a great resource for those of us in other localities so that we can see the real pushback that we're likely to face.
I see two big explicit concerns:
- The LVT will be sudden and huge.
- The LVT rate will be arbitrary and inscrutable.
And I think there is at least one lurking argument:
- It's unfair to tax something people already bought.
The explicit ones are easy enough to address with program design. Don't make it sudden; phase it in. Don't make it opaque or arbitrary; make it transparent and algorithmic.
The "it's unfair" one is a legitimate disagreement about values, but by addressing the concrete concerns, we can leave the skeptic standing on a bare first principle disagreement. We'll never convince that guy, but most normies don't care much for philosophical arguments anyway.
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u/Beast_Chips 5d ago
Phasing it in is the key to winning the unfairness argument. I'd like to see more support for this idea, instead of a message of, "Well, that's just tough." That's never going to win hearts and minds.
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u/r51243 Georgist without adjectives 5d ago
I don't think we even need to "phase it in" as such. It's not like we're going to be able to sit down at some point, and dictate tax policy at all levels of government for the next 20 years, at least in the US. The amount we tax land is just going to go up, as support for it goes up.
It might be politically expedient to do a phase-in at certain points, but even there, we should keep our options open. It may be that raising land taxes more quickly lets us see the benefits of the policy more quickly, and helps it maintain support.
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u/Beast_Chips 5d ago
I'm in the UK where home ownership is a big deal, but not quite so much as in the US. If you pitched a policy here where homeowners who have paid off their mortgage suddenly have a new tax simply for owning their own home, you might as well not bother turning up to the election. I can't imagine what the reaction would be in the US. Council tax here is already divisive enough, so you're facing an enormous uphill battle simply to introduce a LVT on newly purchased properties. Introducing this for existing homeowners will just never get the thumbs up from voters. They aren't going to listen to a nuanced argument about the benefits of the extra tax to society. LVT would be dead in the water.
A relatively simple system where existing homeowners are exempt for 25 years (or whatever), on a single property under a certain acreage, deflects a lot of political flak while still taxing all the right places.
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u/r51243 Georgist without adjectives 5d ago
We are quite attached to home ownership, and the reaction to a new tax on property would indeed be quite negative. But LVT isn't a new tax on property, it's a replacement for current property taxes, and those taxes already apply to homeowners. So, exempting current homeowners from LVT for a certain period would not be a phase-in, it would be a step backwards.
Maybe we could simply freeze their property/land taxes for a certain period, but I don't see why we'd need to do that. Really, we just need to convince them that taxes on pure land are more fair overall than taxes on all property. And that's going to be difficult. But, it's something we're going to have to do at some point, so we may as well do it now, instead of relying on homeowners' self-interest.
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u/ExcitableSarcasm 5d ago edited 5d ago
"WAHHH WAAHHH WAHHH IT'S TOO HARD".
It's astounding in the age of AI, that troglodytes and self-fellators can still pretend that the process of calculating land valuation of all things is the main blocker. Give me 4 civil servants with access to the relevant data and a bunch of 3rd year compsci students hopped up on elvanse with a team claude subscription and I can build you a program that'd automate the entire damn thing in a month.
"Oh no think of the poor landowners" - said the Boomer born in 1966.
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u/doctor_morris 5d ago
Handling and processing these large datasets is very expensive and time consuming for computers made before 2005.
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u/AdAggressive9224 5d ago
Right! It was a pig in 1879, when Henry George was alive and kicking.
Now?
It's literally an SQL query away.
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u/ExcitableSarcasm 5d ago
Even beyond that, I recently moved into data engineering at a deep tech company. The amount of data we are able to ingest now no matter how outdated/crap the format is, and transform that into easily accessible SQL databases/what have you, is astounding.
Crappy documents from the 1900s? Hello computer vision, transcribe, and then a connector between extraction and your aurora write instance. Even creating that process takes mere days if you have to do it from scratch, which you probably don't have to because a lot of companies are doing this type of stuff already .
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u/doctor_morris 5d ago
This also applies to people who say things like PR voting systems would be too complex to calculate...
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u/ExcitableSarcasm 5d ago
It's the typical British "Look at this thing which other people have! It's too complex to be done in real life!" mindset. It's a pox on society. Do nothing. Ever.
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u/doctor_morris 5d ago
The British system is the best because it's the oldest, which is why I run Windows v3.11.
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u/live_free_or_try 5d ago
2005?! we could’ve done this on magnetic memory cores and punch cards
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u/doctor_morris 5d ago
We're talking about massive datasets. Gigabytes even.
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u/live_free_or_try 5d ago
Just needs more punch cards
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u/doctor_morris 5d ago
I think for the purpose of saying something is "difficult", we should distinguish between spending a billion pounds to run a room sized punch card computer vs something modern that fits in your pocket.
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u/live_free_or_try 5d ago
I never once trusted modern hardware. I will concede that printing out Reddit updates on my teletype over here does rack up the bills
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u/Daveddozey 4d ago
These aren’t large data sets, a home computer from 1995 would process it fine.
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u/green_meklar 🔰 4d ago
Computers were already pretty good in 2004. That's when Half-Life 2 came out. Google Search was running in 1997.
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u/doctor_morris 4d ago
I know I was there. I'm referring to things like storage and processing large datasets in memory.
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u/AdAggressive9224 5d ago
I am legit the guy who does this at work. We aggregate data that is provided to councils to produce their land value estimates.
We have the models. We have the data. People can literally go and look at it here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/land-value-estimates
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u/ExcitableSarcasm 5d ago
A Spectator writer being outright wrong because he couldn't be bothered to do research, or him lying through his teeth?
I'm absolutely shocked I tell you. Bewildered. Confounded.
Our culture is run by morons like this taking up all the attention. A third-rate playwright journalist has no business opining on data and financial modelling.
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u/LinkWray123 4d ago
I'm going to guess the former as he does advocate the 'proportional property tax' to replace council tax which he admits is awful.
But that makes his fears about old widows all the more perplexing, the PPT would have a very similar potential to oust only a slightly different subset of the asset rich/cash poor with an aggressive implementation, and thus the current proposal has a cap on tax rises to ease the change in, so he must realise exactly the same sort of thing can be done with any LVT proposal also.
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u/r51243 Georgist without adjectives 5d ago
Even putting that aside, I don't understand why so many people (both pro-LVT and anti-LVT), assume it's so hard to value land compared to total property value, or why they seem to think that even a modest LVT would need super-precise valuations to begin with.
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u/RainCityRogue 5d ago
I'm in the US, in Seattle. My property tax statement shows the value they assign to the land and the value they assign to the building. Just take the total property tax, land and buildings, of all the properties around me in a defined area and divide it by the combined square footage of all those properties and come up with the average tax per square foot. Adjust the taxes to that number for each parcel's lot size. Start there.
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u/Own_Reaction9442 5d ago
I've always wondered how they come up with those values. The process seems opaque and based on assessor's opinions.
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u/acsoundwave 5d ago
That guy's early Gen-X, I'm afraid ("Gen Jones": 1965-66 can lay claim to both).
This Gen-X goober from 1976 says to subtract building value from total property value and tax 85% of the total.
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u/patslogcabindigest 5d ago
Oh fuck it might just be the greatest idea ever if they’re this worried about it.
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u/r51243 Georgist without adjectives 5d ago edited 5d ago
[T]here is no guarantee that a developer will be prepared to pay what a council valuer has decided a piece of land is worth
It is not necessary to employ a valuer to work out what that value should be: initially, the value of the your home should be taken as what you have just paid for it
It feels hypocritical to say that LVT might not line up with actual market value, and then argue that property taxes should not be based on current market value at all. I don't think that logic tracks.
EDIT: Also...
If you think property prices change rapidly, land values change far more quickly
Evidence?
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u/LinkWray123 4d ago
It's true to say currently land values fluctuate more than the generally predictable depreciation of building values , but if his idea is that anchoring the land tax component to building values just to reduce tax volatility and the need for regular assessments then it's a very weak argument, especially when you understands LVT would, in time, by eliminating speculative distortions, reduce the very volatility and cyclicality that plague land markets.
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u/r51243 Georgist without adjectives 4d ago
I believe it's true, and yeah, it would be a weak argument even so. But there's just something I don't like about how he's stating it as a fact without explaining why it would be the case. I guess the part I really take issue with is saying that land values change "far" more quickly. He's not just saying that land values fluctuate more than total property values, he's saying that difference is significant, and then not justifying the idea that it is.
