So experts are wrong and you’re right, but also plenty of experts agree with you? How do you believe these contradictory things?
Experts agree on a land value tax and so do I. If that’s all you said, we wouldn’t be disagreeing. But the crazy thing you said is that we need no new housing supply, which no one agrees with.
You also seem to be completely ignorant as to why taxing land value works. When land value is not taxed, we subsidize inefficient use of land like the economically and environmentally disastrous suburban sprawl you seem to like so much.
I need to get back to my own students. Please consider taking an intro economics or urban design course, or even just read a book or two.
The mainstream consensus is wrong because it’s driven by politics, not economics. Nobody is willing to suggest the simple economic policies that would drop housing prices by 50%, because it would lose them the next election. The government could drop a 100% capital gains tax on land values tomorrow and fix the issue entirely. Of course it would eliminate a very large chunk of the savings of more than half the population which would cause all sorts of social and economic problems, but it would reign in housing costs overnight.
I never said no new housing supply, point out a single statement where I said that. I’m pointing out that building by itself won’t makes homes affordable. There’s a theoretical way, where we wave our magic wand and have millions of houses appear, but there’s no practical way to get that number of units we would need to drop prices to affordable levels without massively inflating the cost (counter productive) in order to pull more labour from other industries and it would take decades to retrain that many people anyways.
Land value taxing would work to reduce prices because it drives down profitability of holding land. The efficiency of the tax at regulating use is almost secondary to the removal of the profit motive for holding land. As I’ve pointed out, there isn’t a huge shortage of housing with less than 2.5 people per unit across the country, the price is the current problem. That current price is mostly driven by what people expect to make in terms of the investment, rather than the value they get from living there.
I should know, my wife and I are around 800k more wealthy simply by owning the home we’ve lived in for the last 13 years (We’ve upgraded twice from our initial starter) and we knew that was going to happen when we took out the largest mortgages we could afford in order to maximize the leverage on the investment.
So experts are wrong and you’re right, but also plenty of experts agree with you? How do you believe these contradictory things?
Experts agree on a land value tax and so do I. If that’s all you said, we wouldn’t be disagreeing. But the crazy thing you said is that we need no new housing supply, which no one agrees with.
You also seem to be completely ignorant as to why taxing land value works. When land value is not taxed, we subsidize inefficient use of land like the economically and environmentally disastrous suburban sprawl you seem to like so much.
I need to get back to my own students. Please consider taking an intro economics or urban design course, or even just read a book or two.
The mainstream consensus is wrong because it’s driven by politics, not economics. Nobody is willing to suggest the simple economic policies that would drop housing prices by 50%, because it would lose them the next election. The government could drop a 100% capital gains tax on land values tomorrow and fix the issue entirely. Of course it would eliminate a very large chunk of the savings of more than half the population which would cause all sorts of social and economic problems, but it would reign in housing costs overnight.
I never said no new housing supply, point out a single statement where I said that. I’m pointing out that building by itself won’t makes homes affordable. There’s a theoretical way, where we wave our magic wand and have millions of houses appear, but there’s no practical way to get that number of units we would need to drop prices to affordable levels without massively inflating the cost (counter productive) in order to pull more labour from other industries and it would take decades to retrain that many people anyways.
Land value taxing would work to reduce prices because it drives down profitability of holding land. The efficiency of the tax at regulating use is almost secondary to the removal of the profit motive for holding land. As I’ve pointed out, there isn’t a huge shortage of housing with less than 2.5 people per unit across the country, the price is the current problem. That current price is mostly driven by what people expect to make in terms of the investment, rather than the value they get from living there.
I should know, my wife and I are around 800k more wealthy simply by owning the home we’ve lived in for the last 13 years (We’ve upgraded twice from our initial starter) and we knew that was going to happen when we took out the largest mortgages we could afford in order to maximize the leverage on the investment.