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submitted 7 months ago by mossy_capivara@midwest.social to c/196@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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[-] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 90 points 7 months ago

Good solution is to tax land. The land value tax cannot be passed on to tenants, both in economic theory and in observed practice.

Plus, it's just a super good tax. Progressive, hard to evade, super efficient, incentivizes density and disincentivizes sprawl. It's so good that economists of all different ideologies agree, from free-market libertarians like Milton Friedman to New Keynesians and social democrats like Joseph Stiglitz.

We should be taxing land, not labor.

[-] HardlyCrabbing@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

I agree that taxing land is a good idea, but it's really hard to do in practice. How you put a value on land?

Income tax is easy to put a value on, because it's right there on your pay slip. But what's the value of land?

[-] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago

http://gameofrent.com/content/can-land-be-accurately-assessed

The key downsides of income taxes, though, are it requires tracking everyone's income, and it's very easy to hide income by doing under-the-table work and getting paid in cash. In contrast, it's impossible to hide land.