The solution is to tax the land value rather than property improvement value. Any particular improvement from a property owner isn't taxed ... though implicitly the whole neighborhood getting more expensive (via the aggregate of all improvements and increased demand) does raise your tax.
If I'm meant to treat a rise in property tax in response to positive change in value as a disincentive to improvement, what difference how the tax increase is computed? It isn't even clear LVT does not create a massive incentive to consolidation, as property tax increasing without connection to improvement kicks off a "Red Queen's race" where anyone unable to capture revenue from improvement, or unable to increase that capture, ends up facing a permanent structural bar to any ownership. It seems as though designed to annihilate even any possibility of an American-style middle class, in favor of an ever narrowing landlord gerousia enriching itself through rent farming.
Well, it makes sense if you hope to be among the winners. But I don't see any Georgists here seeming very interested in addressing anything like that, just a couple who handwaved past it. [1] I'm not an economist, though, nor even very smart. I'm just a Baltimore homeowner who's heard a time or two before of such alternative tax scams. I mean schemes.
[1] And the ones responding at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826168, who seem thus far to present one argument each and retire discouraged by its failure. One hopes someone might come along willing to actually espouse this heterodoxy, rather than just try to feel "based" for namedropping around it.
An LVT specifically targets land rents, yes including imputed rents. Implied is an end to income and sales tax. The effects of this will be to discourage things like a surface parking lot or low rise motel in the dense part of a city.
Suburbs and rural areas nobody really cares about.
I'm very confused about the idea that taxing land ownership more heavily will somehow lead to more consolidation and _favor_ landlords, and simultaneously harm existing homeowners. It's just incoherent. Perhaps I too am not smart.
Perhaps you are motivated not to reason. Forecasting growth rates of revenue from improvement, versus property tax apparently aka "land rent," and observing the possibility exists that one will grow faster than the other especially since many improvements generate no revenue at all, requires not all that much effort. But I had no idea you people were mad enough to argue seriously this should be the only tax of any kind anywhere. Excuse me.
Taxing land ownership reduces returns on land ownership, making consolidation less rather than more likely. Wasn't that your main concern?
And yes, the amount of money to spend and how that money are collected are separate political questions. LVT is just about funding sources. Most Georgists are also for "pigouvian" taxes and taxing negative externalities.
How does reducing returns on land ownership make consolidation less likely, when improvement revenue looks to scale more or less proportionately - and superlinearly - with the area of contiguous property owned?
If you buy a storefront, you can run a shop. If you buy the block, you can build a skyscraper and lease or rent out all the retail space, not to mention the apartments under the condos under the penthouses, all of which also make you money, of course.
But again and still, we see Georgianism as the "camel's nose" for a complete overhaul of the economic and fiscal underpinnings of American society, and while this is a good time for such conversations - everyone else is coming off the fringe! Why not the remaining L. Neil Smith fans, once they've got their trusses and orthotics all in order? - for generally similar reasons I wouldn't expect to encounter a tremendously credulous public.
