this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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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.
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?
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.