> On top of that, a tax that applies equivalently to all of the land available to the rental market in a given area will simply push prices upwards across the board

Most research asserts that a land value tax decreases the selling price of land.

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EgregiousCube 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Presumably by exactly the value of the tax (over the lifetime of the purchase).

	▲	iso1631 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In a fully functioning spherical chicken market, once balancing in If I buy land for $100k today, I can assume I'm going to make say $6k a year from renting it to someone and $2k a year from it increasing in value, giving me a 8% roi If I instead had to pay just $4k a year in LVT, the price would reduce to $50k to keep that 8% roi. I'll still be making money for doing nothing. Now if that LVT was returned to the population at large, it's quite possible the population has more money to spend on land, so I could increase the rental price from $6k a year, but then the LVT would increase, because the idea is it reduces unimproved land value to zero -- nobody should make money from occupying land, they should make money through improving it. In reality though any LVT implemented would be full of loopholes which would introduce absurd incentives. Just like taxing income, and worse taxing earned income more than non-earned income.

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jlarocco 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But who's selling the land? If everybody has to pay the tax then all of the property owners can increase rental prices by the same amount.

	▲	iso1631 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		All property owners can increase rental prices now anyway. They can only increase them to the maximum someone will pay for it. That's why average rental prices tends to track average income. If you have 5 homes and 6 people, each able to pay 2100, 2200... 2600, then the worst home will rent for 2200, and the one who can only afford 2100 will live in a box.