> kind of tax, versus increasing a percentage that already exists

I mean, most places currently have a Land Value Tax, it's just included within the Property Tax that we pay. Conceptually all we are looking to do is raise this percentage and lower the building percentage. This has been done already in Pennsylvania[0]. We're just looking to continue this process. You can do it all at once, and that would be better, but I think most LVT advocates are fine with phasing it in, and trying to find out the best way to phase it in.

Once we get that change then we can look to change other things, and the podcast rightfully points out that in places like Texas that has no income tax and has a property tax, if they went to a LVT system they would start to out-produce the rest of the country. Other states and cities would then quickly try to catch up.

> We can tax the purchase, ongoing renting and time of sale.

If we move to just ongoing renting, that's all you need. And that's a Land Value Tax. See the annuity point below.

> if we get price growth due to lack of sellers, this will encourage builders to build.

When you have an elastic good and the supply of it goes down, the price goes up. We get price increases BECAUSE there is less supply. This is not a contradiction. Builders will not build more when you discourage trading. Liquid goods are worth more.

> LVT is that it is not direct enough. If you want to reduce demand for homes, remove the people buying 2-5 from the market

The LVT directly taxes the misuse of land at a just rate. We don't want to remove the demand for homes, we want to remove speculation. We want to make it unprofitable to waste land. We want the supply of homes to meet demand. We want people to be forced to pay to the community for being a NIMBY, and we want the community to be able to take those funds and build elsewhere to be able to meet demand.

Under a LVT, we want and like landlords. Landlords who need to compete on the quality of the homes that they have, that have to compete on the quality of services that they give, that's what we want. The issue now is that they are fat bloodsuckers who don't have to do those things because as the city grows around them they accrue value for doing nothing. You see this now in how even mobile home land is being bought up and rents are increasing, as brought up in the podcast.

> see if I can square the circle.

When you win the lottery, you can choose to take the lump sum or you can choose to take the monthly check. There is a certain value in how that calculation gets done that we call the capitalization rate. In that same way, anyone at any time can choose to spend their million dollars and get something like a $50k/year annuity.

What the Land Value Tax really is to Georgists is seeing that the combined positive externalities of the city is worth say that $50k/year to the location. So what we want to do is to tax away that $50k. If we don't do this, then through the capitalization of that annuity on the land, the price of the land would be worth 1 million. Once we tax that value however, the land price drops from a million to zero. So in Manhattan(although I suspect Manhattan has higher than $1m land values, adjust accordingly) you would have a $250k house with a $50k/year tax, and in middle of nowhere you would have a $250k house with a $0/year tax.

What economists know is that taxes on elastic goods cause dead-weight losses. Similar to what I mentioned above, when you tax something you get less of it, and that less ends up raising the price. Land is a special case in that it is inelastic, and thus it is the best thing to tax.

When you tax income, that means you get less of it. By reducing the income tax, by reducing the sales tax, by reducing the capital gains tax, the economy will grow. We'll have more outputs. And that growth will then be captured by the land. So what this means is that for every $1 we reduce in other taxes, the value of the land value tax grows by more than $1. This is why we're called 'Single Taxers', and why we need to quickly mention that we are also for carbon taxes and the like. If you take this to its extremes, what you would find is that the vast majority - certainly greater than 90% of the population - would be better off under a LVT world.

[0]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/6/non-glamorous-g...