Perhaps someone who has thought about this more can explain how a 'land value tax' differs from existing property tax regimes that explicitly examine the value of improvements and the value of land...
This Detroit case is interesting because there are different rates of taxation on the land, but the difference in rate could also be obtained by increasing the land component of a parcel's value.
Land value tax is an idea by Henry George - the guy who coined the phrase "the rent is too damn high". His idea is among other things that a property tax discourages investment - one way to make money as an investor is to hold a plot of empty land in a desirable city centre location, watch it go up in value, and neither pay tax on any development on it nor bother with messy things such as tenants. Taxing the land value, according to George, removes that perverse incentive.
I don't understand how that needs a special tax though. Wouldn't the more obvious choice be to just tax all wealth/assets?
E.g. where I live it's just assumed that all your assets produce a yield of 4% yearly, and that is taxed as regular income. Makes the tax declaration also a lot easier, since people don't have to list all exact dividends and profits they might have gotten from investments.
They are loading the tax burden on the land rather than on structures. So, you can build the Taj Mahal or leave the lot a burned out wreck-- either way you pay the same tax. Many comments on the thread overstate what this is.
I happen to think it's interesting, but for reasons unrelated to the article-- it's kinda goofy for the state to tax personal property that happens to be fixed to a location, like a fireplace, stained glass window or chandelier. Tax a house on a foundation; no tax for a house on wheels? This "LVT" scheme does away with those issues so folks can fix whatever they want to the location, so it makes more sense logically even if the connection to Detroit's problems is very unclear.
Detroit has blight. LVT addresses property speculators that buy land to sit on it for 10 years and do nothing with it. With LVT they have to either pay up, develop it, or sell it. All options good for the city.
> I happen to think it's interesting, but for reasons unrelated to the article-- it's kinda goofy for the state to tax personal property that happens to be fixed to a location, like a fireplace, stained glass window or chandelier.
The 'goofiness' is on purpose: you tend to get less of what you tax. Most taxes are taxes on some kind of economic activity.
The supply of land is fixed, so you can tax it all you want without impacting economic activity, like working a job or investing capital or even just shopping.
> [...] even if the connection to Detroit's problems is very unclear.
>even if the connection to Detroit's problems is very unclear.
Child of lifelong Detroiter here. iirc a big problem in detroit is some ultra wealth like Matty Moroun owning a huge portion of the land and just sitting on it, doing nothing with it. If that's still true, the LVT makes plenty of sense.
Property taxes can apply to all types of property. The idea is the more valuable the property, the more expensive it is for the state to defend it for you (via police, etc.)
In practice, real estate is the 20x more valuable than any other personal property, so it doesn't make sense to tax anything else. Cars are subject to a registration fee.
If you own expensive business machinery, that may be subject to tax in some states. My county also taxes boats and airplanes.
In many places a large part of what property tax is for is things like roads, water, sewer, police, fire, and schools.
For most of those how much money is needed for them depends a lot more on what is on the land than on the land itself. E.g., the amount of sewer capacity needed for a lot is proportional to the number of people who live on the lot. It thus seems sensible to have a tax that includes as a factor what is built on the lot.
That sounds like a really, really good idea because it would shift tax burden from people that have done socially positive things in a city context like adding population density building multiresidential and shift it to people leaving dead zones of low density decrepit garbage. On the theory of making things you don't want cost more and incentivizing things you do want my making them cost less, that's a great idea. My only concern would be rezoning land into a higher tax bracket causing distress to the original owner, which they could do by grandfathering zoning for tax purposes until a property is sold.
Land value taxes don't factor in improvements. Improving the land results in no property tax change, so they incentivize doing more useful things with the land.
I've gone back and forth on LVT, but don't currently support it.
The problem is determining what the land is worth. If you use a periodic market-based auction system (the only known way that could possibly yield accurate prices), then you give the government and the wealthy extraordinary power to kick people out of their residences, even ones in which the tenants built the house. Good for the collective perhaps, but terrible for individual autonomy. This could be mitigated by auctioning off longer length (~say 30 year) leases, but you can end up with huge value mismatches after 30 years of change, just like today, and I suspect there would be other unintended consequences. For example, things wouldn't be built to last, they'd be built to generate as much value as possible before the lease is auctioned off again.
And even then, you haven't really determined what the land is worth, since any rational auction participant is considering how much money can be made with the existing improvements on the property.
That being said, I hope they do try it in Detroit, since I have no stake in the city and it seems like it has more to gain than to lose from such an experiment.
