Matthew 23:-

Then spoke Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples (the Apostles),
saying, \"The scribes (lawyers) and the pharisees (politicians) sit in
Moses\' \[Law\] seat: All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe of
God\'s Law, that observe and do; but do not ye after their example: for
they say, and do not (and make up their own laws against God\'s Orders -
Deut. 4:2). . .

. . .Woe unto you, lawyers and politicians, hypocrites! for ye are like
unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are
within full of dead \[men\'s\] bones, and of all filthiness. Even so ye
also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of
hypocrisy and inequity. . .

\-\-\-\-- Original Message \-\-\-\--

From: beavercole
\<[[mailto:beavercole@sbcglobal.net]{.underline}](mailto:beavercole@sbcglobal.net)\>

Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 8:23 AM

Subject: Lawyers Destroying America

PREFACE to

Lawyers Destroying America

\- A Parasitical Culture -

By: Sammy Sorrell

National Director For United Citizens For Legal Reform

& Author Of America Agenda For Legal Justice Reform

There are many men and women who have chosen to be a lawyer and devoted
their professional lives to equity and justice. These people are not the
target of this book. There is a greater number of the lawyers\'
fraternity however, who have different motives and have not been so
noble. In fact, as a general culture and class, lawyers are destroying
America, turning this nation and American justice into a financial and
political self-serving game.

Client benefit, true equity and justice have been and are being
subordinated to the financial and political business opportunity concept
by lawyers in America today. Equity and justice are for sale to the
highest bidder. Because of lawyer monopoly of the legal services
profession, many Americans cannot afford to pay the ransom demanded by
the lawyer monopoly to buy a shot at justice.

Any society is a mirrored reflection of its laws and the administration
of those laws. If you accept that premise, America is a nation in deep,
deep trouble! The crisis reaches into every vital area of society
including but not limited to constitutional, political, economical,
financial, governmental, justice, social, moral and spiritual.

\* 135 million personal and property crimes were committed against
American citizens during the 10 year period ending December 1992 with a
21% clearance arrest record. When that 21% was turned over to the
judicial system, the percentages went down. A sad commentary for the
American justice system.

\*America has the highest tort tax in the world at \$1200 for every man,
woman and child. We cannot be competitive in the international market
place. Who pays that tort tax? None other than the American consumer.

\* We are the most litigious society on earth with 95 million lawsuits
filed annually at a cost exceeding \$300 billion effecting the gross
national product.

\* Over 80% of low to middle income Americans can no longer afford the
cost of justice in America.

\* We have two standards of justice, the \"Model T\" brand and the
\"Cadillac brand\". Those who have money get the Cadillac brand and
those who don\'t have money go to prison or bankruptcy court.

\* Over 27 billion annually is extracted from the medical and insurance
fields by lawyers looking to extort a settlement from the deep pockets
in those professions. Billions more are being extracted from industry in
asbestos litigation with 75% of the awards going to the lawyers.

\* We have laws and rules stacked end to end which would fill up the
super dome in New Orleans. Yet we have a legal mentality that looks at a
given dispute and says, \"If we can\'t find any law that has been broken
we may have to pass a new one.\"

\* We have a judicial system where politics, fraud, conspiracy,
deception, perjury, dishonesty and obstruction of justice is the order
of the day by the dominant lawyer culture who operate the system. This
translates into a giant mirror for society that if it happens in the
judicial system, you can get away with it in society. Is the judicial
system teaching immorality on the face? Nobody is responsible, nobody is
guilty, nobody is wrong as long as lawyers can make money out of the
issue.

