u/InitialLeg1155

With rising global temperatures, an uptick in food related diseases, and a general degradation of the university system, do you feel that we should start reminding people that socialism is rooted in scientific exploration. Even if you’re not a strict Marxist, people like Albert Einstein
and Bertrand Russell were very prominent members of the scientific community and were also fierce advocates of pretty broad democratic socialism. We need to follow in their footsteps once more

I’ve heard the georgist argument for severance taxes and I quite like them. However, in looking over some of the conversations on this page, there does seem to be some disagreement about how the taxation of a resource which takes labor to be extracted should be handled. If you tax such resources, there could be an incentive to extract less or to not extract at all. Doubly so if you’re in a competitive environment where land and severance taxes are not uniformly applied (i.e. some places have higher/lower tax rates than other places). To me it seems fairly straight forward that you should simply be able to deduct the material costs associated with the extraction of the resource from the ground from the gross receipts generated by the sale of said resource. In other words, tax net not gross. This would, however, be more akin to a corporate income tax on resource extractors, so I’m curious how georgists feel about this

Hello!

I want to start by saying that I completely agree that the general property tax burden should be shifted to land. However, I do think that there can be some benefit to certain targeted types of property tax. For example, pied-a-terre taxes, with the caveat that they are by housing unit and not by building cost. My reason is as follows. A land tax incentives the land owner to offset the cost of the tax that they incur simply for owning land. This is good. However, you could easily see a scenario where developers say “well if there’s no property tax, I might as well get as much bang for my buck from the development” and then build massive amounts of luxury properties targeting out of state buyers who want to store wealth in high value units without living in the city. Even if we take all property as being equal (so not targeting wealthy property owners), if a house is sold for an equivalent value, who would benefit the local economy more, someone who is a full time resident or a non-resident who owns property as an investment vehicle? Again, I think land taxes are the best form of property tax we have in that it broadly incentives property development. However, not every development is as socially useful as the next, and there are some property taxes that, if done right, can also work in conjunction with a land value tax.