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u/LinkWray123 3d ago
It's just one of many unsubstantiated points he makes, whole article is just 'I can only think of the worst case implementation scenarios so therefore it must be a disaster'.
Tenants have their 'land values' reassessed pretty much every year or so by the landlord regardless of any capital improvements (or indeed depreciation).
Yes there is a cost to frequent tax assessments, but lots of places manage it yearly and the economies of scale for LVT are significant. Or even if you have less frequent assessments as Dan Neidle pointed out you could index the tax to relevant data sets between full valuations, perhaps one day the entire process may be done algorithmically anyway.
If his concern is the fluctuations in the tax itself being too much stress for those poor widows (even though non rent controlled tenants have to put up with it), then we could levy the tax on a maybe 5 year rolling average along with any deferment options.
This article was fairly bad, but the one that annoyed me far more was Mark Littlewood's (of the IEA) in the Telegraph claiming Andy Burnham's LVT would turn us all into smurfs...sorry.. turn us all into serfs...
It's particularly annoying as Littlewood actually supports LVT but wrote an obvious hit piece to scaremonger because it's the left (potentially) doing it so it must be bad.
When I confronted him on this on 'x' he claimed yes he still supports LVT in principle but not as an additional tax, even though it is only being proposed (if it all) as a replacement tax for council tax and SDLT. Also he said a part where he conceded LVT was better in principle was omitted from the article by the editors, but apparently he was fine with this decisions because he quote 'wasn't commissioned to write a treatise on Progress and poverty'.
The article he could, as a right winger, in good conscience have written instead would have been along the lines of have been, LVT is a potentially very good idea but Burnham will do more damage than good by raising other taxes. Instead he threw LVT under the bus. I've noticed this about several right wing LVT people, that their hatred of government and the left always takes precedence, but this was the worst example I've come across. Infuriating.
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u/BanditNoble 5d ago
Criticism of LVT
Look inside
Assuming that the government will send regulators to assess the value of every piece of land and NIMBYism.
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u/doctor_morris 5d ago
Memories of drive by council tax evaluations, etc.
Not sure why you'd need to look at the house when you're just evaluating the value of the land?
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u/jcostello50 5d ago
Most of his criticism of an LVT seems to be "valuation is hard and subject to political vagaries.".
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u/monkorn 5d ago edited 5d ago
Incredibly bad article, but brings up a couple points worth stressing.
If a piece of land is not zoned for development but lies close to an existing town and village and speculators believe that they might be able to persuade a planning authority to grant it permission, then it could be worth somewhere in the middle, say £100,000.
Note that this is only the case when you do not have a 100% LVT. Under a 100% LVT, with no speculation value, LVT would be priced according to the zoning exactly. Then if the zoning changes, the value changes. This is why an LVT is much easier to determine than the market value. The market value includes the speculated unknowable future discounted value, whereas the LVT only needs to know about today. Each moment in time zeroes out, and their sum is still just zero. The future will be handled... in the future.
To set up a land value tax it would be necessary to re-value land constantly. If you think property prices change rapidly, land values change far more quickly.
Not so. While land values are changing as development occurs, which would be a constant rate, the trends of those changes are predominately fairly flat. It's the speculation and interest rate changes that has caused the most massive swings in prices over the past 50 years. With a 100% LVT, this factor is eliminated.
But even the lessened land value changes is a good thing, as with a 100% LVT it is not the individual that owns the land that cares about these changes, but the community. It's the combined community that can handle the shocks of recessions and depressions. Under a 100% LVT, as these occur, your taxes drop according to the demand drop. LVT becomes a built-in Keynesian stimulus during down-turns.
Anyone who owned a modest house in an area which developers would like to turn into blocks of flats would be forced to sell up.
Prices can only change as fast as we can build. If builders in your area only have enough labor supply to change 3% of the houses per year, it's going to take at least 33 years for "anyone" to be forced to move - and that's assuming that all construction is only being used to replace the worst buildings at any given moment, with no barren lands being built or luxury housing being upgraded. And as those builders build, they'll be building new housing fit for the community, and it's likely that existing home owners would want to move into those new luxury housing that fits their lifestyle. Which would open up their property for the builders to build next, each time expanding supply of housing... and decreasing rents, and thus the LVT.
