https://scottsantens.substack.com/p/land-value-tax-dividend-ubi
"Imagine two plots of land in the heart of a big city, side by side, the exact
same size. On one stands a gleaming fifty-story tower full of offices and
apartments and shops. On the other sits a zero-story parking lot.
Now ask yourself: which owner pays more in taxes?
The tower owner does. We tax the building, so the more you build, the more you
owe. The parking lot owner, who built almost nothing, pays almost nothing, even
though the dirt beneath that asphalt is worth a fortune precisely because it
sits in the middle of a thriving city that everyone else built up around it. So
the parking lot just sits there. Year after year. The owner pays their small
tax, and watches the land’s value climb—value they did nothing to create, mind
you—waiting to sell for a huge windfall.
I think that’s pretty perverse, and a
land value tax (LVT) is built to fix
it.
A land value tax is a tax on the
unimproved value of land: the worth of a
location itself, not the buildings or improvements sitting on it. That value
isn’t created by whoever holds the deed. It’s created by the whole community
around it. A land value tax, paired with a
universal dividend, can give that
value back to everyone in equal shares. It may be the closest thing we have to
a perfect tax. It can’t be hidden or dodged. It makes housing cheaper instead
of more expensive. And I believe it’s the best way to capture and share the
enormous wealth that technology is concentrating into very few hands.
It’s also the final layer of a broader multi-layered universal basic income
plan I’ve been building. But it stands on its own, so let me start from the
ground up."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
