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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   332 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 2, 2026

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Sometimes it’s good to admit when your enemies do something smart. I like Mamdanis Pied-a-Terre tax. My gut says most of these are likely tax dodgers which isn’t fair to the rest of the city. Either legally tax-dodging by limiting days or being smaller fish not getting caught. Making them pay a PAT tax or NY income taxes seems fundamentally fair to me.

And if it gets people to sell second homes and instead stay in hotels 2 months out of the year I think that’s a net positive for a city with limited housing.

I’ll disagree with a million things with Mamdani and NYC policy but the concept of a PAT tax feels fair to me. I would be in favor of lower taxes overall but a PAT feels like it would capture a lot of people who use NYC services but dodge their taxes which boost tax fairness in my opinion.

LVT would do this more effectively, efficiently, and fairly.

Ever since Scott posted his review of Georgism I've been increasingly on board as I keep seeing issues with not-LVT. It's not a perfect solution that would fix literally all of society's ills, but like 90% of anything related to taxes (and ~50% of anything related to housing) seems easily solvable with LVT.

I wish we still had enough federalism that proponents of LVT we could have a jurisdiction that had LVT.

I think they're a very good idea, but many things seem like good ideas until they're actually put into practice.

I don’t think you can run an experiment on it. Because land values do vary and to get high land values to tax you generally need a combination of geographic restrictions and government regulations to generate high land prices to tax - plus some kind of historical corporate agglomeration effect to generate a lot of wealth in an area.

Houston or Dallas is for all intents and purposes wealthy areas. Land values are cheap. LVT only really becomes interesting in LA, San Fran, NYC, Miami, maybe Boston.

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