Who is the keeper of the laws? There is no debate here! The answer is
lawyers. Under the three branches of government concept, the answer
spotlights a constitutional nightmare. The federal congress is dominated
by lawyers and many of the state legislatures have been dominated by
lawyers. Twenty four of the forty two American presidents have been
lawyers - with two in the White house as of this writing. The judicial
branch of government is 100% lawyer dominated. So what does this mean?
If you don\'t get anything else from this book, remember this! It means
we now have a ruling class of lawyers in the nation (1) making the laws,
(2) judging us in the laws, (3) prosecuting us in the laws, (4)
defending us in the laws, (5) interpreting the laws and (6)
administering the laws. Not only is this an illegal monopoly of the
vital legal services profession but it is profoundly a closed door
tyrannical rule of the American people and a constitutional nightmare.

It gets worse! Most of us have learned through our own experience in
this life that truth and fact are the basis of all progress and anything
less is deception with an effort in futility. Science did not put a man
on the moon through distortion of fact and truth. Progress in the
medical field has not been made because fact and truth has been
disregarded. In any area of our lives, we really never know anything
until we know it by its causes based upon fact and truth.

The ruling class of lawyers controlling our nation has little regard for
fact and truth. The entire lawyer profession is built around avoiding
and redefining the truth. Their example of fraud, deception and
dishonesty in society, in the judicial system, in government has sent a
terrible negative-ethics message that has had a devastating effect on
the character of generations of young people. These deceptive traits and
practices are also the planks that support the foundation of the largest
criminal culture to be found in any society. Law Schools are anti-ethics
with teachings that there is no black or white situation, only a hundred
shades of grey.

Lawyers present a terrible conflict of interest on the face. Judges are
lawyers with a robe on. When lawyers take the bench and don the robe,
they do not leave behind all of their negative personal baggage and
lawyer transgressions. The entire system is a lawyer closed-membership
country club with the masses picking up the tab.

Lawyers are social parasites\-- they move to the soft and misery spots
in the economy simply for personal financial or political gain at the
expense of the parties. Lawyers are not producers\--they gravitate to
situations which will carve up and tear down the economy rather than
build it up. The spoils from their mischief only benefit the lawyers
personally and their political cohorts. A few, more noble minded lawyers
with ethics notwithstanding.

Lawyer self-regulation permits the judicial system to operate in a
shroud of secrecy where lawyers can and do commit all manner of fraud
and criminal transgressions and quickly hide those transgressions in a
maze of lawyer self-regulation and protective rules. This includes
blatant constitutional abuse and violations by lawyer-judges. Under this
cloak, one lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a thousand
criminals with guns. Only 2% of all lawyer complaints nationwide are
formally prosecuted.

Lawyers gravitate to the political positions to dominate not only the
judicial branch of government but also the legislative and executive
branches of government. They have created a planet of needless laws
where legalese has become the national language and technicalities have
become the national product. All of this has a counter-productive effect
on business and the free enterprise system.

Lawyers should never be permitted to run a government. On more than one
occasion we have put the nation\'s business on hold while the government
spends millions looking into lawyer transgressions. The charges are
generally made by lawyers against a lawyer. Look at the personal baggage
of Bill and Hillary Clinton, an ongoing multi-million dollar
investigation of two lawyers. A special lawyer was appointed to do the
investigating. Lawyers in congress squabbling over congressional
hearings where there will be more lawyers conducting those hearings with
hundreds of staff lawyers behind the scenes shoving paper and pushing
subpoenas. Lawyers standing by in courts to hear the evidence. Lawyers
have undoubtedly cost this nation billions of dollars just in wasted
motion, needless laws and judicial process in government, not to mention
losses in the private sector.

Lawyers have created an unconstitutional manufacturing plant that churns
out laws by the hundreds daily. Under the constitution only
congressional lawmakers are permitted to create law. Lawyer-judges
create their own law daily in the judicial system based upon their own
opinion and rulings and they call it case law. Upon these mountains of
unconstitutional case law, people\'s lives and property and the
constitution hang in the balance.

