Land taxes are great because there is less of a deadweight loss. Governments need money to operate. All else equal, we should get governments the money they need without wasting people's time to comply with complicated tax laws.
Humans also generally agree that progressive taxation is a good idea. Rich people should pay more to fund the government. Rich people own a lot of land, so they'd pay a lot of land tax. Poor people generally don't own any land and wouldn't be subject to this tax. Land taxes align well with what a lot of people think is fair.
Another key factor is enforcement cost. Enforcing a land tax is really easy for a government. You just... Go there and get it. There's no moving the land offshore or having complex relationships or offsets. If someone won't pay the government just assigns the ownership to someone who will and goes on.
Compliance costs with many other taxes are quite high.
Wouldn't a land value taxes be regressive for condos as the more expensive ones are on higher floors and would pay the same rate as people on lower cheaper floors?
This question is out of the scope of land value taxation. The overall tax burden would fall on the institution running the condo (HOA/company/whatever). How they decide whom to charge and how much, etc. would be a separate question government by different rules and laws.
Which is not to say that the outcome would be fair, but whether it is or not would depend upon how these organizations are regulated and run.
I don't think it is out of scope though because wether the government or your HOA/whatever is deciding how to appropriate the LVT is at the whims of someone else. I'm mostly for LVT but it gets supper messy with multiple ownership properties on land.
Also, LVT don't fix zoning as the value of your land is based on what you can make from it. If your land is zoned for only single floor parking, nobody is going to buy it for more than they can earn through single floor parking so the land won't be that valuable thus it won't have a high land value tax.
Why would they pay the same rate? From my understanding, the condo corporation would receive the tax bill. It would then be up to them to determine how they should charge the individual units.
Generally speaking no. When there needs to be major maintenance, each condo unit owner pays N% of the cost where N% is defined as your ownership stake (also your voting weight) in the condo. N is roughly your unit's square footage / the sum of every unit's square footage.
> Humans also generally agree that progressive taxation is a good idea.
Fairly bold assertion. I'd say most humans don't even really know what progressive taxation means.
> Rich people should pay more to fund the government.
A static tax regime (i.e., taxes calculated by a simple fixed percentage of wealth or income) leads to the same outcome. E.g., in a 10% fixed tax regime, someone making $10k/a pays $1k in tax and another person making $1mm pays $100k in tax, meeting your desire to have the rich pay more--no progressive taxation required.
I’d like to add here that the biggest fallacy is assuming rich pay income tax at all, which leftists across the world all seem to universally believe.
I would argue that in 21st century the definition of rich is actually „achieves most of his income through sources which are not subject to income tax”.
Progressive income tax mostly hurts well qualified proffessionals nowadays (people actually working for that income) and as such is detrimental to economy at large.
This isn't true. If you define "income" as the sum of an individual's income from capital plus income from labor, it is only in the top 0.1% of the distribution that capital income dominates labor income. (This percentile threshold changes slightly based on country; in countries such as the United States it'll be a bit higher.)
And? Due to power-law distribution that 0.1 % holds disproportional amount of riches.
I really don’t get that people talk about rising income inequality all the time, but actually noticing it (i.e. very strong minority holding many assets) suddenly doesn’t make sense.
No one is denying that income and wealth are distributed very unequally. But my point is that well more than 99.9% of individuals primarily earn money via labor and are therefore subject to an income tax, and so it isn't correct to assert that income taxes don't hurt the rich. They don't hurt the absolute richest individuals - but most people aren't defining "the rich" as only the top 0.05%.
"Rich" is an ambiguous term; there clearly isn't a single definition. That being said, I think most people would agree that an individual who earns a salary of $500k a year (~99th percentile in the United States) is clearly "rich."
The question I'd put back to you is why it's useful to have a single, universally agreed-upon definition of "rich"?
It comes down to the purchasing power. If you tKe $100 from someone with only $1000, it affects their ability to live more than taking $100M from a billionaire
Land taxes are great because there is less of a deadweight loss. Governments need money to operate. All else equal, we should get governments the money they need without wasting people's time to comply with complicated tax laws.
Humans also generally agree that progressive taxation is a good idea. Rich people should pay more to fund the government. Rich people own a lot of land, so they'd pay a lot of land tax. Poor people generally don't own any land and wouldn't be subject to this tax. Land taxes align well with what a lot of people think is fair.