by eru | 2025-06-06 06:11:10+00:00
> You must account for the cost of the random new UBI you addressed to cover your other arguments.

I already accounted for that in the original comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44188857 so I see that it was perhaps a bit too implicit:

> (In taxation and income, medians tend to be lower than averages, so the above system would leave money left over to use for general government revenue. If you want more of that, instead of paying the median amount, you could pay UBI at eg the 20%-ile level. That would still protect those people who only 'have 1 good thing going' from net outflowing payments.)

The less UBI you pay, the more you have left over for general government revenue. The more UBI you pay, the less you have left over for general government revenue.

> Land value as it stands is fucked in large part because the government holds so much of it. The solution is to release more land, not lock more of it up in state ownership.

It doesn't really matter, as long as they lease it out to the highest bidder.

> Its highly likely that people will end up with a significantly increased tax bill, especially if they had low/no income previously. Again this is stated intention, its just the flip side of encouraging more efficient use, is discouraging people from living within their means on a block of land they own that's near things property evaluators value.

LVT does not encourage (or discourage) any land use, efficient or otherwise. It makes no change to opportunity costs between different uses.

> You need to solve for the entire budget, not a number you made up.

I have no clue what you are on about?

If you want a clear suggestion of what I would prefer:

Auction off all the plots of land for eg 30 years at a time. Do the auction for the next lease 5 years before the old lease ends. Stagger the auctions to have around 0.28% of plots being auctioned off every month.

(Don't bother with UBI etc, unless you want UBI for other reasons anyway. Those were just suggestions to solve specific concerns about orphans and widows you brought up. I would suggest to just use the regular, existing means-tested social safety net for them, instead of spinning up something bespoke.)

Singapore does something reasonably similar, but I think 99 year leases are too long, especially since the country is young enough that the giving back at the end of leases has essentially never been tested.

I'm not sure why you bring up the US government spending? I don't know how much LVT could raise in the US. But some people have tried to figure that one out.

> If someone lives in a caravan sitting on a 200k valued piece of land that they own outright (hoping to develop one day), making minimum wage, and they get a tax bill for 20k, or even 10 or 5k their life just ended. If you want them to borrow with no income to offset their tax, they wont get that loan.

That's fine. They can sell the land to get rid of those hopes and dreams and tax obligations.

You can write similar sob stories about any tax at all. And most are worse than what you get with LVT.

With an established LVT, your caravan dweller would never get this weird idea in the first place.

And I admit that whenever you make an adjustment to the tax system, the people who made plans based on the previous system will have those plans torpedoed. Them's the breaks.

So we have to decide what we want to discuss: how an LVT system would work in the steady state, or how we could (or could not) transition to one.