Lawyers have created a monstrous legal monopoly of the entire legal
services profession in America and then they create laws and rules so
American citizens will be forced to use the monopoly. Litigants have to
pay a ransom to a lawyer to access this monstrous legal monopoly just to
open the court house door and then they often lose this front fee ransom
through lawyer malpractice, conspiracy, fraud and theft. There are
thousands, maybe millions, of documented cases where litigants have lost
everything they own because of lawyer malpractice, conspiracy, fraud and
theft. Lawyer-judges, prosecutors and other judicial bodies and
tribunals (lawyers) have winked, blinked and nodded as they covered up
the transgressions.

Recently in Albuquerque, New Mexico the state district court handed down
the largest judgement in history. That judgement was a whopping \$21
million against a lawyer who handled a widow\'s trust estate, left by
her deceased husband. After the husbands death, the lawyer withheld
information from the woman about the value of the estate which
ultimately grew to over \$20 million dollars. All the while the woman
was receiving \$150 per month when she should have been receiving at
least \$78,000 per year in interest earned by the trust. She died in a
rest home with her son having to borrow money to pay for her services.
Where is the lawyer? Still in practice!

Prosecutorial (lawyer) abuse is rampant. Political persecution under the
guise of judicial prosecution is the order of the day with many lawyers
in the state offices of District Attorney and Attorneys General. Many
prosecutorial lawyers seek high profile cases and manipulate the media
for name recognition as they climb the political ladder moving to a
higher political office. A prosecutor victims graveyard stands as a
monument to prosecutorial abuse in most states, created and maintained
at the taxpayer expense.

Bar associations, all lawyers literally operate the control tower of the
Judicial system. Lawyer discipline is a joke. Lawyer misconduct,
malpractice and lawyer theft are cloaked in a shroud of secrecy.
Discipline is almost non-existent even in states where discipline is
administered by a committee under the state supreme court. Dracula is in
charge of the bloodbank!

The truths in this book offer a singular focus evolving from lawyer
domination and tyrannical dominion! From that lawyer domination flows
many of the ills that not only have caused a failed equity and justice
system but in large measure a destruction of the moral fiber of a great
nation.

It is the hope of the author that this exposure of the ruling class of
lawyers in America, their mischief and destruction of a nation may cause
a complacent society to rise up and say enough is enough. Hopefully, the
reader may be enlightened that the very system designed to protect our
rights and freedoms may have evolved into a monster that can easily take
away those rights and freedoms through a nightmare of self-serving
bureaucracy of lawyers.

America became a great nation because of the great principles of its
people, their morality, their interchange of faith in each other and in
their God and because of a nation of procedures. If we are to remain
great, it will be because we continue to build upon that same
foundation. The dominant lawyer culture has taken us away from that
foundation, creating a new foundation in negatives, politics,
dishonesty, character assassination, fraud, deception, with no
production of valuable goods and services. Because of their own
self-serving interests and self ordination this nation is reaching new
heights in immorality. We can ill afford to allow yesterday\'s
immorality to become today\'s morality in such a vital part of our lives
and watch it ripple out into society. But judge not upon my reflections!
Let the documented stories and facts in this book decide the case.

END To order the book Lawyers Destroying America call

1-888-666-9953 Ext. C2

\-\-\-\--Original Message\-\-\-\--

From: Steven Cord
\[[mailto:stevecord@hotmail.com](mailto:stevecord@hotmail.com)\]

Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2005 11:39 AM

To: comments@taxreformpanel.gov

Subject: Empirical Supoort for the Most Ability-to-Pay Tax There Is

================I am appending below 60 brief summaries of empirical
studies

proving the advantages of a federal land value tax.

\>\>\>\>\>It is the most ability-to-pay tax there is, because most
voters own

little land value or have

little land-rent income, especially if exemptions are granted to
farmers, the elderly, the

temporarily unemployed, etc.

\>\>\>\>\>If jobs are taxed, or what they produce is taxed (which comes
to

\>\>\>\>\>the

same thing), then

there\'ll be fewer jobs. But not so with land values: if they are taxed,
land-sites will have

to be used more productively. That\'s good for the economy - for all of
us.

\>\>\>\>\>This is how best to pay for a revenue shortfall in Social
Security.

But such a tax must be done carefully, and I could advise the Panel on
that because I

have had hands-on experience with it (I have induced 22 jurisdictions to
do this).

I request permission to present these studies (and more, if

requested) to the Panel.

=============Steven Cord (Professor-Emeritus, currently President, the
Center for a Better Economy, 10528 Cross Fox Lane, Columbia MD 21044,

1-800-252-3126)

237 Report

(1-60 only)

by Steven B. Cord

Dedicated to Allan Hutchinson of Australia and H. Bronson Cowan of
Canada,

who first devised and used the method for making

empirical studies of LVT possible.

This is a compendium of the first 60 of 237 empirical studies (there are
many more) substantiating that land value taxation (hereafter
abbreviated as

LVT) has produced spurts in construction and renovation, as measured by
building permits issued. It has taken me some 30 years to collect all
these studies (they are from all over the world).

Frankly, 237 studies may well be considered overkill. The sheer number
and consistency of these findings is positively overwhelming; they
surely suffice to show that we could gain at least these three
advantages by taxing land assessments more, construction and renovation
less:

v Construction & renovation spurt because they are taxed less

v They also spurt because all land-sites will be used more efficiently

v Most people get tax breaks (because they don't own valuable land).

There are other LVT advantages also. The empirical studies reported here
have been taken from back issues of Incentive Taxation (published eight
times a year since 1974) but I only have reviewed about a quarter of
those back issues. I stopped after #237, thinking that few people will
read more.

My files contain the additional studies beyond 237.

A random 22 of these 237 studies have been reprinted in a new book, The

Golden Key to Continuous Prosperity. I have encountered no anti-LVT

empirical studies, despite a rather extensive reading of the academic
literature.

These studies have been fully corroborated by independent sources. For
instance, before Fortune Magazine ran its 1983 article supporting LVT,
it sent two researchers, Gurney Breckenfeld and Ed Baig, to visit the
city halls that I had visited and found that the figures were exactly as
I had reported them in Incentive Taxation.

Professor Nicolaus Tideman of Virginia Tech. University and his
then-graduate student, Florenz Plassman of Virginia Tech University (now
a professor in Binghamton) replicated all these studies and published
their research in the peer-reviewed Journal of Urban Economics (March
2000, pp. 216-47; see IT 12/00).

A 1985 study by the prestigious Pennsylvania Economy League contained
facts supporting the conclusions of this compendium (see p. 16 of their
1985 study). Later, the P.E.L. was instrumental in getting two cities
(Clairton and DuBois, Pa.) to adopt a two-rate building-to-land shift in
their

property tax.

Note also that Allan Hutchinson, the author of many of these studies,
used government sources. He and H. Bronson Cowan of Canada (who visited
Australia in 1943) discovered that the Australian Bureau of Statistics
annually published the building permit issuance of every area in the
country. I have also used building permits for my studies.

Hutchinson was able to compare the performance of land taxing areas with
their neighbors both before and after the adoption of LVT. The
statistics came to him, he didn't have to go to them!

Perhaps this question has crossed your mind: "If LVT is so good, why
hasn't it been more widely adopted?" Well, if you don't act after
reading this tremendous mass of empirical evidence, then you have the
answer.

If a partial shift from taxing buildings to taxing land produced all
these wonderful economic results, one can assume that a 100% LVT would
do even better.

You can order hard copies of this report for \$12 (as of 2004) or you
can request a free copy of a report containing the aforementioned 22
studies.

Read at least some of these empirical studies and judge for yourself.
Then act.

\(1\) The accountancy firm of Price, Waterhouse & Co. performed a study
for H.U.D., which found that tax abatement was conducive to new
construction (per summary, p. 4, as reported in the summer 1975 issue of
Incentive Taxation (hereafter referred to as IT). The study reported:
"Based upon the evidence collected it appears that the Fairhope Single
Tax Corporation's practice of site value rental has been effective in
that it

has encourage more intensive development of its property" (p. 8).

\(2\) In the early 1970s, the General Council for Rating Reform of
Australia reported that in Kilmore Shire, Victoria, the dollar value of
construction and renovation increased 3.19 times in the three whole
years when it started to tax land values only, as compared to the three
years previous when building and land income was taxed (based on
statistics from the Australian Bureau of Census; local property-tax
switches in Australia were made in April, so there was a year in which
both systems applied. See IT, summer 1975).

This GCRR study was based on statistics from the Australian Bureau of
Census. It is important to note that local property-tax switches in
Australia were made in April, so there was a year in which both systems
applied.

\(3\) In Buninyong Shire (Victoria), the GCRR found that, comparing the
three whole years immediately prior to the shift from taxing the income
of both building and land to the first two whole years after the shift
when only the land value was taxed, there was an average 5.90 increase
in the annual dollar value of new construction and renovation (Ibid.;
the ultimate source was the Australian Bureau of Census).In Buninyong
Shire (Victoria), the GCRR found that, comparing the three whole years
immediately prior to the shift from taxing the income from both building
and land to the first two whole years after the shift when only the land
value was taxed, there was an average 5.90 increase in the annual dollar
value of new construction and renovation (Ibid.; the ultimate source was
the Australian Bureau of Census).

\(4\) In Orbost Shire (also Victoria), the GCRR compared the three whole
years before the shift to taxing land values only to the year
immediately after the shift. It found that the average annual
construction and renovation increased 1.74 times (ultimate source:
Australian Bureau of Census).

\(5\) Harry Gunnison Brown, a prominent American public-finance
economist in the 1930s, found that those districts in the states of
South Australia and Victoria which taxed land values were markedly
superior in new dwelling construction.

He also found that in the state of Victoria, "although at the 1921
census only 16 per cent of the state population was in the fourteen
districts rating land values, these districts accounted for 46 per cent
of the total increase in dwellings for the State between the two census
years \[1921 and 1933\]."

\(6\) Brown's figures on the Melbourne suburbs were even more striking.
He found that those suburbs which are about five rail miles from
Flinders Street in the center of Melbourne and which tax land values
only, had 50% more dwellings constructed per available acre in the
1928-1942 period than those which did not. Making a similar comparison
for suburbs seven miles out, the land-value-tax suburbs did 2.33 times
better; LVT suburbs 9.5 miles out did twice as well (IT, 9/75).

\(7\) Melton Shire (Victoria) switched from taxing real-estate income to
taxing only land values in 1973 (as the result of a poll of landowners
only) and then saw the Aus. dollar value of its building permits
increase 1.68 times in the first year after the switch as compared to
the year previous (Land Values Research Group, successor to GCRR,
hereafter referred to as

LVRG) -- IT 10/75. All of LVRG's studies come from the Aus. Bureau of
Census).

\(8\) The average 1954-61 population growth of rural LVT towns in
Victoria was 21.8%, but for their non-LVT neighbors it was only 13.4%.
Their 1955-63 dwelling construction was 38.3% higher (source: GCRR,
using Victoria state govt. statistics).

\(9\) New York State taxpayers spent more than \$400 million to build
the New York Thruway, but land values along the route increased by
considerably more than \$400 million (Perry Prentice in Architectural
Forum, as reported in IT 1-2/76).

\(10\) Life editorial (1965): "Since the \[Toronto\] subway was built
the neighborhoods around the stations have experienced a small
construction boom and land values have skyrocketed. A 100-square-foot
plot purchased in 1947 for \$22,000 sold ten years later for \$257,000."
(IT, 1-2/76). (11) "The landowners on Staten Island in New York City
pocketed a \$700 million windfall because other taxpayers put up \$350
million for the Verrazano Narrows Bridge; now their land is much more
accessible than before. And one can wonder about the increase in land
valuation on the Brooklyn side of the bridge." So wrote Perry Prentice,
vice-president of Time, Inc., in an article in The Commercial and
Financial Chronicle, 8/22/68, as reported in IT, 1-2/76.

