> The economist in the podcast was explicitly asked why doing things like "heavily tax all non-primary residence homes" wouldn't work. Do you have any argument as to why she was wrong?

Can you point out the timestamp, I don't see it in the transcript and I just listened and I don't hear any discussion of speicfically heavily taxing non-primary residences.

I listened to this same economist making the rounds (another really good indication they're talking their book) on Odd Lots[0][1].

Just as on Odd Lots, the entire conversation was tilted -- they jumped right past the simple solutions
and right to the hard-to-understand, change-the-paradigm solution. Of course Redfin wants this solution -- they don't care about the land tax (and they don't have to pay it), but they do want more units to broker.

They bang on NIMBYism and zoning problems that could open up space for new housing, and that's great, but this is a different problem right under our noses -- and that's rampant speculation and rent-seeking activity in the housing market.

I don't want to be unduly critical here, but the odd lots interview was slightly better. There is so much nuance being lost (a throw away allegory to stopping littering with PR, when the real problem was companies not being taxed for the externality that is plastic/styrofoam packaging).

> The many changes that you are proposing, and the tax evasion that will occur, and the modifications to stop those evasions, and the changed behaviors to those modifications are where the complexity lies. A Land Value Tax isn't a complicated thing. In fact, in a single land tax + carbon tax world, many things would be drastically simpler.

My initial proposal was a bad one -- someone pointed this out and made a better suggestion, an even more direct tax, right on the capital gains. That's a much better proposal.

A land value tax is more complicated than simply increasing capital gains tax (or even my previous suggestion) on rental property.

We do not need to create new tax machinery (which is what a land value tax would require) for this, and in the end a land value tax is a proxy for what we really want. What we want is to disincentivize speculative and profit-via-rent-seeking purchasing of homes. The easiest, most straight forward way to do that is to tax that specific activity.

Fairweather did this as well -- I don't think it's a good idea to mix in carbon taxes, equity & equality, and other things with this issue. Just stick to the one issue. In practice those issues are related, but that doesn't mean we must solve them all at once.

> The beautiful thing about a Land Value Tax is that it is incredibly hard to evade. You own the land, you pay the tax. You don't want to pay the tax? Sell the land.

This is stated simply, but implementation will not be simple, vary from state to state, and likely contain lots of the tax evasions/loopholes as well.

The refinement on my original suggestion (increasing capital gains on rent-seeking activity) is simpler.

> This disincentives building, and would harm rent prices over the long run. The land value tax does not have this downside.

It's a market -- building will be disincentivized until supply is constrained enough to raise prices. It will balance out, and this time the speculative turbulent forces will be gone, meaning housing will be easier to predict and plan out.

The land value tax is a way for the same circus we have to keep going, and the government to collect more taxes from the circus, but the circus is the problem. It's better to attack the problem directly than indirectly.

The land value tax encourages building bigger structures to juice the ROI on a single plot of land. That is not what I want, at least right now, and it is an indirect way of reducing demand. Remove the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 100th home buyers from the market, and demand will plunge. Maybe our goals are different, but I mean what I said -- I want to disincentivize rent-seeking behavior.

In fact, the land value tax is probably actually harmful to my stated goals -- making land more expensive without reducing property tax much would actually make land ownership less affordable for the common homebuyer, and a cost of doing business for professionals who can pass along land ownership taxes to the 1st level tenants (with renters becoming the 2nd level tenants).

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-13/transcrip...

[1]: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnR...