I assume a land value tax would be many multiples of that for a highly desirable plot.

So granny has $900,000 in equity and is facing a $50,000/yr tax bill, so granny has 18 years to burn through it all.

So you'd likely see a $1M plot of land taxed at $100,000+ per year. It would make zero sense to sit on the empty plot or build a single family home. It would incentive someone to building a $10M building on it.

If they sell it won't that just mean they have to pay 800k in taxes on their 1m house and then have to find another house for $1m?

Some things don't really add up.

Ideally, IMO. Simply owning land is not a meaningful contribution to society. Rent from land ownership therefore disincentivizes meaningful contributions to society by creating reliable sources of income to those that don't contribute, disproportionately among the rich (who otherwise have the best means to contribute) because they disproportionately own land from which they can extract rent.

> If they sell it won't that just mean they have to pay 800k in taxes on their 1m house and then have to find another house for $1m?

Well, if land value was taxed on sale, grandma could just sit on the property until she died and not be affected by the policy at all. This is IMO not ideal because much of land value will then be lost until the next generation comes along. LVT should instead be collected on a regular basis.

Ideally, with single-tax LVT, land value is completely consumed by taxes. Any money grandma makes on the sale will be from the value of her own development and the excess value over land value the buyer expects.

That said, I believe that there are important criticisms that can be raised against Georgism. I believe that it would have to be accompanied by strict zoning laws to avoid displacing people and exploiting natural resources. I'm less concerned about grandma's little house than I am about a tax that makes things like fracking or deforestation to extract what makes the land valuable inevitable.

This is trivially solved with a home equity loan. (If this proposal were broadened, non-recourse home equity loans for purposes of paying this tax would need to be expanded.)

You're selling part of the upside. That's the point of the land value tax. Someone who owns a $1mm house from a $100,000 purchase didn't do $900,000 of productive work. Those gains are rents, in the economic sense, not income. Giving those up--or downsizing, as you suggest--isn't ridiculous and is the point of the land value tax.

I would rather we deflate house prices by making it unprofitable to own a home that you don't live in, and have a massive oversupply of new homes.

Whenever I see inflation adjusted prices, I feel like I'm getting robbed.