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Comment by skzo

2 days ago

why not?

The onus is on you to describe some mechanism by which abolishing almost all taxation will magically fix wealth discrepancy.

  • I don't know what degree "fixing" means.

    You can tax certain things a certain amount and you get diminishing returns. For example, if you had a 50% wealth tax, it would stop collecting anything pretty quickly and would cause pretty big economic disruption.

    Land value tax has the potential to collect a lot of money with less disruption.

    There's like $20 trillion worth of capitalized land value in the USA. That could mean like $1 trillion a year on-going assuming 5% discounting. Land rent is a perpetual stream of wealth.

    There's only $8 trillion billionaire wealth. So already 5%/year would be less. And there's a huge incentive and ability to avoid it by moving.

    And I rarely ever even hear suggestions for wealth tax rates around 5%. So then if you had a wealth tax, well land is wealth, and you'd be leaving a ton on the table as you could still have the land value tax at 5% of the capitalized value.

    That money could be spent on public services that poorer people will benefit from more like transit, schools, or even local hospitals and subsidized healthcare. A typical point by LVT supporters here is that these services have the impact of raising land rents.

    Most taxes have this dynamic:

    tax -> invest in public services poor people use -> land rents go up -> land owners benefit

    LVT has this dynamic:

    Tax land -> invest in public services poor people use -> land rent goes up -> tax land more so land owners don't benefit

    Landlords, developers, builders etc. should earn the return on the constructed housing, not the land.

    • > There's like $20 trillion worth of capitalized land value in the USA. That could mean like $1 trillion a year on-going assuming 5% discounting. Land rent is a perpetual stream of wealth.

      Leasing the land of the US? That's your big revelation?

      listen to the other commenter, fixing it means reducing wealth disparity.