Comment by pydry
1 day ago
>I agree with many of the arguments here about the theoretical impacts of a land value tax, especially the section "an LVT implicitly taxes improvements to nearby land"
Which is more of a feature than a bug.
The alternative to "local land value improvements feed the local tax base" is that schoolteachers who make the local schools good make the local landlords more money.
The idea mooted in the article that developers would be unwilling to build 20 houses on a plot of land because having 10 houses would jack the LVT up for the other 10 is entirely backward. The value of those houses will be predicated almost entirely on infrastructure (roads, rail, schools, etc.) or services (shops) provided by the community you're paying taxes to.
>I content that it is simply not possible to evaluate the "unimproved value" of a given parcel.
Did you read the wikipedia page about LVT which describes how? Which part is impossible?
> The alternative to "local land value improvements feed the local tax base" is that schoolteachers who make the local schools good make the local landlords more money
Or indeed that a headteacher works long and hard to improve their school and all they get for it is a reduction in their real income because the plot of land their house sits on costs 20% more.
Or the schoolteachers get driven away by a horde of NIMBYs who really don't want to be forced to move because the schools are good...
> all they get for it is a reduction in their real income because the plot of land their house sits on costs 20% more
And, y'know, the value of something they own goes up by 20%...
And that headteacher's salary can increase too because the tax base went up.
No such luck for the poor schoolteacher whose rent went up. All she will contribute to is her landlord's vacation fund.
>Or the schoolteachers get driven away by a horde of NIMBYs
Really??? You think NIMBYs will protest a good school?
If you want NIMBYs go visit San Francisco. Theyve detaxed land there to such an absurd extent that the locals with $1.5 million mortgages will flock to town council meetings to try to declare a launderette historic to prevent it from being turned into apartments (because if any more apartments are built they will go underwater on their absurdly sized mortgage).
> Did you read the wikipedia page about LVT which describes how? Which part is impossible?
The wikipedia article describes some processes, including assessments, regressions, and interpolation from fixed landmarks.
Those are all means of estimating something, which you can call the "unimproved land value" if you are so inclined, but what exactly is the thing that they are estimating? How do you know if they are accurate?
You can implement a framework based on any of those measures, but crucially as above they are not an LVT, they are a "proportionate tax on total value based on extrapolating previous sales minus human estimates of improvement value according to a rubric" for example, and have different advantages and disadvantages than an LVT even theoretically, so every time you make an argument that "LVTs have such-and-such a property" you have to expand the definition of LVT to be the specific case and verify whether that property makes sense in the context of that particular methodology. As a shorthand it becomes useless.
My point is not that there are attempts to have an LVT that are approximations of the ideal reality; my point is that this ideal simply does not exist in any sort of cogent way so you might as well tax based on how much God loves the property or how many potatoes you could grow on the land.
>You can implement a framework based on any of those measures, but crucially as above they are not an LVT, they are a "proportionate tax on total value based on extrapolating previous sales minus human estimates of improvement value according to a rubric"
In other words an accurate imputed land value.
I still dont see a problem with this.