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this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Get rid of income taxes and do a national Land Value Tax on all business properties instead, like Henry George talked 145 years ago, problem solved.
Okay, but Bezos makes the bulk of his money on intellectual property and service fees, not physical real estate.
What you're proposing is still, fundamentally, a tax cut for Tech guys and a big tax hike on the agricultural / mineral / business real estate sectors. It also sets up this very fluid goalpost of "What is an acre of land worth?"
We play this game in Texas, and there's an enormous incentive for regional economic interests to decide who the Texas Comptroller and Texas Railroad Commissioner is, because these two get to functionally dictate how much tax will be collected on land assets. By contrast, the head of the IRS taxes all dollars equally.
You make some really good points here. I'm a Texas resident as well, so I've seen the f'ery the State gov does in favor of the politically connected cronies first hand too (e.g. the 5000+ uncapped nat gas wellheads that the tax payers are stuck with health and clean up costs on instead of the companies that profited on them). But the thing with a nationally applied tax is not subjected to the cheaply bought corruption of the State and local officials (although I will agree that on a Federal level even more f'ery can happen, which is why the Federal income tax is being turned ever more into a penalty on so called "middle class" earners, rather than a tax solely on the wealthiest among us, which is how it was done when it was first introduced in 1913).
The thing is that income can easily be hidden, moved or not reported, and it takes lots of resources at both the business and bureaucratic level to track and account for it. And it's way easier for the uber-wealthy to hide their assets, or to use political influence to create income tax loopholes, than it is for to do that for those that live from paycheck to paycheck. Where as it's a lot easier to know who owns a property and what they are doing with it. And a nationally applied tax can't be avoided simply by moving to another State.
As for “What is an acre of land worth?” - with a Land Value Tax you are basing that on the market value of solely the "unimproved" plot of land in an area, so that someone with an empty lot pays the same tax as someone with a huge apartment tower on the plot next door. That way, the LVT does not discourage developing, farming, mining or building in the way a standard property tax (which charges more based on what is on top of the land) does.
As far as exemptions to the LVT goes, I'd say no one should ever be forced to pay rent to the government in perpetuity on their actual home, so a homestead exemption for primary residences should be put in place for sure. Multi-million vacation homes and air bnb's, seem to me should be paying a national LVT though. But buildings that are all apartments seem to me should also receive exemptions, so that housing development is not discouraged by implementing the tax. Another positive thing with putting the LVT on office buildings is that it incentivises allowing remote working for businesses.
Also - on an ethical level, I'd say by default people are entitled to the entire fruits of their justly engaged in labors, and that taxes are optimally applied via "pigouvian" paradigms, where those that are creating "negative externalities" have to pay the rest of society for the damages in health, clean up and congestion costs they are putting onto others. In other words, in a better world we would just tax polluters rather than wage earners. I will grant that creating a purely pigouvian taxation system has some big issues in how it is assessed and applied though, so that's where the LVT can help as alternative.
I can also grant that completely replacing the massive revenues that come from income tax with an LVT might shift too much taxation onto some - in which case I'd say a good transition to try would be replacing the payroll tax (for which the Federal gov takes in over $1 Trillion in revenue a year) with the LVT. Payroll taxes to me seem to be the most evil tax, as they penalize both those who are earning wages as well as burdening businesses that are employing people.
Anyway - not holding my breath for any of these proposed changes, just playing wish upon a star, trying to think of better ways of funding needed services without descending into enabling blatant governmental theft and corruption.
That's largely a consequence of our privatized financial system. Give everyone a Federal Reserve bank account, let people do fee-less banking at the Post Office, establish individual publicly available revolving credit at the prime rate equal to... idk, 10% of your net worth... for daily consumption and 50% for big ticket items. Suddenly everything becomes a lot easier to track and a lot cheaper to manage.
You'll bankrupt the surviving credit card companies and every major retail bank. And, you know, that'll cause some problems. But if we're going to overhaul the entire underpinning of federal revenues, why not shoot for the moon?
But that's entirely speculative, as real estate markets fluctuate heavily from year to year. I watched my own house gain and lose over 30% in the course of a few years, during the housing boom/bust. And I'm just a humble starter-home guy living in a hot market, not some Blackrock / Berkshire Hathaway juggernaut juggle portfolios in the trillions.
Income taxes are great because income is inherently liquid. If you're paying out at payroll, you're never going to not have that money, because the tax comes off before it even hits your bank account. Land Value Taxes are trying to tax you on an illiquid asset. If you're picking up a tab that fluctuates this heavily, you're setting lots and lots of people up for a sudden surge in state-owned debts. And that's a whole new kind of problem.
Listen, far be it for me to deny the man the sweat from his brow. However, what you're talking about isn't a tax issue, its a pay issue. As a contractor, I bill at $250/hr and get paid a meager $60. I'm soaked for 76% of my gross revenue before I even get issued a paystub.
If you want to abolish the wage relationship and guarantee everyone collects what they're due, my ears are open. But I'm not sure whether I'm going to move mountains over the $10 the Feds collect after I've been scalped by my employer for $190.
That's before you get into how pigouvian taxes are a bitch to calculate and heavily regressive if they aren't properly amortized.
No. The political system at the moment is nothing if not heavily gridlocked.
But I've seen conservatives and liberals alike push all sorts of fancy tax reform schemes. The big problem I see is that the tax benefits some folks get aren't big enough to build popular support. And the tax hikes others get are guaranteed to provoke enormous outrage.
The only real path forward appears to be nibbling around the edges and refusing to fund the bulk of the IRS so nobody important ever actually gets punished for evasion.
They didn't mention getting rid of those taxes. Just income tax.
Or, just get rid of capital gains taxes and tax it marginally at the regular rate.
I don't think that would be really more effective as the federal income tax in the US caps at a really low rate.
And personal properties over the first $10 million or so.
Basically I think the Land Value Tax should apply to any land that isn't under either a primary residence, or isn't under a building that solely provides primary residences for others. So that way developing housing is not discouraged, and people aren't paying rent into perpetuity to the gov for their actual home. In that way, yes, second and vacation homes would be taxed, But the thing to understand is that an LVT is different from standard property tax, in that you don't charged more tax depending on what is built on the land, you are only assessed based the value of the unimproved land.