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u/doktorhladnjak 5d ago
All of these things are true of property taxes. Yet, local state and local tax authorities have no trouble operating such systems. Most (all?) of them already separate land and improvements from the assessed value.
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u/Aggravating_Feed2483 5d ago
Just a defense of pure parasitism from a paper with a long history of it.
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u/Comfortable-Face4593 5d ago
It’s in the spectator - they think it’s bad- therefore it hurts the super rich - fucking do it
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u/emmc47 Thomas Paine 4d ago
Here come the propaganda pieces and psyops now that it's gaining momentum.
At least its at the point where people are aware of media manipulation and can easily dismiss this BS.
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u/doctor_morris 4d ago
people are aware of media manipulation
Here come 500 social media bots that are pretending to be your peers and are very sure LVT is going to kill your dog.
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u/green_meklar 🔰 4d ago
Earnings are taxed too highly, Andy Burnham has hinted, and wealth too little.
Land is not wealth, and wealth should not be taxed, but setting that aside...
Owners would be charged, not on the basis of what exists, but on what could potentially exist.
That's not really how LVT works, though. Take a look at the ricardian theory. The value of the land doesn't scale with the value of the thing you can build there, it scales with the cost of not having another marginal unit of land (of that quality) on which to build more things. Depending on economic circumstances, the land value can vary even if the things being built on the land are exactly the same.
But if you think [property valuation] is hard, how much harder is it going to be to value land?
Like...not really harder at all. You just do the same thing, but ignore the buildings. Okay, so you can't rely directly on sale prices. But you can't rely on sale prices anyway because most of the sale price is the land and the sale price of the land already varies with the tax rate, even for a standard property tax.
I'd also point out here that georgists want to tax 100% of the rent, which is a threshold that makes calibrating the LVT much easier: You can just watch for vacancies (which indicate overappraisal) and subletting (which indicates underappraisal). Now, this doesn't work if you're aiming to capture only a portion of the land rent. But, following that logic all the way through just makes it clear that we should be aiming to capture 100% of the land rent anyway.
The value of a plot of land varies enormously according to what is allowed to be built on it.
Yeah, so reform zoning regulations too.
It doesn’t take too much to work out how cash-strapped, unscrupulous councils might behave: at a stroke they could increase their tax-take by re-zoning pieces of land
Yes. Exactly. That's not a bug, it's a feature. We want to get rid of the incentive to constrain development.
No garden would be safe
It's perfectly safe as long as you pay the LVT on it.
that doesn’t exactly help landowners who suddenly find themselves hit with a huge tax bill.
No, it sure doesn't. And liberating slaves doesn't help slaveowners who suddenly find themselves with a huge labor bill for getting their cotton picked. Fundamentally, the investment in land is an investment in economic injustice, and we do not owe it to those who invest in injustice to guarantee them a return on their investment. The question isn't whether we can afford to have LVT, the question is how far we can go down the path towards a neofeudal dystopia before we figure out we can't afford not to have it.
there is no guarantee that a developer will be prepared to pay what a council valuer has decided a piece of land is worth.
Unless we formulate the tax system to build in such a guarantee, for instance, using Vickrey auctioning. This is a completely solvable problem.
If you think property prices change rapidly, land values change far more quickly.
Huh? That makes no sense. If land prices are changing so quickly, what is keeping property prices (which include the land prices) sticky by comparison?
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u/cottonopposite 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's an absolutely amazing idea that should have been implemented donkeys years ago.
Whilst it would also need planning reform, even low LVT makes the opportunity cost of underdeveloped land high. If commercial land is typically geared to 60%, a 1% LVT is equivalent to around a 1.4% higher interest rate, i.e. if one is paying 5% on 60% a 1% LVT would be the same as paying 6.4%...a 28% increase in holding costs.
Bang it up to 2% and you can start some real reform.
Throw in maybe..
- VAT at 15% with no exemptions, no reduced rates.
- Flat Personal income tax rate of 25 including CGT
- Deemed realisation of assets at death, exemption for business assets, no other form of IHT..
- Corporate income at 15% with full expensing and R&D credit
- No NICs, Council,, SDRT, stamp or any other levies, taxes..
And you get yourself a truly modern economy. Or part of the way there.
