Land 🔰alue Tax Would Solve This 🌇🏗️

“What protection[ism] teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.”
― Henry George, Protection or Free Trade

Here is my take on whether corporations or people should be owning land with single family homes built upon it:

"We must make land common property."

So the removal of disincentive to build is two-fold. First, those who want to live and work on high value land are finally given ownership rights to do so, when before they were blocked by speculators. And second, the removal of taxes on incomes, inputs, and improvements lowers the cost to build.

So it looks like owners are being "forced" to build because of the LVT when it's just a transfer of ownership from owners of the underdeveloped land to those who want to develop. Most likely if owners are true speculators, they just sell to developers, and the LVT doesn't force new buyers to build.

But since it's impractical for individuals to own bits of HVL while building is happening, the land is rented out to providers of housing to build the housing for them (with a citizens' dividend providing temporary displacement income) and then they take ownership of it once building is complete.

I think the mechanism that looks like "incentivizing development" is that LVT redistributes land via the tax from speculators of high value land to those who then become "owners" of HVL. And as new owners, what they would do immediately is start building, just like if they bought greenfield land.

They're calling him Reincarnated Henry George

One important rhetorical clarification about a land value tax with respect to improvements: an LVT doesn't incentivize building improvements to maximize the productivity of a lot, it removes all disincentives to building improvements to maximize the productivity of a lot.

Democrats need to learn their Pigou: internalize externalities via taxes like the gas tax and focus taxation as much on land as possible.

www.grputland.com/2013/10/rams...

"Mr. Burns, I think we can trust the president of Cuba..."

The median voter only punishes the party in power for the stupid shit they are doing. They never reward the party in power any good things that they do to help them, and certainly never reward the party out of power for trying to help them.

The issue is that while the governor is elected by PV, the maps have to pass the legislature, which if gerrymandered bad enough, can sustain unfair maps. It took numerous statewide state supreme court races in WI to have those gerrymanders stuck down, and will probably be required in NC as well.

One important rhetorical clarification about a land value tax with respect to improvements: an LVT doesn't incentivize building improvements to maximize the productivity of a lot, it removes all disincentives to building improvements to maximize the productivity of a lot.

The thing about gerrymandering, which the Republicans used to know, is that when it's effective, no amount of rhetoric from the other side will be able to overcome the biased maps that you drew, but now they're on the other end of the stick (being forced to play fair).

Just an epic crashout over a war that they started in the 2010s, won, and then restarted in 2025 because they couldn't help themselves, and they're losing bigly because they assumed Democrats wouldn't fight back and are now going to the WOKE well because there is nothing they can do about it.

Reminder that Portland drafted Zach Collins instead of a guy who scored 71 points and a guy who scored 83 points in a game.

I love this joke from National Treasure 2 after Riley cracks the home alarm for Ben:

Damn Bam.

"What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis." -Dr Martin Luther King

Most "cutting through the bullshit" metaphor of NIMBY attitudes I've ever read.

Unequal ownership of land causes unequal distribution of wealth. And because unequal ownership of land is inseperable from the recognition of individual property in land, it necessarily follows that there is only one remedy for the unjust distribution of wealth:

We must make land common property.

Not that I'm proposing a VAT, but IF you want to structure the system in a way that makes sense, then do a VAT to pay for programs that distribute services (like health care or retirement savings) and use a large deduction income tax to fund a UBI to redistribute income to low income persons.

I think there can be both this and eliminating income tax for a large swath of people. From a pure money in/out standpoint, it doesn't make much sense to charge money via IT to low-income people just to give it back; if we're going to do that, better a broad base VAT than an all-income income tax.

I don't know, there is one BIG problem with taxes that needs to be solved...

Filled up both of ours tonight... will sit back and "enjoy" the show that may be coming this week.

NIMBY: "But those communities don't want to be Manhattan. Communities should decide for themselves if they want that to happen."

YIMBY: "If 40M people existed in that area, then by definition the majority in those communities wanted 40M people to exist in that area. Q.E.D."

Echoes of “Probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April.”

It's crazy that Manhattan is recognized as a jewel of the world area, and literally no one else wants to be known as the Manhattan of the West. Imagine two Manhattans with perfect weather all year round!