Comment by spwa4
6 months ago
> No, land value tax only makes it more expensive to leave the property empty. It doesn't make anything else more expensive. Indeed, it makes it cheaper for a business to buy up an unused property, because the seller would rather sell at a loss than incur a sufficiently larger loss (land value tax) over time.
You're disregarding everything I said. The problem is that "selling at a loss" is a much, much higher loss than the tax over time, which is what's sustaining the bubble for 1.5 years now. Investors are showing the opposite behavior of what you claim, and you are unwilling to even consider the data.
There effectively a land value tax on commercial property. It's called a mortgage. It's just being paid to banks (and the money "destroyed") instead of going to government. It has the opposite effect of what you claim: it makes land values higher despite no development.
You are also totally not considering what happens if your "forced to sell" shit actually goes through. That money is people's pension money and money that is used for social security. If your tax results in those loans disappearing, yes, you may be able to buy the lot cheaply, but only at the cost of destroying a large amount of people's livelihoods.
> The problem is that "selling at a loss" is a much, much higher loss than the tax over time
You don't know what the tax is, so there's no way that you can make that assumption. Like folks here are saying, we just make the tax enough that it's an even higher loss than that.
> There effectively a land value tax on commercial property
Commercial property isn't the issue here. We're talking about penalizing unused commercial property.
> That money is people's pension money
I didn't force people to put their pension money into Blackstone so Blackstone could ruin communities with their speculation. More importantly, communities being ruined here, and the people living in them, are more important than investors in speculation which ruins them. The livelihoods are already being destroyed by them.
So that would be a yearly tax, higher than the sale value of the property? Oh great, then I don't need to explain to anyone what a horrible idea that is.
Unused commercial property is a subset of commercial property.
And you don't care that people lose their pensions. Ok. I think we're done here ...