Wouldn’t a LVT mean that the taxes on the mobile home be much less than the apartment in the dense city?

Correct. Land "in the country" is worth zilch compared to a similar plot in a dense urban core. GP has it backwards, they're perhaps thinking of some flat tax on land based on square footage whereas LVT is based on assessed value.

I'm just going by the headline definition: "A land value tax is a levy on the value of land without regard to buildings, personal property and other improvements." That's the basic idea.

I think people need to keep in mind the actual purpose of taxation: One group is taking resources from another. Nobody is pushing this tax (or any) because it's "efficient" or whatever. They are pushing it because they will come out ahead.

A person who lives in a 600 square foot apartment in a 60 story tower will effectively be paying taxes on 10 square feet of actual land. That land might be very valuable, but I suspect no matter how you twist the numbers, it's going to be less than two acres anywhere in the country. Especially if you go by the spirit of the LVT, which is to ignore improvements.

I could be wrong. I'm just guessing at "who fucks over whom" here.

Land buildings are on tends to become extremely valuable due to all the surrounding businesses that emerge due to a high density of people. If you look at land value maps of cities you get very noticeable spikes in cities.

I’ve seen land as cheap as $489 an acre and land as expensive as $6,000,000 for a half-lot. Even assuming $12,000 an acre in the countryside in California which can be found now on the internet, it’s quite believable that 10 square feet of land beneath a skyscraper is going to be worth more than $24,000. That 10 square feet is an underestimate as well because the unit will be responsible for more than 1/60th of its floor plan.

The more I read about LVT the more clear it is to me that it legitimately solves many, many problems society is currently facing. The housing price crisis is effectively solved by LVT. The "greedy landlord" meme is effectively solved by LVT. Income tax being distortionary is solved by LVT. NIMBYism caused by people wanting their home to be worth more is solved by LVT. Yes, some are better off, some are worse. It's not as clear as you think though. Rural land is worth very little compared to urban. The real losers are people who have single family homes in desirable areas.

Your assessment is correct. The fact that implementing such a simple scheme as LVT would lift up many societal issues suggests that the entire problem that it aims at is the society's bottleneck.

From system design we know that no matter how much we optimize other parts of the system, no gain in performance will be achieved because the flow still has to go through that bottleneck. So we should focus on removing that narrow part before even engaging in discussions about other economical topics such as minimum wages, healthcare or education funding etc.

Society has it backwards.

The land value tax incentivizes the owner of scarce, valuable urban land to put it to good social use, such as building apartments for hundreds of people to live in. You would have to be astronomically wealthy to own two acres in a dense city and keep it solely for your own enjoyment. If you want two acres all to yourself, you can move to the countryside, where land is cheap, and one person can conceivably pay the property taxes on an engineer's salary.

That sort of assumes that the owner of the apartment-dweller's property doesn't just increase their rent (pass along that tax).

As other people pointed out, there should/would have to be some mechanism to value the land for the LVT. The land the apartment building is built on in the city would have a higher value than some 2 acres out in the country. The owner of that land would have to pay the LVT, and the rent for an apartment on that land would reflect that - ultimately making everyone who lives in the apartment pay that tax, if indirectly.

Interestingly because the supply of land is inelastic its supply curve is a straight vertical line. If you charge the tax directly to tenants they lose say $20,000 in LVT tax. This lowers their demand for land by $20,000. Because the supply curve is a straight vertical line the intersection of the supply and demand curve is now $20,000 lower. They literally pay $20,000 less for land rent. This doesn't work with anything that has elastic supply like buildings where the tax would lower the supply and the new intersection of the supply and demand curves would result in the tenant and owner sharing the tax. But it's well understood and accepted in the economic literature that landlords end up paying the tax not tenants.

> Interestingly because the supply of land is inelastic its supply curve is a straight vertical line. If you charge the tax directly to tenants they lose say $20,000 in LVT tax. This lowers their demand for land by $20,000.

This might sound good in theory, but it is a very hard sell to say that's how it pans out in practice. You even say: "This doesn't work with anything that has elastic supply like buildings" - so as soon as you put a building (apartments) on the property, this theory goes out the window.

> But it's well understood and accepted in the economic literature that landlords end up paying the tax not tenants.

I don't dispute that there would be some competition among landlords as to how much of their LVT they can pass off to tenants - it wouldn't be 100%. But to claim that there would be no impact to tenants strikes me as hilariously naive.

No the building on the property isn’t taxed. You pay $0 more in taxes for building it.

If you have a fundamental objection to how the established theory of supply and demand curves works I can’t really help you. Large parts of economics have shown it to be successful and I certainly trust it over anecdotal arguments about how landlords will pass on the tax.

Based on the demand curve any attempt to pass on the tax will result in empty land and less overall revenue due to the mispricing. This at a minimum means some landlords will be very unhappy.