Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
I am so bad at not taking bait. And in this case for me it’s doing a Georgists/LVT debate. I believe they have a false-model of the world and there are higher deadweight costs than they think. Developers do need incentives and one of them is land appreciation. Best example I have is a developer had maybe 40 acres of land near a major US city. I lived in this development. The first 50-story tower was built in I think 1980. It’s now mostly finished and my guess is there are now roughly 25 fifty story towers with the most recent one being about 100 floors. A lot of their profits were land appreciation and the land appreciation incentivized them to add amenities and parks etc. It also makes sense to build 1 big building at a time instead of of fill the whole site with little buildings and then tear down the little buildings as land values go up that justify bigger buildings. I think land appreciation is an economic incentive to invest in a community. So taking that away is a dead weight costs.
I also think all taxes have a deadweight costs. But taxes are the price we pay for civilization so we must have them. So we should tax land. But we should also tax everything we can. But we should try to keep the taxes on everything low to minimize the disincentives of doing good things. I think income taxes are fine but should be lower. The PAT for NYC I think is fine because in a more globalized world more people are avoiding claiming residency in NYC and not paying the income tax. The rich do live in multiple locations now and many rich do spend 4 months of the year in NYC. They won’t claim NYC as their residence. But they should be taxed and their shouldn’t be an arbitrage of avoiding claiming NYC residency which many people do.
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