How is this different from just having higher taxes on capital gains? (Obviously higher capital gains taxes would also impact other assets, but I mean in the context of land. Seems like both result in the same effect if you're able to defer LVT until sale.)

Seems like a huge risk, what if the land then deprecate after appreciating for a while? You'd owe a lot of money from the appreciation years, but the sale of the house doesn't cover it because it's now depreciated

I disagree with the fundamental premise on both parts.

> "You didn't do anything to make that happen" is a useful generality and not a prescription of every single individual in the community.

In fact, everyone does contribute, positively or negatively, to their community. Either through involvement or absenteeism, or somewhere in between.

> Your fixation on this point reveals a very fundamental misunderstanding of the goal of an LVT

The goal is obvious and not a misunderstanding. The goal is a bad goal, precisely because it punishes positive involvement in the community. To improve the community means to increase your own cost of staying.

Imagine someone wants to avoid displacement due to their taxes increasing beyond their ability to pay. I don’t know why they would want to stay in their economically “inefficient” house, but perhaps it’s because home is where the heart is and they have sentimental attachment to their home.

If they want to keep your housing costs down, the best thing to do is poison the ground (metaphorically or literally) because it decreases the “productivity” of the land. Box stores in America famously pay low property taxes because building a box store actually decreases property values - they’re expensive to demolish and limited in utility, while being an eye sore that makes the neighborhood higher traffic and less undesirable. Mississippi as a state is cheap because the voters used the government to destroy public services - it’s in someone’s best interest to do this in a Georgism world if they don’t want to be regularly displaced.

I was pointing to the argument that "you didn't do anything to make it happen. Only right that excess value goes back to society and reduces the tax burden of the working class."

Sounds like Obama's "If you’ve got a business, you didn't build that" argument (though Obama might have just screwed up the words, or maybe he simply had a Kinsley gaffe, aka a Freudian Slip).

The land owner DID work for it. He BOUGHT that land (and also the option that it could go up, or down, in value) with the sweat of his hard earned work or savings, or that of their family or business partners.

OP's wording states that he would favor confiscating value generated by the acquisition if such value happened because the market's perceived value increased.

It's basically a communist wealth redistribution logic.

My point is that if someone were to offer $1M for OP's "bengarcia.dev" domain, that OP would not send $999,988 ($1M minus $12 bucks of registration) to the Federal Government.

Yes Ben, The US Government IS READY TO TAKE YOUR GIFT!

SEE: https://fiscal.treasury.gov/financing/gifts-to-government

That article is ridiculous “More expensive tomorrow, more affordable today”. It reads like a predatory credit card offer and is full of what if’s.

High property taxes pushing down the sales price of a house does not help the buyer or seller. The buyer is going to pay the same, just more in taxes vs the loan, and the seller is going to get less because high taxes have reduced the value of their home.

I'm not a big LVT fan - pushing for maximally productive use of land is going to result in displacing people, displacing small businesses, displacing artistic/cultural/environmental spaces, etc.

I would much rather see an overall assets tax that scales with the value of the assets. That would incentivize more smaller businesses, long-term thinking, and wealth distribution. It would hit big corporations in the same way a LVT would, forcing them to be more and more productive with their assets the more they have, without pricing out smaller entities.

I think that there's something about LVT, but your dismissal is very shallow and why it's not been implemented so far.

I don't _want_ $1M, I want to live in my house that I bought and lived in for years. Getting money I don't need and having to live in a place I don't want to live in is _not_ a positive situation.

This assumes a house is nothing but an investment, like a bunch of stock.

This is far from reality. A home is family and life to most people, nobody cares if it went up or down in value, a home is about our life.