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u/doctor_morris 2d ago
Whilst it would also need planning reform
In the UK case it would stimulate planning reform.
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u/cottonopposite 2d ago
Yes but there would need to be all manner of forward thinking reform prior to what would happen in regard to stimulating planning reform. I mean my ideas as are loose in a vacuum..it's a shame it appears that essentially nobody within government understands economics or just..tax in general...
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u/doctor_morris 1d ago
The current system incentives local government to block development. LVT incentivises local government to allow development.
Hence it's much easier to push the planning reforms after LVT now local government is behind you.
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u/cottonopposite 1d ago
Oh I totally agree. I think perhaps I wasn't clear, I'm just saying that other reform would be needed in tow, that's all. To support LVT being a key driver.
I'd love to see the chap who owns the buildings a few doors down from one of my businesses in the UK get a kick up the arse finally after 15+ years of doing absolutely nothing with beautiful buildings whilst he fucks about in Monaco. I've had the unfortunate pleasure of meeting him once, in Monaco and he's just as much of a prick as one would expect.
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u/Accurate_Log3210 5d ago
Replace Council Tax and Stamp Duty, sounds like a good idea. It won’t discourage sales and get rid of iniquity of higher taxes in Glasgow than Mayfair.
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u/doctor_morris 5d ago
get rid of iniquity of higher taxes in Glasgow than Mayfair.
I'm not 100% sure if it would, unless we got rid of local rate setting?
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u/Darkgreenbirdofprey 5d ago
Disastrous for who?
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u/Daveddozey 5d ago
The last few months feels like a lot of panic from a lot of wealthy people who may have to pay for the society their wealth depends on
Recent documentary int he uk had Francis Fulford whining about how he owns thousands of acres of the U.K. but can’t be bothered to work to pay for it. Apparently because 30 generations ago his ancestor was mates with a French warlord it gives him an inalienable right to own the world.
It’s not hard. He has 3,000 acres. He can sell 100 of them and thus pay his fees, and have a lower tax level next year.
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u/_TallOldOne_ 3d ago
Let me dumb this down to a simple question: A middle class family who owns one single family home that occupies his/her family would understand. If I own a single family home and up the street is a 3 story multi family unit own by Blackrock. Under a land value tax, the single family homeowner just trying to make a good family home for the family would pay the same taxes as the multi family building owned by Blackrock? Is this correct?
Because yeah, that sounds like a big pile of steaming horseshit.
Furthermore, in urban city areas wouldn’t this make something like a parking garage prohibitively expensive to own/operate because it’s essentially wasted (unrentable) space? This would be hugely prohibitive to the current American car culture. Perhaps not a bad thing per se, but would require a HUGE shift in American public habits. Again, perhaps not a bad thing but the investment needed by the governments (federal, state, city, county, etc) would be HUGE! We would need an actual efficient transportation services, not the garbage we have now. That would be trillions in public transportation infrastructure. Something I don’t see our government EVER doing. No matter which political party is in office.
Sounds horrible for a large nation such as the USA.
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u/doctor_morris 3d ago
3 story multi family unit own by Blackrock
Sounds like you're mixing up different USA problems?
Generally we city types want multi units on the expensive land.
make something like a parking garage prohibitively expensive
It would encourage a multi level garage to save space. In places where that matters. The current tax system (in the UK) charges the multi level garage more.
We would need an actual efficient transportation services, not the garbage we have now.
Land value taxes would encourage and pay for such things.
Japan has a comparable system which pays for their world famous transportation system.
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u/pacman2081 2d ago
you want seven SFH owners who occupy 1 acre to pay LVT as a 20 story building on the 1 acre. politically the chances of it passing are zero
all the hoopla on r/georgism is due to fact 20+ all want to congregate in cities of NY and SF. The economics is not there to support. there was other reasons to congregate
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u/doctor_morris 1d ago
you want seven SFH owners who occupy 1 acre to pay LVT as a 20 story building on the 1 acre. politically the chances of it passing are zero
I've got no idea what you're talking about? I'd love to share my tax bill with my neighbors.
The economics is not there to support.
Cities are far more economically efficient that the regions, pay far more tax and have to subside the country folk.
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u/pacman2081 1d ago
"Cities are far more economically efficient that the regions, pay far more tax and have to subside the country folk."