Property tax: The more of your money you invest into your property, the more you pay for taxes (punishing investment)
Land value tax: Your tax is unchanged on how much you invest in your properties. A rundown parking lot pays the same amount of tax as the next door skyscraper (encouraging development of limited, high value land, and punishing lazy speculation).
Land value tax is a simple, elegant way to incentivize more (and more efficient) economic development.
> Property tax: The more of your money you invest into your property, the more you pay for taxes (punishing investment)
> Land value tax: Your tax is unchanged on how much you invest in your properties. A rundown parking lot pays the same amount of tax as the next door skyscraper (encouraging development of limited, high value land, and punishing lazy speculation).
The problem with this analysis of a land value tax is that the value of the lot next to the skyscraper depends on the improvements of the skyscraper lot. This is in addition to the 'inherent' value of being downtown.
If we assume the skyscraper is the highest and best use of the land, it would then appear that both the skyscraper land owner and the parking lot land owner are being charged based on the investments made on the skyscraper lot.
Now, how are market prices determined? Overall, investors and lenders wish to maximize a return on investment. Indeed, property appraisals explicitly consider the highest and best use of a property in determining its market value.
So I am unclear how the explicit taxation of land value and improvement value that exists currently causes differences in behavior from the land value tax system you outlined.
Land prices go up when poeple have more mooney and go down when people have less. The root cause is that land is unique in the economy because it both cannot be manufactured and cannot be moved. Each piece of land is therefore unique and no one can increase supply in response to demand. Renting or purchasing land is essentially an auction and the price is set by the highest bidder. Economists call this a "monopoly price" because it's the same effect you would get if someone has a monopoly and can raise prices at will. This is in contrast to competitive prices which sink lower and lower until they bump up against the actual cost of getting the work done to provide that product or service.
Land value is therefore a really weird part of the economy that allows people to charge money without doing any work or providing any value in return. If we confiscate all the money people charge to rent or buy land, nothing changes because no work was ever happening. The land is still there and still just as useful. Contrast that with anything where work is actually done - the industry would collapse if you confiscate the money. Taxing land value therefore allows the government to reclaim the money which those people should not be able to charge in the first place (if there was free market competition). When this happens, counter-intuitively, land prices do not rise (because the highest bid in the auction doesn't change) and there is no negative affect on production or jobs (because no one is employed to manufacture or maintain land). We know this because economic theory predicts it and various countries have already tried it. Instead, other taxes can be cut or eliminated due to the enourmous boost in government income, which has very positive effects on the rest of the economy. Understanding how this works is deeply counter-intuitive and so people usually think that a shortage of buildings is driving property/land values because it's easy to make sense of.
To directly answer your question: if you tax the land value as set by the current market, you don't have to worry about assessing other factors that SHOULD lead to higher taxes because the people trying to buy the land have already done that. That's why they are offering a higher price. It's simple and therefore cheap and easy to administer. Also essentially immune to tax dodging because you can't hide the asset.
> Land value is therefore a really weird part of the economy that allows people to charge money without doing any work or providing any value in return. If we confiscate all the money people charge to rent or buy land, nothing changes because no work was ever happening. The land is still there and still just as useful. Contrast that with anything where work is actually done - the industry would collapse if you confiscate the money. Taxing land value therefore allows the government to reclaim the money which those people should not be able to charge in the first place
You say they shouldn’t be able to charge for it, but instead of disallowing it you just change the beneficiary?
Another (somewhat more niche) piece of trivia: (80s-90s) Poland had its own version of Monopoly called Eurobiznes/Eurobusiness: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurobusiness
Existing tax policies focus on the current market value of the land. Compared to a land value tax, existing tax policies under assess poorly used land or vacant land and the owners pay much less in taxes. This encourages speculation and discourages productive use.
The assessor can't the change the share of land vs structure unfairly any more than they can increase the assessed value unfairly. A homeowner can protest the assessment and provide comparable sales and other estimates that show a more objective split of value.
Michigan property taxes are interesting in another way, they have had issues with "dark store" restrictive covenants for commercial and industrial real estate. Basically the owner of a large commercial building argues the land/building has very little value on the open market, it is a single use building with restrictive covenants that prevent an alternative use. These restrictive covenants prevent the land from being sold to their main competitors, and these restrictive covenants are self imposed.
Agreed - the many counties in the US already have a portion of the property tax bill coming from a land value tax/Georgianism.
California property tax bills have two components [1][2]:
- structure/improvement assessed value
- land value assessed value
The land value component is re-accessed frequently and changes based on comparables (presumably but its mostly black box).
The question is to what degree/portion of Georgianism to apply and what to do when the land value component starts going up infinitely that its starts hurting the electorate.
