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Re:The New American Homeless by simplecomplex on Saturday August 24, 2019 @01:18PM (#20788384)
Sounds nice but the devil is in the details. Land value tax would be determined arbitrarily not by the market. It’s sounds great if you ignore the problem of actually assessing unimproved land value.

Of course we know “value” is just the amount of money someone traded for something, so Georgism can’t be implemented practically.

When you stop thinking about how awesome LVT is and think about how to calculate it, the whole theory falls apart.

Re:The New American Homeless by rcpt on Saturday August 24, 2019 @04:11PM (#20789420)
This sounds like an argument to abolish all property taxes. No?

Land value assessments should be easier than typical property assessments (which take into account land value already), cf https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#Assessment/ap...

Re:The New American Homeless by simplecomplex on Monday August 26, 2019 @04:01PM (#20803160)
Pretty much. An assessor can write down any assessment they want. All assessed value taxes have this problem. The value I attribute to something can only be objectively defined by a market transaction. And more importantly, people attribute different values to the same thing.

This is simple to illustrate by example: Three people are willing to buy the same property at different maximum prices. Person A is willing to buy at $35k, person B at $30k, and person C at $25k. Any value an assessor writes down will necessarily be different than one of the three people. There is no dollar value intrinsic to the property itself.

Re:The New American Homeless by rcpt on Monday August 26, 2019 @08:53PM (#20805258)
So, because land value assessments are easier than property assessments, we should get a smaller margin of error by switching to a LVT. This is good.

Your other point seems to be that no margin of error is acceptable and we should therefore ditch the whole thing.

It's not clear that the societal pain from somewhat inaccurate tax assessments is great enough that we should just set everything to 0. We have lots of data that 0 property tax leads to housing shortages and rampant speculation (cf. Malta for an example) and if you don't tax land ownership you often end up taxing something productive, like income.

Re:The New American Homeless by simplecomplex on Monday August 26, 2019 @11:59PM (#20806230)
Margin of error? I don’t think you understand me.

There can’t be a margin of error because there is no dollar value inherent to land (or anything). Margin of error compared to what?

People attribute different values to the same property, which is not reflected in any sort of assessed value.

I’ll explain with a question: If I say a property is worth $30k and you say it’s worth $100k what should the assessed value be?

Re:The New American Homeless by rcpt on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @01:42AM (#20806639)
> there is no dollar value inherent to land (or anything)

There's "intrinsic value" which is different from the "market value". I'm not very familiar with finance so I'm not sure if this is what you you're getting at.

But your idea, that land can't be taxed because it has no value, can't possibly be new as these questions have been around for literally hundreds of years. That being said, I've never heard it before and would be genuinely interested if you can link some papers or books.

Re:The New American Homeless by simplecomplex on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @03:49AM (#20807195)
> There's "intrinsic value" which is different from the "market value".

If there is, then how would I calculate the intrinsic value of a piece of real estate, to levy a tax on it?

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_theory_of_value vs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value