.webp?h=10 "Top Hat (black) - Traditional. Classy. Elegant.")
aweonao
https://x.com/RealPatrickWebb/status/1882074737331048806
BREAKING: President Trump is considering abolishing the federal income tax, per NYT.
— Patrick Webb (@RealPatrickWebb) January 22, 2025
!neolibs Trump's redemption? Hopefully tariffs are bullshit
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oh boy we're going to get a land value tax!
every fricking time
!georgists !neolibs
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I've never understood Georgism why place all of the tax burden on people named George
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Henry George deserves it.
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That guy on ER, one of Carter's interns?
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I nedd to read more about georgism
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tldr: Taxes are bad because they distort economic activity, which is bad. When you tax work, people work less. When you tax investment, people invest less. To minimize distortions, you should tax the thing that is least distortable. The supply of land is (except around the edges) literally fixed, so this is the least distortive thing to tax. You can argue about reducing spending, etc., but for a given amount of desired revenue, a land value tax is the best.
IMO there are three categories of objections to this:
1. People object on kind of moral grounds thinking there's something wrong with the government taxing something you own in perpetuity, as if it destroys the ability to own something. This is extremely r-slurred if you think about it for 30 seconds, for reasons I'm happy to get into.
2. People object based on economic grounds ("farmers in Iowa will turn their fields into high-rise Condos and we'll all starve"). Statements like this are universally incorrect and r-slurred for reasons I'm happy to get into.
3. People object on implementation grounds, like "how do we assess value," "what about retirees who want to stay in their houses." These are the best objections but people have decent ideas on how to address this.
BTW, there are also commie-type moral arguments for Georgism like "pure land ownership gives you economic rents for doing nothing" so we should tax that instead of taxing your labor. Fine, but frick commies I don't care.
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The issue with Georgism today is that this means that the service and information industries basically go relatively untaxed
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this is a good point and I'd like to see you go over it.
I'm an economics brainlet but wasn't georgism conceived when productivity was (mostly) directly correlated with land size?
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The short answer is that there's no reason a priori to make sure taxes are evenly distributed among sectors. If your goal is to maximize revenue without economic distortions, you want to tax the thing where quantity can't be adjusted. If you tax tech/services you'll get less tech/services. If you tax land, you won't get less land.
Sometimes the goal is also to change behavior (e.g. people are polluting too much, or people are driving their cars too much). In that case taxing CO2 or cars entering lower Manhattan makes sense because people will adjust the quantity of polluting/driving they do in response to the tax.
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Wouldn't that promote more "land insensitive" fields?
If you taxed 10 acres of a farmland and 10 acres of commercial buildings full of codecels the same would't that itself be an distortion?
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Say we're in a zero taxes world. If using land for farming produces $10 per year and using land for coding produces $5 per year, and there's a 10% interest rate (say), then the landowner will rent the land to the farmer for $10 per year and the land will be worth $100 ($10/10%, this is just the value of an annuity that pays $10 forever taking into account the time value of money). Say we tax land at 1% of its value per year. The tax doesn't impact the value that farming or coding on it produces, so farming is still best. The farmer pays $10 per year, the landowner pays about $1 per year in taxes (slightly less b/c the tax is going to decrease the value, as you'll see, but this is second order and doesn't affect anything), and the land is worth (10-1)/10% = $90. So the value of the land changes but the activity on the land doesn't change. Even if the tax was 99%, using the land for farming is still best.
Let's do a different example where coding is better. Farming produces $10, coding produces $12 in the untaxed world. The coder uses the land in the absence of taxes.
Say you tax coding at 50%. Now coding produces $6 per year and farming produces $10 per year, so we use the land for farming. This is a distortion.
If instead you taxed the land at 1%, you'd still use the land for coding, and the value of the land would decrease. There's no distortion.
Note that if you went from the "tax coding" to the "tax land" world you would switch from farming to coding, but that's because you're undoing the distortion that taxing coding caused, not because you're adding a new distortion by taxing land.
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Sure
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this incentivizes states to conquer more lebensraum
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nibba wat u think bying canada an greenand is about
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This all sounds gay/r-slurred
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I'd follow along but a lot of residential land on the coasts are more and more getting bought up my megacorporations that would lobby against such taxes or will structure it in a way that regular americans wont be able to cope with the taxes but they can and will gladly buy the house/land from them.
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Yeah I'd be worried about the implementation and sneaky carveouts for sure (unlike income taxes and corporate taxes which are famously simple and not full of abusive loopholes).
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Plot twist ban owning more than n homes or plots of real estate
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I'm good with that but you can totally structure it for family members and other loops holes
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I'm sorry your uncle molested you, but this is no way to process your trauma!
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What happens if we colonize other planets?
Also you're a neoliberal shill and you should keep yourself safe.
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The main problem with Georgism is that it's primarily a UBI scheme with the tax restructuring thrown in almost as an afterthought, as a mechanism for funding it. There are some very naive people calling themselves georgists because of the tax part only, of course, but if you talk to any serious supporters and pretend to be friendly, they will eventually use it as a point in favor. This is a bit disingenuous imo and colors the character of the movement.
There are other issues, for example as far as I can tell nobody proposes a flat land tax, that taxes every acre equally. Else you'll end up either making farming unprofitable or letting all urban activities go essentially tax free and raising about enough taxes to buy a used condom. Abandoning this principle however immediately creates an inescapable quagmire of unprincipled patches and crutches trying to "objectively" appraise the land value and distinguish it from (untaxable) "improvement" upon it. This actually has very immediate practical consequences, for example there are people who bought a bunch of farmland in California and are planning to bootstrap a new Silicon Valley there. What is a Georgist to do about taxing them?
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Is he going to impose a VAT tax?
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They want to do tariffs.
Unrelated but a VAT is the midwit tax. But by virtue of being popular with midwits it's more likely than the superior LVT.
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