Do you introduce alternative tax sources (i.e. income)? Do you introduce caps on annual land value increases or add a bunch of waivers for specific use cases (i.e. primary homes, day cares)?
Or do you just stick with the unrelenting assessed value increases and go free market/no pain no gain/survival of the fittest on the electorate?
Basically Texas is basically the US experiment closest to pure Georgianism.
Texas is not Georgist. Property tax is assessed on the full market value of property, not on land. And Texas’s land speculation and sprawling, inefficient land use reflects this.
The economy is not a zero sum game. If a land tax leads to increased economic activity it can actually result in a lower tax rate and generate more than enough tax to pay for the services the government provides.
Why would the land value spiral upwards? At some point the land becomes not worth buying/developing, so there’s still downward pressure on price.
Or are you suggesting the tax rate will spiral upward infinitely? Again, at some point that just means it’s not worth buying the land unless the productivity possible on it is through the roof as well.
As I understand it, what prompted Prop 13, aside from the desire to serve the owners of the best land, was that while land values were rising astronomically, municipalities and elected representatives were eager to serve their constituents, who naturally wanted all the amenities that their governments cared to offer.
And the municipalities -- their local elected representatives -- complied. They didn't reduce the millage rate each year to stay revenue neutral. No, they used those funds to supply those desired public goods.
And as land values rose, taxes rose. And eventually, people whose homes were appreciating by half (or 100% or more) of their annual incomes, increasing their home equity at an awesome rate, started objecting to the taxes that were paying for all those public goods.
Remember that in those days, California's colleges and universities were regarded as among the very best. And they changed a lot of lives, particularly of those in the school districts so well funded by those taxes that were ever-rising because the local officials didn't lower the tax rate to remain revenue neutral.
I don't see any sign that California, under Prop 13, has any resemblance to Georgism.
Take a look at a listing at realtor.com for a home in any California city or suburb, and focus on the "Property History" section, on (1) asking and selling prices; and, under that (2) assessment and tax history. (Choose the "see more" option in each section.) Then look at the assessments vs the current asking price. The land and "additions" figures rise by no more than 2% per year, while the asking and selling prices are far above the assessment on which taxes are based.
"The land value component is re-accessed frequently and changes based on comparables (presumably but its mostly black box)." No, they rise by 2% per year, until a sale takes place, at which point their sum is adjusted to the selling price.
But the house next door, of similar age and condition, but not sold in 20 or 40 years, is receiving a huge subsidy, paying a tiny fraction of what the newly sold neighboring buyers are paying.
Where is the equity in that?
The answer, for other states, is not assessment caps or capping taxes at a certain percentage of assessed value, but reducing the millage rate to remain revenue neutral, unless the local property owners approve a millage rate that is higher than revenue neutral because they actively desire more services, better schools, etc.
Unlike property tax, land value tax punishes you for leaving valuable land (e.g surrounded by lively business buildings) intentionally undeveloped or underdeveloped.
The only problem that I can see with this approach is landscaping. It is valuable to have a nice park in the center of a city, if only for the cooling down that it provides, but parks don't make money and land value tax would incentivize people who own them to bulldoze the park and build something in its place.
Perhaps this could be solved with certain exemptions. But these are subject to the usual corruption, e.g. someone leaves a really bad parking lot in place and his friends in the town hall simply categorize it as a park.
I think the Wikipedia entry, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax, actually does a pretty good job explaining land value taxes, and specifically in explaining the benefits compared to property taxes.
The way I see it, taxes are disincentives on bad behavior. So if you tax high value property more then it hurts people who want to improve their properties.
I've been thinking about local taxes a lot recently (I've been a locally elected selectman for a tiny town in MA) and realized that the automobile ruined the way we value land, which ultimate ruined the way that municipalities are able to control costs and spend their taxes to add value.
I'd write more, but only if someone responds to this.
I come from Western Massachusetts, which is characterized by smaller populations and lower budgetary allocations. The most significant budget item in most municipalities here is education, followed by road maintenance, which is often extremely costly. In Massachusetts, the basic cost estimate for repaving a standard road is approximately $1 million per mile, and this investment typically only lasts about a decade before it requires another round of expensive repairs.
Bridges are even more financially burdensome. Recently, we replaced a culvert that was so small I could easily jump over it, and yet it set us back $700,000. Keep in mind; we're talking about a town with a population of around 1,000 people, and we have over 30 of these culverts and bridges scattered across our approximately 80 miles of road within a 55-square-mile area. If you're familiar with the region, you might even be able to pinpoint which town I'm referring to.