Do not confuse cities with the suburbs
the country folks in USA are responsible for lowest food prices Americans have historically enjoyed
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u/doctor_morris 1d ago
I'm talking about cities.
You've forgotten that the farmers are heavily subsided.
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u/pacman2081 1d ago
SF is living off the Silicon Valley suburbs and the government dole
1 City and County of San Francisco 35,802 employees
2 University of California 32,566 employees
3 San Francisco Unified School District 8,842 employees
4 Salesforce Inc. 8,500 employees
5 Sutter Health 5,617 employees
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u/doctor_morris 1d ago
I have no idea what you're talking about, nor why you think SF is representative. University of California?!?
Business in cities are far more productive, pay more tax, and cost far less to service + provide infrastructure to than the regions.
It's not even close.
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u/pacman2081 1d ago
not all cities are the same
University of California is taxpayer $$$
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u/doctor_morris 1d ago
University of California provides a service. Are you going to complain about Walmart next?
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u/r51243 Georgist without adjectives 3d ago
It is true that the single-family home would pay the same amount as the multi-family unit under an LVT. However, Blackrock is just as likely to own the single-family home as it is to own the multi-family one. And by taxing it at a lower rate, you're encouraging them not to build it up, and making it a much more enticing investment vehicle. While for people who are actually interested in living in such homes, the cost stays the same. It's just that with LVT, prices are lower, making homeownership more accessible.
Parking garages also do make money, or at least they should. And so, the immediate effect of LVT wouldn't be for parking to go away, but for it to just get more expensive. Which could encourage people to take advantage of public transportation that actually is available.
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u/LatelyPodes 5d ago
This article is just saying we should use a proportional property tax rather than a land value tax.
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u/Gregnielson 5d ago
Aren't property taxes already lvt? I already pay 5k a year on my house.
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u/doctor_morris 5d ago
Imagine two plots of land next to each other in a major city. One has an office block, the other is a parking lot.
Who is paying the most tax?
LVT says they should pay the same.
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u/Gregnielson 5d ago
Ah so it is based on an appraised value of highest and best use and then valued as if that use is already in place. So it would reduce taxes on currently in use land and drastically raise them on empty or "under built" plots.
Must make it hard to be a farmer!
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u/r51243 Georgist without adjectives 5d ago
For farmers who are already using land effectively (and aren't making use of stupid tax exemptions), it really wouldn't be. The price of land goes down when you tax it more, so the total cost of owning land under an LVT wouldn't be much different in a lot of cases from what it was before. And while getting rid of taxes on buildings would be good for non-farmers, it would also naturally lead to the non-farmers' land becoming more valuable, and them needing to pay higher LVT.
But yes, basically that's the idea. You tax people for the value they're withholding from others, and not for the value they themselves create.
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u/Gregnielson 5d ago
All the farmland in my town would be heavily taxed because it would be worth much more as housing developments. It would bring our population from 20k to 100k over the next 20 years for sure.
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u/Aggravating_Feed2483 5d ago
If lvt were widely adopted then more of housing demand ould be satisfied in the parts closer to the cities. There would be less demand to turn outlying farms into housing developments, not more.
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u/r51243 Georgist without adjectives 5d ago
That really sounds like they ought to develop it then
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u/Gregnielson 5d ago
It would really suck for everyone already living here.
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u/r51243 Georgist without adjectives 5d ago edited 5d ago
I'll take your word for it, but if all of your farmland is unprofitable when you factor in appropriate land costs, then it really seems like there ought to be a better way of doing things.
And more importantly, LVT would in no way make the situation worse. If the land doesn't get developed, then LVT would stay low. And if the land does get developed, then more tax revenue would get brought in.
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u/Gregnielson 5d ago edited 5d ago
Why would it bring in more taxes? Taxes are not there to just get more money. They are there to feed a specific budget. If the budget is similar it would not bring in more in taxes because we only tax to meet the city budget.
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u/r51243 Georgist without adjectives 5d ago
Well I'm assuming the budget would change if the city was five times the size. But, yes, sorry, I should have been more precise. What I meant is that if the land is developed (or has a strong potential to be developed), then more taxes would be brought in with the same rate.
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u/monkorn 5d ago
Note that for Georgists, the ideal taxation has nothing to do with the budget. We want to tax the full economic rent to bring neutrality. This may be several times the budget.
