I'm assuming you mean a reduction in income taxes to offset the increase in property tax. This would still negatively effect retirees and others who don't make a lot of income and thus wouldn't have much income tax to offset.

That's where UBI (or "citizens' dividend", in Georgist parlance) comes in. Unless Grandma's living in a SFH in SoMa, she's probably gonna end up getting more in dividends and other public services than she'd pay in LVT.

Revenue neutrality of the taxes isn't going to stop people from losing their homes, unless you happen to live in a hypothetical state where everyone holds values of land exactly in proportion to something else that's currently taxed (In which case there would be no point to switching to LVT from that tax anyway...)

Except there are still winners and losers. The losers would be people who live in single family homes in expensive suburbs. A.k.a. the people with the most political power. The winners would be the young who don't own and those who live in condos, A.K.A the people with the least political power.

The evening news doesn't care about balance, it cares about stories. Taxes that aren't collected aren't stories (at any one time, everyone is not paying an infinite number of potential taxes). A person being forced to move from their home is a story.

1. That might help some, but it won't fix it. Wherever else taxes are cut won't be on property, therefore the "land value tax plus some other tax cuts" will work out worse for property owners. That's kind of the point. But it's also, as hash872 says, the thing that makes it politically impossible.

2. Make it revenue neutral? Who's going to do that? Some legislature somewhere? Are they actually going to do it? Or are they going to say "Yay, more money!" and find new things to spend it on?

I have zero confidence that a Georgist tax would be revenue neutral, no matter what theory says should happen, and no matter what promises are made.

> I have zero confidence that a Georgist tax would be revenue neutral

It's pretty trivially easy to make any tax revenue neutral. Just return 100% of the tax revenue to the people split evenly between every person or adult in the country.

My skepticism has nothing to do with how technically easy it would be. My skepticism comes from observing the behaviors of actual politicians. They're going to spend the money, not give it back, no matter how trivial giving it back would be.

But then we're on to why would the state do that, unless they happen to be a state composed entirely of geolibertarians that think redistributing ground rent is the proper purpose of government? A regular government considering going through the political pain of turfing out homeowners at least wants budget to spend on their actual political priorities

(Also, giving tax money "back" to the population is surprisingly nontrivial given political complications over which people qualify to get the rebate, political and practical complications over actually getting the money, and an expected ultimate impact - positive and negative - on the net recipients)