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Notes -
The recent Georgist uprising in the rat-sphere seems to be spreading outward, and gathering steam if anything. Lars Doucet, who wrote the original ACX post that blew up, is now releasing a book called Land is a Big Deal which summarizes his writings thus far.
There was also a major takedown of Detroit land assessment practices by a major land parcel data collector, ReGrid that dropped a few days ago. Major takeaways:
In addition, some fairly mainstream political candidates such as Chloe Brown who's running for Mayor of Toronto, seem to be gaining steam. Land value tax is a large plank in her platform.
I got interested in land reform through the original series of ACX posts, and frankly I'm surprised how interesting the problem is and how overall neglected the topic seems to be. Even extremely intelligent and well read folks I talk to about it are surprised when they learn that land value is usually just pulled out of thin air - the industry standard is to just take 25% of the purchase price and not give a shit about location or any other factors, which seems bizarre upon a critical review.
I've seen some discussion about Georgism/LVT here, but curious if anyone else has been following this?
Also, what are the arguments against LVT, besides low-effort "taxes are always bad and raising them is evil?" Genuinely curious for well thought out reasons why an LVT would be a bad idea.
Edit: For those new to this idea, a Land Value Tax in it's most basic form simply says we should tax away the value of the land, and only let people who sell land profit off of the 'improvements' they make, such as buildings, restorations, etc. For instance if you bought a piece of land and tried to sell it 1 year later off pure speculation, doing nothing to the land, you would not receive any profit.
As I stated in the original post - if these states actually separate the land value from the 'improvements' (which I don't think they do?) then this is an entirely arbitrary number. The 'land value' here is just some percentage of total value.
New Jersey localities do normally separate the land value from the improvements, and it is not an arbitrary number like a percentage of the total value -- it is the assessor's judgement of the part of the value which can be attributed to the land. This is to make equalization easier, since e.g. it is obvious that similar houses on different-sized properties should have different land values but similar improvement values. However, as far as I know, with the exception of a few jurisdictions with "vacant lot" taxes, the rates on land and improvements are the same in all jurisdictions.
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