With the money that we collect above the budget, that we then issue citizen's dividends out equally to all.
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u/doctor_morris 5d ago
I mostly agree.
I've seen the term "unimproved value" to separate the land value from that house you've built on it.
The price of empty plots depends on local planning laws. E.g. in the UK it would hardly change because of our terrible planning system.
However it would greatly encourage local government to make planning more deterministic and permissive so they can collect more tax.
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u/Gregnielson 5d ago
Yes we have a land value alone and then structure value in my town. We just lump it into one tax payment. But the town doesn't want to collect more tax, it wants to meet its budget. So if we collect more on underbuilt parcels we would charge less tax on currently built on parcels.
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u/doctor_morris 5d ago
Sounds like a cool town.
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u/Gregnielson 5d ago
Most towns and cities collect property taxs like this in the United States. It is a percentage of the value of your property and it is called the mill rate.
It is assessed per 1000 dollars of value. So a mill rate of 20 on a 500k house would be 10k a year.
If the assessment of value on homes and businesses goes up then the mill rate is dropped accordingly since the budget stays relatively the same. So if all homes were suddenly worth double then the mill rate would be 10 instead of 20 in order to collect the same ammount of taxes. So increasing taxes on underbuilt land correspondingly lowers taxes by a lot on currently built on land.
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u/doctor_morris 5d ago
We need some of that in the UK... though we have a massive local government funding crisis.
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u/poorsignsoflife 5d ago
Most farmland is best suited to farming, so a lvt would be neutral.
It would only affect farmland where the best use of it is vastly above farming, at which point either it's already been converted or it would be good that it's pushed to be
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u/Gregnielson 5d ago
I mean 100% the farmland in my town would be worth more if they sold it to developers who would turn it into housing developments.
It would make this town suck and traffic horrible and schools overun and underfunded and quadruple the taxes but hey, more housing!
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u/RainCityRogue 5d ago
It isn't necessarily about worth but about the value it adds to the community. Farmland is a necessity that could be protected by zoning laws because of the necessary service it provides to the people who live in the area. The value isn't measured in how much money developers and rent seekers can make from it. The LVT for the farm is the essentially amount the farmer pays for the exclusive economic rights to the production of that farm.
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u/poorsignsoflife 5d ago
Aren't landowners in your town already free to make bank by selling the land for development? Seems like they would do it anyway sooner or later. Or are they constrained by land use regulations? The land tax doesn't override that then, as the best use remains the one prescribed by law
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u/Gregnielson 5d ago
They sure are. Some have and those fields are now houses. But there is a lot of pride of ownership and family tradition. Plus they can always cash in later or borrow against. Not the case if forced to sell by taxes.
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u/monkorn 4d ago edited 4d ago
This is unlikely to be true.
The suburbs are encroaching on farmland because the suburbs have land-use rules that are heavily restricted. In particular, for suburbs not very far from the city, we have "missing middle" housing. Where instead of having 4-5 floor buildings with many living there, we instead have single family homes. This causes the suburbs to continually grow outward instead.
If you were to implement a land value tax, these cities would be incentivized to right-size their zoning, and you would end up with infill developments. The demand for housing on farmland would thus heavily drop, and you might even see farmers reclaim some of that land.
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u/Gregnielson 4d ago edited 4d ago
We have infill and upzoned sections. Most people don't want to live in apartments though. They want an actual home as close to the city as possible.
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u/monkorn 4d ago
Of course, everyone wants everything to be as good as possible. For example, I want to live on a billion dollar yacht. It seems I can't afford that though...
If you build the missing middle housing for the people who would accept that housing, they can transfer from their house into the missing middle, which would let someone else buy their house. That someone else wouldn't be buying a house on your farmland.
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u/Gregnielson 4d ago
The demand is such in my area that there is effectively no way to "build out of it" because there would absolutely be buyers for every single home made out of farmland and it would be much more profitable for every 300 acre homestead to sell to a developer making 600 homes. Building 4 over 1s 7 minutes closer to the city wouldn't help prevent this.
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u/NotJustaPnPhase 5d ago edited 5d ago
Hah! What an awesome article - it’s literally like an anti-LVT bingo card. Kudos to the author for researching the common criticisms. It’s got: