Terrible Idea Jeffery Smith, Oregon's geoist leader, recently had the following published in Willamette Week , a periodical in Portland, Oregon. The sales tax is the most regressive of them all. Worse, if you eliminate the property tax, all you do is inflate the price of land. Look, it's society, not individuals, who generate the values which attach to land. Land values rise when people move in, when government expands infrastructure, when residents behave neighborly, when technology ups demand for a resource.
Land value measures society's health and belongs to all members equally.
Low or zero taxes would keep Oregon's economy humming with full employment, as they did in Hong Kong, once voted the world's best city for business. Plus, collecting land value would spur efficient use of land, reversing sprawl, as it does in Johannesburg, South Africa. Were Oregon to collect the worth of all the nature we use, the state would suffer an embarrassment of riches. An annual dividend would become a permanent fixture, a la Alaska's oil dividend. Then, no matter how high land dues rise, this land dividend would keep up.