To add to the challenge, not only do we have to repave our roads every 7-10 years to prevent them from falling into disrepair, but we also have to maintain them for safety, plow them, and salt them for safe travel. Over the past three decades, the expectations for maintaining these infrastructures have significantly increased.
The problem lies in the way taxes are structured, which is based on the combined value of land and improvements (buildings). Particularly in smaller towns and cities, most people are trying to get the most affordable option. This approach encourages sprawl, resulting in substantial infrastructure construction and maintenance costs. In larger cities (unlike mine), the upkeep of water and sewer lines are another considerable addition.
In more suburban communities, we're witnessing the aging of infrastructure that was originally constructed during the early days of the automobile era. The cost of replacing this aging infrastructure is substantial, but growth expectations, which used to help fund these projects, are dwindling. Many people who moved a few miles outside the city center still expect the same level of services without understanding the financial implications. This situation places a significant strain on tax funds, leaving us with limited resources to invest in valuable critical community needs and values.
We now live in a small city in multi-unit building that has ~60 ft of road frontage, and is right in downtown. The building has 6 apartments so has considerable value. But our _infrastructure_ costs are tiny compared to those that live in suburbia. Why are we paying more taxes for helping the city be efficient?
MA GL says you have to tax everyone on their property value - so someone in a 250K house out in suburbia that costs the town huge amounts to maintain their roads, sewers and water, actually costs the town money -- while a downtown 6-unit $1.5M building next to others that use the same services, is a boon.
And what made that possible? The proliferation of the automobile.
We need our tax system to promote density - which means you can spend more tax money on things that matter.
Underfunded pensions are a problem only because tax revenue must be spent on maintaining unsustainable infrastructure that was originally built on an expectation of never-ending growth.
If that infrastructure costs were not so high, there would be sufficient money to pay people what they deserved.
I remember high-school economics class, every lesson the teacher would relate how georgism was a solution to the problem at hand. It sounded like a panacea for all society's economic woes.
Once you understand George's complaints about rent seeking you begin to see it everywhere. I don't think his proposals are a panacea but they would help with most problems in our society (e.g. housing affordability, income inequality). His theory is accepted by both heterodox and orthodox economists but unfortunately hasn't had enough mainstream political interest to prove its utility.
The main disadvantage I see is that, despite being able to absorb all tax requirements, politicians and voters wouldn't be able to resist tacking on other types of taxes on top of it.
See the first page of lvtfan.typepad.com for the story! It goes back to November, 1887, and a speech from a then-judge, later congressman, from California.
How ironic that a campaign with "free land" in the slogan treated land as a public commodity and sought to make land the entire basis of the government's tax income.
I hope they do try it. If they do, one of two thing will happen. Either it will fail dramatically, in which case the LVT muppets can finally shut up about it... or it will succeed, all of our cities will migrate to this new utopian taxation scheme, and the LVT muppets can finally shut up about it.
Experiments are good, even if they fail to confirm a hypothesis because we can learn more. Sounds like your mind is made up before the experiment though.
There are many ways of implementing it and many reasons it may fail or succeed, but you've made your extreme bias clear. What was the purpose of your comment? To feel superior despite not having the slightest actual argument to present? Let me guess, you feel the same way about congestion taxes.
Or a third way which would be the most reasonable, if it succeeds only those cities that are derelict and need to turn things around would implement this.
Whehter you property value or land value pales in comparison to other aspects of your taxation system. Basically, do the complete opposite of what California has done. A summary:
1. Prop 13 in the 1970s was the incumbent homeowners voting in a massive generational tax break. It capped annual property tax raises for really no reason. Worse, it allowed your children to inherit those tax rates (as well as inherit your property on a stepped up basis so you didn't pay any CGT either). Only in recent years did this get cut back slightly. If you own multiple properties, only one (the primary residence) gets to have its beneficial tax rate inherited. And that measure only passed by (IIRC) 51%;
2. Corporations get the same capped tax increases and don't have to worry about inheritance. Disney World had its tax rate set in the 1960s so it paying a pittance. The LLCs can get bought and sold without resetting the property tax rate to assessed value as would happen if the property was sold;
3. For old people who may be sitting on massive land value that you may not want to evict straight away, just do what Texas does: accrue property tax but defer it to their death with a lien on the property. This gives people a choice between staying and paying later or downsizing.
Prop 13 may seem great if you're a longstanding homeowner but the thing is, it's a trap. You can't move because if you sell your property you lose your beneficial tax status. People should have mobility and generational wealth isn't who we should be giving massive tax breaks to anyway.
