First, taxes greatly reduce the gain from employment, if we add social security taxes, income taxes, sales taxes on extra purchases, and the loss of welfare aid, on top of economic costs such as commuting and child care. Secondly, today's tax system depresses wages by using land inefficiently, as underused city landowners await higher land values, making enterprise locate in less productive marginal land, bringing down the whole wage level of the economy for all workers. The key to raising wages and ending poverty is to bring that margin of production to its natural, more productive level. That can only be done by shifting taxation from wages to land rent in order to eliminate the speculative land gains that moves the margin and thus depresses wages to a low level. This economics of poverty is not obvious, and the public as well as the politicians remain ignorant of these economic principles.
Greed thus feeds on apathy and ignorance.
The key reform of public finance, shifting taxes from wages to land rent, will not likely come about until much more of the public understands the basic economic link between land and taxation. Two books describing this link are the classic Progress and Poverty by Henry George, and the recent book Land and Taxation , both available from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation . Welfare reform requires a thinking reform, a shift from just looking at the appearance of social problems to a more fundamental economic understanding of causes. Your name Your email address Check this box if you'd like to receive occasional Economic Justice Updates via email. No more than one every three weeks on average.