Home-Owner-Ist, Socialist... or both?

The LVTC blog alerts us to this idiocy from the IPPR (page 20 onwards) 

[my comments in brackets]
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Property and land taxes

Despite vocal advocates and their use in several countries as municipal tax, a British property or land tax has serious drawbacks on closer consideration.[that's a lie, or at least, he doesn't list any drawbacks or show that he has given it serious consideration]

Such taxes are limited to single class of assets – albeit an important one [another lie - land rents are not a special kind of income - it's just all the income you can prise out of the productive economy. Without those other wealth creating activities, no land rents].

Economically and fiscally arbitrary, they pass over all other wealth [good] while creating inconsistency driven distortions and avoidance [no, LVT reduces distortion and avoidance - he says so himself later on - what on earth is the man talking about?]. The UK already has high taxes on property usage [outright lie, except Business Rates] and transactions [true but irrelevant and SDLT and CGT are not LVT].

And we have highly skewed land and property ownership, polarised between all-but-monopolistic landed interests held at repressed values and the vast majority buying or renting toeholds of urban property at high, inflated, increasingly unaffordable prices.[that's one of an infinite number of arguments FOR LVT, not against, what a joker]

The danger is the tax hitting lifetime acquired owner-occupied urban property [Poor Widow Bogey alert!] more than the deeper inequalities in property ownership or wealth. [Nonsense, quite the reverse is true] All this then curtail the amounts of tax that can be raised. [the amount LVT could raise is limited by cowardly politicians and other taxes]

Conversely, property can't go anywhere or readily disguise itself.[that's an argument FOR] If all that's wanted is a modest tax to raise limited supplementary revenue to the existing unreformed tax regime,[no that's not all that's wanted] then a property or land tax might be (or at least seem) straightforward and less readily avoided.

Here, a land rather than property tax – say, based on owned acreage according to land type – would be preferable [idiot idiot idiot farmland is only worth a hundredth as much as outer suburban land, which in turn is only worth as much as inner urban land], given the UK's highly distorted property market.

By attaching more to the pure 'rent' ownership component of property, it would have limited impact on incentives or the housing market, while going more to the real nexus of property inequalities. [no that's an argument for proper LVT, not for some insane acreage tax]

Failing that, rather than fiddling around with a necessarily limited additional property tax, one might as well simply extend the existing Council Tax bands, removing the present cap for more valuable properties. [an excellent start] Nevertheless, if real reform is in order then looking to a property tax at all remains ill-advised. [somebody kill this man, quick]

So he's clearly a Homey of the worst sort.

And he is of course a Socialist. On the next few pages he talks blithely about having "The Better Wealth Tax" instead of LVT, while making no attempt to explain how wealth would be defined and measured; how he would prevent massive avoidance and distortions; does not give any sort of moral or economic justification for taxes on vaguely defined "wealth" and completely ignores the fact that an income tax on investment income is mathematically much the same thing as a "wealth tax" in the same way as PAYE is a tax on your truly personal wealth.