If you get these things wrong property vs land value makes absolutely no difference.
"Getting rid of the speculators" sounds good and might even BE good. But you know, Detroit's been in decline since the 1967 riots. No conceivable LVT is going to be a game changer. If the land isn't worth anything because no one wants to live there, that's the end of the story.
If you dramatically reduce taxes to labour and capital, it quickly becomes a very attractive place to move your business or earn an income. And that's the start of a development flywheel. Instead of taxing productivity, land taxes reabsorb the value generated by the community (positive externalities), which would otherwise flow into the pocket of the guy who owns a parcel of land in proximity to the public good. You then use these tax revenues to produce more public goods, which benefit everyone, and then suck up the value that accrues to the land. rinse and repeat.
You are already paying taxes, Land Value Taxes just seek to be a more efficient (since they try to target rent seeking rather than profitable labor) and more just (since they target land that the owner didn't create) form of taxation.
So arguing that it's effectively the government stealing your property is only a valid argument if you are arguing that all taxation is theft. If that's what you believe then that's fine, but it would be better to be upfront about what argument you are making.
Property taxes and wealth taxes undermine property rights in ways that normal income taxes don’t. If I earn $100 and pay tax on it, whatever’s left over is mine forever, and I never have to pay tax on that income again. If I buy $100 worth of property, I have to pay tax on it again every year forever, which basically means I’m only buying the right to rent it from the government in perpetuity.
Your use of the phrase “rent seeking” is also a bit weird. It sounds like any extraction of value from capital would meet your definition. It’s fine if you object to a persons right to extract value from their capital, but rent seeking typically describes attempting to extract value from capital _without_ reciprocating any productive value to the person who’s paying you. Which is certainly not the case with land use.
>> Land Value Taxes just seek to be a more efficient (since they try to target rent seeking rather than profitable labor) and more just
So someone like Musk should pay basically no tax personally because he doesn't own any land?
I think the idea LVT comes from a period of time when land was a good proxy for wealth. These days, I think that's only true for the middle class, who gets crushed by LVT while the true wealthy laugh from their mansions on modest plots of land while spending their summers on billion dollar yachts.
I do not see Brazil under the Wikipedia section for implementations of land value tax. I tried to look myself, but did not see a definitive answer. It sounds like there is a property tax, but a property tax is different from a land value tax.
Also, 2% is in a similar range to many existing implementations, and has been shown to be too low to prevent speculation.
Your comment about "it's gone" shows that you do not understand the intent here. I would recommend you watch the following: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h59se33UCK4
In short, the land is not gone. The profits you made if you rented it out are not gone. However, any hope of increased value through speculation will be diminished based on how long you held the high value asset prior to sale... which is the exact intent of this policy change.
In the US, people have the right to property (unlike say, places like Canada https://www.albertalandinstitute.ca/resources/property-right...). This is a freedom enshrined in the US Constitution and through the fifth amendment. If the Detroit government pushes too hard and rapidly deprives certain parties of their land, they can expect a constitutional challenge.
That device you used to post that comment, what, did you create it? Those clothes you are wearing, did you create them? The car you drive, did you create it?
I’m not saying anything pro/con the LVT. But measuring ownership by whether you created it or not is a pretty terrible measure. You wouldn’t own _anything_ worth any value in the modern world.
Readit News
This Detroit case is interesting because there are different rates of taxation on the land, but the difference in rate could also be obtained by increasing the land component of a parcel's value.
For a more detailed overview, I recommend Lars Doucet's review of George's Progress and Poverty, which won the Astral Codex Ten book review contest a year ago: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-progress-a...
I really like the style, but you need to put an hour or so aside to read the whole thing. For me, it was definitely worth the time!
And wardrobes, tables, books or computers (every year) but that's another story.
E.g. where I live it's just assumed that all your assets produce a yield of 4% yearly, and that is taxed as regular income. Makes the tax declaration also a lot easier, since people don't have to list all exact dividends and profits they might have gotten from investments.
Deleted Comment
I happen to think it's interesting, but for reasons unrelated to the article-- it's kinda goofy for the state to tax personal property that happens to be fixed to a location, like a fireplace, stained glass window or chandelier. Tax a house on a foundation; no tax for a house on wheels? This "LVT" scheme does away with those issues so folks can fix whatever they want to the location, so it makes more sense logically even if the connection to Detroit's problems is very unclear.
The 'goofiness' is on purpose: you tend to get less of what you tax. Most taxes are taxes on some kind of economic activity.
The supply of land is fixed, so you can tax it all you want without impacting economic activity, like working a job or investing capital or even just shopping.
> [...] even if the connection to Detroit's problems is very unclear.
Detroit suffers from a lack of economic activity.
Child of lifelong Detroiter here. iirc a big problem in detroit is some ultra wealth like Matty Moroun owning a huge portion of the land and just sitting on it, doing nothing with it. If that's still true, the LVT makes plenty of sense.
In practice, real estate is the 20x more valuable than any other personal property, so it doesn't make sense to tax anything else. Cars are subject to a registration fee.
If you own expensive business machinery, that may be subject to tax in some states. My county also taxes boats and airplanes.
In many places a large part of what property tax is for is things like roads, water, sewer, police, fire, and schools.
For most of those how much money is needed for them depends a lot more on what is on the land than on the land itself. E.g., the amount of sewer capacity needed for a lot is proportional to the number of people who live on the lot. It thus seems sensible to have a tax that includes as a factor what is built on the lot.
Most states do tax mobile homes, they just classify them as vehicles. Whether that actually makes a difference in the tax rate depends on the state.
The problem is determining what the land is worth. If you use a periodic market-based auction system (the only known way that could possibly yield accurate prices), then you give the government and the wealthy extraordinary power to kick people out of their residences, even ones in which the tenants built the house. Good for the collective perhaps, but terrible for individual autonomy. This could be mitigated by auctioning off longer length (~say 30 year) leases, but you can end up with huge value mismatches after 30 years of change, just like today, and I suspect there would be other unintended consequences. For example, things wouldn't be built to last, they'd be built to generate as much value as possible before the lease is auctioned off again.
And even then, you haven't really determined what the land is worth, since any rational auction participant is considering how much money can be made with the existing improvements on the property.
That being said, I hope they do try it in Detroit, since I have no stake in the city and it seems like it has more to gain than to lose from such an experiment.
If if someone in your neighborhood repaints their house, your land becomes more desirable. This is true for you and others!
Land value tax: Your tax is unchanged on how much you invest in your properties. A rundown parking lot pays the same amount of tax as the next door skyscraper (encouraging development of limited, high value land, and punishing lazy speculation).
Land value tax is a simple, elegant way to incentivize more (and more efficient) economic development.
> Land value tax: Your tax is unchanged on how much you invest in your properties. A rundown parking lot pays the same amount of tax as the next door skyscraper (encouraging development of limited, high value land, and punishing lazy speculation).
The problem with this analysis of a land value tax is that the value of the lot next to the skyscraper depends on the improvements of the skyscraper lot. This is in addition to the 'inherent' value of being downtown.
If we assume the skyscraper is the highest and best use of the land, it would then appear that both the skyscraper land owner and the parking lot land owner are being charged based on the investments made on the skyscraper lot.
Now, how are market prices determined? Overall, investors and lenders wish to maximize a return on investment. Indeed, property appraisals explicitly consider the highest and best use of a property in determining its market value.
So I am unclear how the explicit taxation of land value and improvement value that exists currently causes differences in behavior from the land value tax system you outlined.
Land value is therefore a really weird part of the economy that allows people to charge money without doing any work or providing any value in return. If we confiscate all the money people charge to rent or buy land, nothing changes because no work was ever happening. The land is still there and still just as useful. Contrast that with anything where work is actually done - the industry would collapse if you confiscate the money. Taxing land value therefore allows the government to reclaim the money which those people should not be able to charge in the first place (if there was free market competition). When this happens, counter-intuitively, land prices do not rise (because the highest bid in the auction doesn't change) and there is no negative affect on production or jobs (because no one is employed to manufacture or maintain land). We know this because economic theory predicts it and various countries have already tried it. Instead, other taxes can be cut or eliminated due to the enourmous boost in government income, which has very positive effects on the rest of the economy. Understanding how this works is deeply counter-intuitive and so people usually think that a shortage of buildings is driving property/land values because it's easy to make sense of.
To directly answer your question: if you tax the land value as set by the current market, you don't have to worry about assessing other factors that SHOULD lead to higher taxes because the people trying to buy the land have already done that. That's why they are offering a higher price. It's simple and therefore cheap and easy to administer. Also essentially immune to tax dodging because you can't hide the asset.
You say they shouldn’t be able to charge for it, but instead of disallowing it you just change the beneficiary?
The game Monopoly was originally called The Landlord's Game and meant to demonstrated the issues of land monopolism.
