Garry, over at HPC:
Land Value Tax won't solve anything. It is in itself pointless and counter to common sense. You can only tax income that can be made from any land, not the land itself, or the value of the land. After all, the value of the land is only equal to the income you can actually make from it.
Therefore it makes perfect sense to tax [earned] income... Of course it would make no sense to tax a small family home, say, a 2 bedroom house, which is the family's primary home. They make no income from it, nor can they ever make any income from it.
Ah, right. Notwithstanding that families in small houses would pay net nothing as the LVT bill would be covered by personal allowances or a Citizen's Income, his logic appear to be that as a house, i.e. any house, is a necessity, it cannot be taxed.
But taxing earned income is OK, says he, so presumably he thinks that work is mere frippery, it's just something which those too lazy to 'build up capital' do in their spare time in order to have money to waste on luxury items?
Unless I'm very much mistaken, work is very much a necessity or we'd all starve to death, and it's not just good for the worker, it's good for the whole of society, Invisible Hand and all that. But anything more than a 2 or 3 bedroom home clearly is not a necessity in any way, shape or form (and I cheerfully admit that my family 'over occupies', but we're paying rent accordingly, that's our little luxury).
Tuesday, 6 September 2011
Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (162)
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15 comments:
The other point on which people like Garry get it wrong is when they say things like:
Of course it would make no sense to tax a small family home, say, a 2 bedroom house, which is the family's primary home. They make no income from it, nor can they ever make any income from it.
They absolutely make income from it because it is close to a job which pays enough to cover the cost of the house. If it wasn't they would have to get a closer job or sell the house and buy another which was close enough to the existing work.
People don't buy houses in the middle of nowhere unless they have the sort of work which can be done in the middle of nowhere or they are so wealthy that they don't need a job. They buy houses which have jobs close by. So the wage that they earn is very much dependent on the house that they buy.
D, yes of course, but such subtleties are lost on people like Garry.
e.g. if you have an apple tree which grows apples, the apples are your income, full stop. The fact that you choose to eat them yourself rather than sell them in the market is an entirely separate issue. If you let them fall to the ground and rot, they are still your income.
Plus, LVT eats out of the purchase price, and most people purchase their homes, why do people insist on paying taxes to former owners and banks?
Another thing that people like Garry fail to realise is that, although a 2-bed house may produce no income, in most cases, if you had no income to pay LVT, you wouldn't have a house either, also, if you have no income, what do you do for food? If Garry is assuming that the incomeless will be supported by the state (as at present), then cannot he go one step further and assume that the incomeless will pay no LVT (this is assuming no CI, which seems to be a concept too far for many people).
Mark, I hope you pointed him at your "Georgism without" LVT post.
Boosting urban density is fine so far as it can go. There are lots of people like me who love living in the centre of town (or as near as we can afford). However I would hate to bring up kids in my flat. If I ever have kids I will be moving to a house with some outside space.
However groovy and vibrant the planners think Barcelona might be, the simple fact is that most people want to live in suburban houses.
And the most frustrating thing is that even if we all lived in lovely spacious houses with plenty of gardens and loads of infrastructure we would still only have "concreted over" a tiny fraction of the country.
It makes me angry how we are deliberately making our lives worse.
Not to worry, judge Fiona Henderson has joined the Communist Party she believes that "squatting" is a good thing, I, personally, disagree with her, squatting" is theft.
Still she fits in well with your idea of theft.
B, that's another way of explaining it. Do you think I should stick with the 'Georgism without LVT' approach?
BE, exactly. Flats in cities are great for young, groovy folk and workaholics but kids need a bit of a back garden.
Anon, that's one heck of a leap of logic: Waddy opposes income tax therefore he supports squatters and is a Communist. I'm not sure how you work that one out.
On the first paragraph... they're going into overdrive promoting the rural idyll that "we" apparently are prepared to die for. There was an article in the Telegraph by Roy Strong, who is a professor of something other, that required a sick bag to get through, it even prominently used the desription, "Eden". Really.
IanB, yup:
the majority of soldiers would return to factory and office work in the cities and towns where some 80 per cent of the population of England now live. But that’s not what they fought for. They may have lived in inner-city tenements or in suburbia but that’s not how they saw the country in their imagination.
In their mind’s eye England was a country of villages and hamlets, old churches and cottages, gentle rolling wooded hills and ancient manor houses. It was a peaceful, romantic and tranquil vision.
So this nutter says the little people fought for the right to be excluded from the countryside because they knew "it's for their own good".
Nice one.
"Do you think I should stick with the 'Georgism without LVT' approach? "
It certainly is worth further development, and it kills the PWB stone dead. HMRC would like it because it would mean less tax returns to deal with. However, it no longer means that LVT is an "in your face" tax, with all that implies for (politically more acceptable) and against (less rein on gov't spending). Also I think you should do a worked example of taxation rates under a LVT/CI system assuming a similar public spend as currently, or, at least, as when the gov't last ran a surplus.
MW,
You support what that well known Communist Adam Smith and his marxist Wealth of Nations/Theory of Moral Sentiments manifesto..
;)
AC1
> Do you think I should stick with the 'Georgism without LVT' approach?
No. It makes the simple land-rent=> CD and makes it complicated and opaque.
AC1
Mark, my comment was meant to be in the NIMBY of the week thread and I seem to have posted it into this one. I was wondering where it had gone :(
IanB, yes of course, but it was a good find nonetheless.
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