This isn't a dispute about the theory, just the mechanics of it.
I'm looking at my town's proposed 2027 budget. By far its primary source of revenue is traditional property tax. Besides being hard to understand by a layman, it does not appear I know a single person paying any real attention to it. We gripe once a year about our tax bill, and then go on. And I contrast that with people paying much more attention to their itemized, monthly utility bills.
I expect people would pay more attention if they received a monthly bill for "opulent new police headquarters" rather than an annual bill and a vague pdf explaining it. Is there a worry about easily hidden slush funds, lavish spending, etc. because the public doesn't tend to look for details?

From reading about Foldvary and Henry George is there going to be a severe recession next month?

One problem with implementing a high LVT is that it would cause current landowners to lose much of the land value they previously paid for, even if they only recently purchased it.

I think the fairest solution, would be to allow current owners to charge for reimbursement from previous owners, such that each owner effectively pays the tax on the land value increase during their time of ownership. This would lead to a chain of claims that would ideally end at the last unlawful acquisition. But could end earlier due to a lack of documentation or bankruptcies.

Example:

Let's say someone bought a property, she paid 200,000$ for the land, by now the land is worth 250,000$. Inflation over the time period was 20%. Meaning the increase is 40,000$ from inflation and 10,000$ from the appreciation of the land value. Now a 90% LVT is introduced and the value plummets to 25,000$. However she can file a reimbursement claim against the previous owner worth:

initial buying price • inflation • tax rate.

Which comes out at 216,000$. Her net worth would go from 250,000$ to 241,000$ (land+reimbursement). She therefore loses out on the value the land gained under her ownership times the tax rate.

What other ideas do you have to address this?

Most of the current debates around artificial intelligence seem focused on copyright issues, job losses, or the disagreements between open-source and closed-source software. But lately, I have been wondering if we might gain some interesting insights by looking at generative artificial intelligence through the classic framework of land, labor, and capital.

I have been sketching out a loose idea about digital land grabbing, and I would love to run it by this group to see if it makes sense, where the weak points are or if I am stretching the metaphor too far.

Here is a simple way we might map Henry George’s factors of production onto the modern artificial intelligence world.

• Labor: The millions of human writers, artists, forum posters, and programmers who spent decades building the open web.
• Capital: The physical and digital tools, large computer systems, data centers, and specialized software programs, built and run by tech companies.
• Land (The Digital Commons): The collective knowledge base created by humans. Much like physical land, real human data is limited in supply (studies suggest we might run out of high-quality public text in the coming years) and hard to recreate (as seen when artificial intelligence models break down after training only on computer-generated data). Its value comes from the public that created it, rather than the company that pays to collect it.

The Parallel to Closing Off Public Land

Historically closing off public land involved putting fences around shared fields and turning them into private property that earns money for an owner.

It feels like we might be seeing a digital version of this process today. Tech companies collect information from the open web for free, hide that collective human work inside private computer models and then charge monthly fees or subscriptions to sell that same knowledge back to the public.

From a certain angle, it feels like a confusion between the value of the soil (the public information created by people) and the value of the tractor (the software and computers). Capital clearly deserves a fair return but I wonder if private companies are also taking unearned land rent in the process.

A Thought Experiment on Policy: A Data Tax and Open Source

If we look at it this way just for the sake of discussion, what kind of policy response might make sense, setting aside standard copyright battles? Here are a few simple ideas to think about.

• A Tax on Private Data Use: A tax on private artificial intelligence models based roughly on how much public data they gathered without paying for it.
• A Public Data Dividend: Directing that tax money into a public dividend fund, recognizing that the underlying information belongs to everyone.
• An Open-Source Exception: If a developer shares their models and training data openly, they pay no tax at all, essentially returning the digital land back to the public for anyone to use. You would only tax companies that build a fence around the data.

I would love to hear your thoughts, critiques or alternative ideas! :)

I noticed that there’s a lot of confusion about what different land value tax rates imply for the tax burden, so I thought I would clarify it.

In practice, the tax is based on the value of land, because that is the easiest to observe. There is also reason to believe that this value is better to base it on as it also includes expectations about the future which reduces speculation.

The most important thing is that the land value tax is based on the after tax value. So a 100% tax rate on a 5 million euro lot does not imply a tax burden of 5 million euros.

The value is calculated using the formula:

Value = rent / (interest rate - growth rate + tax rate)

This value is then multiplied with the tax rate to get the tax burden.

Here is the tax burden for different tax rates on a 50000 land rent lot with 3% interest rate and 2% growth rate.

0%: 0 (market value aka pre-tax value: 5,000,000)
1%: 25,000 (market value: 2,500,000)
2%: 33,333 (market value: 1,666,667)
5%: 41,667 (market value: 833,333)
10%: 45,455 (market value: 454,545)
50%: 49,020 (market value: 98,039)
90%: 49,451 (market value: 54,945)
100%: 49,505 (market value: 49,505)

As the tax rate goes towards 100%, it goes towards the land rent.
If the tax was on the rental value it would be like this:

1%: 500
2%: 1,000
5%: 2,500
10%: 5,000
50%: 25,000
90%: 45,000
100%: 50,000

But we don’t work with land rents cause those are not observed in practice.

So when people talk about a 100% tax rate on land value, they may mean land rent, but it’s likely that they are talking about land value too. The main reason you wouldn’t want a 100% tax rate is because of the margin of error in assessments that could cause abandonment if too high. Another takeaway from this is that there is not that much difference between a 100% tax rate and a 10% tax rate and that there’s a big difference between 1% tax rate and a 2% tax rate. Advocating for a 5% or 10% tax rate is probably enough, and would still go a very long way in completely shifting the tax picture.

Recommended reading: https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/docs/default-source/research/post-corona-balanced-budget-super-stimulus.pdf?sfvrsn=4a481ae0\_5

Edit: corrected some math

I have some lefty friends in NYC who have become quite into LVT. On the whole it looks fine if your goal is to create maximal utilization of valuable land... but in many cities in the US there are pretty strict zoning or 'community board' approval processes that interfere with that.

For example, I live in a historic district, and the building technically has unused air rights, but they're practically inaccessible because any additional structure modification would not be in compliance with Landmarks and Preservation 'visible from the street' restrictions.

Did some googling but couldn't find examples of how LVT and zoning or historic preservation intersects in places it's been implemented.

I just found out what my friend pays for her 4 bed SFH on Governor (University City). It is literally a quarter of the property taxes I pay for my 2 bed room condo. She inherited this from her grandparents.

I love my friend and nothing against her. She didn’t do anything to get this benefit. Just California rules seem to subsidize generational wealth building and promotes the wealthier getting more wealthy. New homeowners have to disproportionately shoulder costs from funding city services.

I just wish she’d recognize her privilege. She opposes the new development near the trolley station and University Square because “Governor doesn’t have the infrastructure for the new homes and that it will impact home values.”

Edit: New housing will probably always be a topic she and I don’t see eye to eye on. It’s also not anything to lose an unconditional friendship of over 10 years over though. Friendship and my housing views are separate things.