It was created by Lizzie Magie, a designer and political activist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_Magie
Another (somewhat more niche) piece of trivia: (80s-90s) Poland had its own version of Monopoly called Eurobiznes/Eurobusiness: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurobusiness
The assessor can't the change the share of land vs structure unfairly any more than they can increase the assessed value unfairly. A homeowner can protest the assessment and provide comparable sales and other estimates that show a more objective split of value.
Michigan property taxes are interesting in another way, they have had issues with "dark store" restrictive covenants for commercial and industrial real estate. Basically the owner of a large commercial building argues the land/building has very little value on the open market, it is a single use building with restrictive covenants that prevent an alternative use. These restrictive covenants prevent the land from being sold to their main competitors, and these restrictive covenants are self imposed.
California property tax bills have two components [1][2]:
- structure/improvement assessed value
- land value assessed value
The land value component is re-accessed frequently and changes based on comparables (presumably but its mostly black box).
The question is to what degree/portion of Georgianism to apply and what to do when the land value component starts going up infinitely that its starts hurting the electorate.
Do you introduce alternative tax sources (i.e. income)? Do you introduce caps on annual land value increases or add a bunch of waivers for specific use cases (i.e. primary homes, day cares)?
Or do you just stick with the unrelenting assessed value increases and go free market/no pain no gain/survival of the fittest on the electorate?
Basically Texas is basically the US experiment closest to pure Georgianism.
[1] https://www.propertytax.lacounty.gov/Home/AnnualSecuredPrope...
Or are you suggesting the tax rate will spiral upward infinitely? Again, at some point that just means it’s not worth buying the land unless the productivity possible on it is through the roof as well.
And the municipalities -- their local elected representatives -- complied. They didn't reduce the millage rate each year to stay revenue neutral. No, they used those funds to supply those desired public goods.
And as land values rose, taxes rose. And eventually, people whose homes were appreciating by half (or 100% or more) of their annual incomes, increasing their home equity at an awesome rate, started objecting to the taxes that were paying for all those public goods.
Remember that in those days, California's colleges and universities were regarded as among the very best. And they changed a lot of lives, particularly of those in the school districts so well funded by those taxes that were ever-rising because the local officials didn't lower the tax rate to remain revenue neutral.
I don't see any sign that California, under Prop 13, has any resemblance to Georgism.
Take a look at a listing at realtor.com for a home in any California city or suburb, and focus on the "Property History" section, on (1) asking and selling prices; and, under that (2) assessment and tax history. (Choose the "see more" option in each section.) Then look at the assessments vs the current asking price. The land and "additions" figures rise by no more than 2% per year, while the asking and selling prices are far above the assessment on which taxes are based.
"The land value component is re-accessed frequently and changes based on comparables (presumably but its mostly black box)." No, they rise by 2% per year, until a sale takes place, at which point their sum is adjusted to the selling price.
But the house next door, of similar age and condition, but not sold in 20 or 40 years, is receiving a huge subsidy, paying a tiny fraction of what the newly sold neighboring buyers are paying.
Where is the equity in that?
The answer, for other states, is not assessment caps or capping taxes at a certain percentage of assessed value, but reducing the millage rate to remain revenue neutral, unless the local property owners approve a millage rate that is higher than revenue neutral because they actively desire more services, better schools, etc.
The only problem that I can see with this approach is landscaping. It is valuable to have a nice park in the center of a city, if only for the cooling down that it provides, but parks don't make money and land value tax would incentivize people who own them to bulldoze the park and build something in its place.
Perhaps this could be solved with certain exemptions. But these are subject to the usual corruption, e.g. someone leaves a really bad parking lot in place and his friends in the town hall simply categorize it as a park.
I'd write more, but only if someone responds to this.
Bridges are even more financially burdensome. Recently, we replaced a culvert that was so small I could easily jump over it, and yet it set us back $700,000. Keep in mind; we're talking about a town with a population of around 1,000 people, and we have over 30 of these culverts and bridges scattered across our approximately 80 miles of road within a 55-square-mile area. If you're familiar with the region, you might even be able to pinpoint which town I'm referring to.
To add to the challenge, not only do we have to repave our roads every 7-10 years to prevent them from falling into disrepair, but we also have to maintain them for safety, plow them, and salt them for safe travel. Over the past three decades, the expectations for maintaining these infrastructures have significantly increased.
The problem lies in the way taxes are structured, which is based on the combined value of land and improvements (buildings). Particularly in smaller towns and cities, most people are trying to get the most affordable option. This approach encourages sprawl, resulting in substantial infrastructure construction and maintenance costs. In larger cities (unlike mine), the upkeep of water and sewer lines are another considerable addition.