\(12\) In the seven years following the construction of New York City's
IRT subway from 135th St. to Spuyten Duyvil, the rise in land value was
\$69.3 million. Subtracting the normal increase during the previous
seven years - \$20.1 million -- leaves an increase of \$49.2 million
directly attributable to the opening of the line. But that section of
the line cost only \$41.8 million (Gilbert Tucker, The Self-Supporting
City, quoting a City Club study

\- see IT, 1-2/76).

\(13\) According to one public official in New Jersey quoted by Gilbert
Tucker in The Self-Supporting City, the opening of the George Washington
Bridge in 1928 increased land values on just the New Jersey side by
\$300 million, or more than six times the original construction cost
(IT, 1-2/76).

\(14\) Less than two years after the property owners of Wangaratta (in
Victoria, Aus.) had voted 4-1 to adopt LVT only, the following headline
appeared in the local newspaper: "Building 'Wave' Envelops Whole of
Town." This occurred during a building recession in the general area
(IT, 9/75).

(15-30) Random-sample studies in sixteen U.S. cities substantiating that
most homeowners pay less with a two-rate building-to-land property-tax
shift IT 5-6-7/76).

\(31\) Landowners in rural Mildura - pop. 11,000, 350 miles northwest of
Melbourne in rural Victoria - voted in LRT-only in August 1956 by a
3.6:1 margin. The value of building permits thereupon rose by one-third
in 1957 and by another third in 1958 in the face of a 10% house-building
recession in rural Victoria during those years (source: Aus. govt.
statistics as quoted in Progress 11/59). See IT, 1/78.

\(32\) "As a means of encouraging owners of sub-standard dwellings to
install improvements, the City of New York adopted in 1936 a law
granting property-tax exemption for five years upon the value added to
existing buildings by improvements completed before October 1, 1938,
provided the improvements did not increase the size of the building.
Mayor LaGuardia estimated that renovation work in that year ran as high
as \$75,000,000..."

(source: Harold S. Buttenheim, founding editor of the American City
Magazine -see IT 11/76).

\(33\) A Pittsburgh City Council study showed conclusively that a 1%
earned income tax would hit the city's homeowners 3.59 times harder than
an equivalent-in-revenue LVT increase. The same study also found that a
two-rate LVT would down-tax 73.6% of homeowners (IT 12/76).

\(34\) Then there's Horsham (a city in rural Victoria, Aus.). To quote
from Progress, 6/74 (an Australian monthly magazine):

"Horsham made the change to site value rating during the rural
recession. For the three years before the un-taxing of buildings, the
numbers and values of permits issued to private homebuilders had fallen
drastically (from \$718,000 down to \$418,000 immediately before the
change).

"This is almost double the numbers of approvals and almost triple their
values of the last year of taxed buildings. Site value rating has done
much to beat the rural recession in this area." (source: Australian
government building-permit statistics, as reported in IT 12/76).

This ends our examination of the first bound volume of Incentive
Taxation (there are nine such volumes). This first volume covers a
period before many two-rate building-to-land shifts occurred in the
United States, and so in these early studies, Incentive Taxation had to
rely primarily on statistics of the impact of such a tax shift from
distant Australia.

\(35\) A Washington, D.C. study done in the 1970s shows that if the
current property tax were shifted from land and building assessments to
land assessments only, then there would be these tax reductions:
single-family homes -- 18.1%, two-family homes -- 20.9%, row houses --
14%, walkup apartments -- 38.9%, elevator apartments -- 22.5% (IT W/77).

\(36\) From 1921 to 1933, 7% of the municipalities in Victoria, Aus.
taxed only land values, but they accounted for 46% of home construction.
In the years 1947-54, the LVT municipalities had increased to 12%, but
they accounted for 42% of the home construction. During 1954-58, 19%
were using LVT, but they accounted for 62% of new home construction
(source: building-permit issuance per GCLR). See 1T, 10/77.

