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."