In more suburban communities, we're witnessing the aging of infrastructure that was originally constructed during the early days of the automobile era. The cost of replacing this aging infrastructure is substantial, but growth expectations, which used to help fund these projects, are dwindling. Many people who moved a few miles outside the city center still expect the same level of services without understanding the financial implications. This situation places a significant strain on tax funds, leaving us with limited resources to invest in valuable critical community needs and values.
We now live in a small city in multi-unit building that has ~60 ft of road frontage, and is right in downtown. The building has 6 apartments so has considerable value. But our _infrastructure_ costs are tiny compared to those that live in suburbia. Why are we paying more taxes for helping the city be efficient?
MA GL says you have to tax everyone on their property value - so someone in a 250K house out in suburbia that costs the town huge amounts to maintain their roads, sewers and water, actually costs the town money -- while a downtown 6-unit $1.5M building next to others that use the same services, is a boon.
And what made that possible? The proliferation of the automobile.
We need our tax system to promote density - which means you can spend more tax money on things that matter.
(this has been edited in places by ChatGPT)
Especially for services (where the value is concentrated at the time of delivery).
If that infrastructure costs were not so high, there would be sufficient money to pay people what they deserved.
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/
Deleted Comment
You're attacking the person rather than the idea.
Experiments are good, even if they fail to confirm a hypothesis because we can learn more. Sounds like your mind is made up before the experiment though.
For some weird reason (laziness?) no one is going back to see why in these cases the idea was repealed.
It has been tried previously and had success.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h59se33UCK4
1. Prop 13 in the 1970s was the incumbent homeowners voting in a massive generational tax break. It capped annual property tax raises for really no reason. Worse, it allowed your children to inherit those tax rates (as well as inherit your property on a stepped up basis so you didn't pay any CGT either). Only in recent years did this get cut back slightly. If you own multiple properties, only one (the primary residence) gets to have its beneficial tax rate inherited. And that measure only passed by (IIRC) 51%;
2. Corporations get the same capped tax increases and don't have to worry about inheritance. Disney World had its tax rate set in the 1960s so it paying a pittance. The LLCs can get bought and sold without resetting the property tax rate to assessed value as would happen if the property was sold;
3. For old people who may be sitting on massive land value that you may not want to evict straight away, just do what Texas does: accrue property tax but defer it to their death with a lien on the property. This gives people a choice between staying and paying later or downsizing.
Prop 13 may seem great if you're a longstanding homeowner but the thing is, it's a trap. You can't move because if you sell your property you lose your beneficial tax status. People should have mobility and generational wealth isn't who we should be giving massive tax breaks to anyway.
If you get these things wrong property vs land value makes absolutely no difference.
"Getting rid of the speculators" sounds good and might even BE good. But you know, Detroit's been in decline since the 1967 riots. No conceivable LVT is going to be a game changer. If the land isn't worth anything because no one wants to live there, that's the end of the story.
I highly recommend grabbing a copy of land is a big deal. https://www.amazon.ca/Land-Big-Deal-wages-about-ebook/dp/B0B...
Roughly, 2% each year and in 50 years and it's gone.
So arguing that it's effectively the government stealing your property is only a valid argument if you are arguing that all taxation is theft. If that's what you believe then that's fine, but it would be better to be upfront about what argument you are making.
Your use of the phrase “rent seeking” is also a bit weird. It sounds like any extraction of value from capital would meet your definition. It’s fine if you object to a persons right to extract value from their capital, but rent seeking typically describes attempting to extract value from capital _without_ reciprocating any productive value to the person who’s paying you. Which is certainly not the case with land use.
So someone like Musk should pay basically no tax personally because he doesn't own any land?
I think the idea LVT comes from a period of time when land was a good proxy for wealth. These days, I think that's only true for the middle class, who gets crushed by LVT while the true wealthy laugh from their mansions on modest plots of land while spending their summers on billion dollar yachts.
The mountain and me
Until only the mountain remains"
-Li Po
Maybe the land isn't really yours to begin with?
Also, 2% is in a similar range to many existing implementations, and has been shown to be too low to prevent speculation.
Your comment about "it's gone" shows that you do not understand the intent here. I would recommend you watch the following: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h59se33UCK4
In short, the land is not gone. The profits you made if you rented it out are not gone. However, any hope of increased value through speculation will be diminished based on how long you held the high value asset prior to sale... which is the exact intent of this policy change.
I’m not saying anything pro/con the LVT. But measuring ownership by whether you created it or not is a pretty terrible measure. You wouldn’t own _anything_ worth any value in the modern world.
They also have silly things like stamp duty, which is a sin tax on giving land to someone who has a better use for it.