There is a lot more to the economy than W2 income. If you want to tax worker compensation, you need to decide what is compensation. Is a nice office compensation? A company phone? A company car? A company apartment? Company-paid airline travel and hotels? Meals? Employee discount? The answer to most of these is "it depends."

If you want to tax business profit, you need the idea of business expense. Well, there are a lot of small business owners in this country. What is a business expense vs. a personal luxury for the owner?

If you want to tax asset appreciation, you need the idea of cost basis. If you don't want that to be arbitrarily cruel, you need the idea of capital loss, and capital loss carryover. Now you notice people are cheating, and you need the idea of wash sale.

A lot of this complexity is essential.

The fact that complexity exists doesn't excuse the additional unnecessary complexity added at every step of the tax filing. Nor the fact that it can't be done online directly with the IRS, without potentially malicious third-parties involved.

With Georgism, the government doesn't even need to track how much you make or have in your bank account.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

On the other hand, with Georgism the government needs to know how to assess land value. It does make those assessments now, but it's bound to become more politicized if all revenue is coming from land.

I also wonder if practices would emerge to make it impossible to know who to send the tax bill to.

> I also wonder if practices would emerge to make it impossible to know who to send the tax bill to.

Well, you could just publish the list of taxes due and make it the landowner's responsibility to pay it, seizing the land if the taxes aren't paid.

I don't think the government would really have to care about who owns the land, as long as the taxes were paid, right?

Not advocating Georgism, necessarily. I just don't see this issue as being a real problem with the idea.

My condo is assessed as 50% land / 50% improvements. That would rather defeat the purpose of Georgism.

Thanks, I had found this once before but couldn't remember the name of it and have been looking ever since.

Sounds like it's Socialist for land, but free-market for everything else. Who knows whether that's good or not, but it's at least a different approach and more interesting than the standard "Progressivism driving the speed limit" that we're used to.

The problem is that tax codes need to adjust to reality and reality is complicated.

A simple system will be inherently unfair.

To get a simple tax system you would need to make everything else simple as well.

This depends on the definition of fair, which depends on the intended purpose of the taxes in question.

There seem to be 3 general categories of taxes:

1. Incentives 2. Dis-incentives 3. Money to pay for services

Each needs to be examined for potentially unfair rules.

Category 0. would be "policy that rewards the coalition of people who keep you in power." Reason and principle are rhetorical distractions. The rule is to take from the people who don't and give to the people who do. It's not even an abstraction, it's just politics in its most essential form.

Well that would probably fall under incentives. Generally I think that the most waste is to be found in the incentives and dis-incentives categories.

I think the posters point is that thinking of it that way might be missing an important motivation behind many taxes, which is maintaining the power base by helping those seen as supporters and hurting those seen as detractors.

If thinking of an abstract incentive/disincentive structure, you could phrase it as ‘incentivizing those who support me to continue to support me’, and ‘disincentivized those who don’t support me from continuing to not support me’, but those are never the reasons given. To their point, the reasons given can or are often transparently be seen to be the more direct reason, but always have a smokescreen with rational justifications as to why they are not.

If you don’t look at underlying motivations, it’s easy to get caught up in the rational (smokescreen) reasons for something and chase your own tail endlessly without addressing the underlying causes. My 2c

Ah, thanks, yes that makes the comment more clear.

Yes this gets into the meta game of taxes. Aka what actually happens is that the law that gets passed is the one that is the maximum benefit for the party in power that gives the minimum required to get the votes from the minority.

This is mostly true for any legislation though.

Taxes are pretty interesting laws in that they have become this massive catch-all place to push the economy around. It's an endless source of unintended consequences.