\(37\) In 164 localities outside Melbourne, Aus., during the two-year
period 1955/56 to 1957/58, there were 42 new factories, of which half
were in the 17 localities using LVT-only. Not only that, but factory
employment in these 17 LVT-only localities increased by 445 whereas in
the remaining 147 localities, factory employment decreased by 361
(source: Aus. govt. statistics in "Public Charges Upon Land Values," a
1961 study of the GCLR). See IT, 1077.

(38-49) Twelve studies in rural Victoria show that LVT-only towns
averaged a construction-and-renovation growth of 29%, as against their
land-and-building-taxing neighbors' growth of a modest 2.6% in the same
periods of time (source: GCLR study of building-permits issued as
reported in Progress, 3/75). LVT-only was adopted in each case as a
result of a poll of only landowners (see IT, 10/77).

\(50\) Wellington, New Zealand taxed land values while Auckland did not.
In 1965, Wellington had £219 in improvements for every £100 in land
value while Auckland had only £143 in improvements per £100 in land
value (source: N.Z. govt. statistics per GCLR). See IT, 10/77.

\(51\) LVT-only Sydney and real-estate-taxing Melbourne in Australia
could be compared in this way. In 1965, Sydney had £222 in improvements
for every £100 values whereas Melbourne had only £125 in improvements
for every £100 in land values (source: GCLR using the Aus. govt.'s ABS;
see IT, 10/77).LVT-only Sydney and building-taxing Melbourne in
Australia could also be compared in this way. In 1965, Sydney had £222
in improvements for every £100 values whereas Melbourne had only £125 in
improvements for every £100 in land values (source: GCLR, ABS -- Aus.
govt.), see IT, 10/77.

\(52\) Ken Synett (former mayor of Marion, Aus): "For many years the
Marion area remained static. Much of the land now being developed was in
the hands of speculators.

"They held it as a lock-up investment. Tax rates were low...Then in
1954, the year after we achieved city status, our rating system was
changed from a rental basis \[i.e., real-estate-income tax\] to one
based on unimproved land value \[LVT\]. This sent the tax rates up \[on
land values\]...The land investors decided it was time to sell...We are
now watching Marion's phenomenal

expansion with pride." See IT, 10/77.

\(53\) After Camberwell, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, adopted
LVT-only in 1922, its development was meteoric. For twenty years, it
headed the Victoria building-development figures both in numbers and
values until displaced by Moorabin in 1946 after that city also changed
to LVT-only. In addition, Camberwell exhibited another advantage of
LVT-only -- it was fully in accord with ability-to-pay (source: Progress
per

LVRG, using Aus. govt. statistics; see chart in IT, 11/77.

\(54\) A 1965 study sponsored by the California General Assembly
(prepared by Griffin, Hagen and Kroger) revealed that over 92% of the
homeowners and renters in Fresno, CA would get tax reductions with a
building-to-land tax shift. See IT 12/77.

(55-59) A GCLR study of five towns in rural Victoria, Australia between
1965 and 1966 showed that they exceeded the construction growth of their
neighbors by 18%, 23%, 52%, 66%, and 48%.

\(60\) In November 1964, the property owners of South Melbourne (Aus.)
voted in a switch to the LVT-only system. In the first six months of
1965, building values increased 2.4 times over what it had been in the
four preceding six-month periods. The expenditures for alterations and
additions to houses were 2.8 times the average in the four preceding
six-month periods. The total value of construction permits for
industrial buildings increased 3.3 times.

Not only that, but the growth in construction continued unabated in the
ensuing years (source: Aus. govt. statistics per GCLR).

Many decades ago, South Melbourne had been a fashionable spot in the
Melbourne area. Then it ran down, went to seed. After switching to
LVT-only, it revived and became known as the "Cinderella City." The
Melbourne Herald (12/2/72) called its renaissance "The Kiss of Life"
(headline). See IT, 1/78.