As a fan of Georgism and Land Value Taxation I was hoping for a good rebuttal but I am mostly just left confused by this article. It spends a ton of time talking about the political environment (not entirely uninteresting) and almost nothing on the "failure" part. The two points raised were that it was too difficult to implement and less was raised than expected.
LVT being too difficult to implement doesn't make any sense to me. We already have a property tax system in the United States that is really complicated. When property is sold that fact is recorded at your local county registrar. Property taxes are then calculated based on the most recent sales price, the rate, your tax districts, there's usually limits on how much it can increase, all sorts of deductions, etc. This is calculated down to the owner level for every plot already - how can LVT be more complicated than that?<p>This line in particular stuck out to me:
"What’s more, in line with Georgist theory, the tax was supposed to credit owners for improvements they made to the land"<p>I think we're talking about different LVT systems here. The current property tax system takes land improvements into account (and charges you more for them). My understanding is that LVT should be a flat tax on acreage (different tax rates for different areas of course) that doesn't care about what is on it.<p>This article is attacking a very different LVT than the one I know.
The thing to understand about the LVT is that we are pretty much all already paying it; not to the city in which we live, but to the previous owners of the land we live on. When we buy a house, we have to pay the previous owner a certain amount for the land. That amount is the present value of the expected income stream that could, hypothetically, be realized by renting out the land. Divide by the number of months in our mortgage term and multiply by the interest rate, and the result is our effective monthly LVT.<p>All George is saying is that that money should be going to the city (or other controlling locality) instead of the previous owner, because it's the city that created the value in the first place.
There's a small note referring to Denmark applying an LVT that is "close to theory", and further down a comment that it comprises roughly 2% of total government revenue.<p>On the linked article, the tax seems to be .5% up to a given value, then 1.5% above that (fairly hefty, imo), but excludes rented properties - which pay tax on the rent.<p>This danish case study seems to me a better case study for the LVT: why does it raise so little?
The devil is in the details here. A land value tax in the Georgeist sense relies on being able to determine the unimproved value of the land.<p>This is impossible.<p>So it always fails.<p>I love markets, everyone loves markets. But markets only approach efficiency on a unit basis when there is a liquid market for fungible goods. Otherwise you can get aggregate pricing signals, but really no information about a specific item.
It's factually untrue that Land Value Tax was repealed in Australia. We have it right now here in Victoria. The valuation of unimproved land value doesn't seem to be a problem in that implementation.
Given that most (all?) of the US already collects property tax, this information is usually public, and (in my experience at least) includes land and property valuations, I'm curious if anyone has attempted a basic estimate of the needed LVT tax to fund some percentage of government spending? Many variables, sure, but I'm talking order of magnitude.
Land value tax didn't destroy the British Liberal Party in the early 1900s. The flawed neoclassical economic consensus (capital vs labor) did. The Labour Party absorbed most of the ex-Liberal voters and then became the Conservatives' main rival.<p>Then the wide adoption of technology like the automobile (which made it possible for many to simply commute to and from the city instead of be there all the time) eroded the political necessity to tackle difficult urban land issues for decades. "Drive until you can afford to live" only gets you so far though and we're hitting the limits of that in many places now.
This piece is kind of embarassing. It certainly attempts to lump a lot of blame on the feet of LVT, which is not too surprising given the author has a history of hostility to the idea.<p>Notably in <a href="https://labouraffairs.com/2022/07/08/churchill-arguing-for-a-land-tax/" rel="nofollow">https://labouraffairs.com/2022/07/08/churchill-arguing-for-a...</a><p>gets into a bit more detail:<p>"With that in mind a 4,000 strong land valuation workforce was recruited. It was on the basis of that valuation that the tax was to be calculated on subsequent sales of land. However, from the start the collection of the new tax was confounded by problems. It took time to embark on a national land valuation programme. In the meantime, many local Tory councils proved to be unsympathetic and obstructive and tax judgments and valuations were regularly challenged by landlords in the courts. This meant that by 1914 only £612,787 had been collected. The war further complicated the land valuation programme as well as sales in land and then after the end of the war the Conservative-dominated post-war Coalition Government delivered the coup de grace to land taxation when all traces were removed from the statute book."<p>None of this is actually remotely relevant to a modern day property tax system that focuses on land, but it just goes to show the intellectual dishonest framing of the author.<p>Notably, Australia had a different experience:<p><a href="https://cooperative-individualism.org/dwyer-terence_taxation-the-lost-history-2014-oct.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://cooperative-individualism.org/dwyer-terence_taxation...</a><p>(p.276)
The cost of compliance and of administration of a land value tax system may be comparable to or better than an income tax or property tax system. An income tax has a cost of collection of around 1 percent of revenues (Australian Taxation Office 1979: Table “Cost of Collection of Taxes Administered by Taxation Office”). By contrast, the cost of collecting the Australian Commonwealth Land Tax of 1910 was 1.25 percent (Scheftel 1916: 86). This was a federal tax from 1910 to 1952, comparable in scope to a national income tax. However, it should be noted:
(a) The total cost of administration in 1910 was 3.5 percent, but that included the nonrecurring cost of setting up the land value tax system (Scheftel 1916: 86, 88).
(b) The Australian federal land tax was on a progressive, not proportional, basis, which made its administration more complex and costly than a uniform ad valorem tax would have been (Bird 1960: 392).<p>The average tax rate of 1.2 percent took about 25 percent of the income from landownership (assuming an interest rate of 5 percent and no land appreciation). With a higher tax rate and fewer loopholes for tax avoidance, the costs of collection and administration would have been a smaller percentage of total revenues."
I did a little maths on this at some point. If you divide the government's revenue by how many acres are in the US, it turns in to ~2,200$ per acre. Not too shabby.<p>If you charge 3,000$ an acre, assuming everyone could pay it (big assumption), you'd be able to eliminate income tax and turn the budget deficit into a surplus of $290 billion with no changes to spending. Nice!<p>The real number would be higher for reasons I glossed over like the fact >25% of the acreage in the US is probably unproductive for the purposes of an LVT (national parks, the plot your city hall sits on, etc.)<p>Who loses? Well, Ted Turner big time. Many large farms probably wouldn't be thrilled. I don't feel _that_ bad for Ted but the farm thing might be concerning.<p>I also think retirees/lower middle class rural folks would get absolutely shafted. Imagine this being instituted the year you retire. You've been paying 30% income taxes all your life, you move out to a dirt cheap 10 acre plot in the Missouri wilderness, and you _still_ have to pay 30,000$ a year. Your property taxes would have been about 200$ the year prior. Ouch.<p>This would force a lot of rural poor onto smaller plots. I do not imagine this would be popular with them. So maybe you weight the price more towards the urban areas? Possibly could work. A big buff to van life arbitrage I guess lmao.