Re: 1911 Reference Book Cites The Single Tax

On Sun, 25 Feb 2007 16:59:32 -0500, Nospam <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

royls@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Readers, especially Nospam, please note: I have hit the "Reply" button
without having read

And without thinking too. Nice to see that you are at least consistent.

That's right. I did not have to read or think about your reply to
know for certain that I would be demolishing it.

Into a county/region you have 2 companies:

A software company selling out of region 100M/yr and occupying a 1 acre
office and a 1000 acre farm producing food sold for 10M inside the region.

That is of course a hugely oversimplified and unrealistic model

It is simplified well enough to highlight the problems.

No, it is simplified well enough to eliminate the relevant factors.

It is a standard
practice when you try to make a logical based proof.

No, of course it isn't. You cannot make a logical proof based on a
simplified model. All you can do is make an analogy, which depends on
essential similarity. The latter is missing from your argument.

Of course, logical
proofs are what you guys are afraid because you live into a hallucinatory
word of propaganda and spin, where the logic is the deadly enemy.

Content = 0.

Today, you tax all the revenue with 1/3 and get a tax revenue of
110/3=36.6M/yr.

Thus discouraging production.

Not at all. Production is driven by demand.

No, it is driven by the prospect of profit. If you tax away the
revenue from production, you discourage production, whatever the
demand. Demand that yields a reduced payment to producers because of
taxation will provide a reduced encouragement to production.

If you use taxation to increase
demand, you can actually stimulate production by taxation.

You cannot use taxation of production or the revenue therefrom to
increase demand.

It is just a pathetic idiotic belief that taxation undermined production.

It is a known fact of economics that most taxes undermine production.
There is even a term for this effect, the "excess burden" of taxation.
A tax on land rent, unlike almost any other tax, is known to carry no
excess burden because the supply of land is fixed and therefore not
affected by the tax.

There are cases where taxation can stimulate the economy and increase
production:
http://www.angelfire.com/planet/dragonomics/laffer_ruminations.pdf

But only a tax on rent, not a tax on production. The article you are
referring to is a rather amateurish effort, and despite the pretty
graphs is far from making credible economic arguments.

Switching to a land tax in order to maintain the same revenue you have to
get in taxes 36.6M from 1001 acres = 36623.37/acre.

You can't get more in land value tax revenue than the rent of the
land. If you try, you just drive the land value to a negative
quantity and drive the land out of production.

But if you don't do that, the tax revenue plummet to small fraction than
before.

No, it does not. The revenue of a land value tax is asymptotic to the
aggregate land rent as the tax rate increases.

In the example above, if you don't do it you will drop tha tax
revenue collected from 36.6M to less than 3M.

Wrong. You posit an industrial economy of $110M. The land rent will
be about $20-$25M, and that's how much revenue a land rent tax can
raise.

Unless you are one of the delusional libertarians that believe the
government is evil and must be starved to death by destroying all the tax
revenue sources, you have to admit that: "Huston, we have a problem".

I have said how much revenue a land rent tax can raise. Whether it is
enough to fund everything the voters want government to do is another
question.

Nospam again proves that he has no idea what he is talking about. The
Georgist land value tax is not and has never been a per-area tax. It
is a tax on the VALUE of land parcels, not on the SIZE of land
parcels. Nospam will of course continue to refuse to know this fact,
just as he has refused to know it all the previous times I have
identified it for him.

Let assume that tomorrow you we switch to a Georgist taxation.
The companies will just move outside of the hightaxation area into the
places where land is cheap.

Why would they? They can't do business there. If they could, they'd
be there NOW. They are already in high-land-cost areas for a very
good reason: they need the economic advantages their locations offer
if they are going to make any money. The Georgist tax would not
change the cost of land, just the destination of the payment.

You are not thinking.

In the end the tax revenue will just goes down as expected.

Flat wrong, as proved above.

People having a house will find themselves in the situation to have to drive
10 times longer to reach their companies on cheap land.

<sigh> So, in order to avoid paying for the advantages of a good
location, companies will move to _bad_ locations, thereby guaranteeing
that they not only lose money, but impose commuting costs on their
employees greater than their land cost savings?

WHY DON'T THEY DO THAT NOW??

The oil consumption
skyrocket pushing the price up. All the existing infrastructure will be
abandoned and the traffic move where the roads are almost inexistent. The
economy gets crippled and in less than one year collapse forever.

ROTFL!! Here's a funny thing, though, Nospam: when Pittsburgh
dramatically reduced its property tax on buildings and increased the
tax on land value, companies didn't move out of downtown. They moved
INTO downtown. They did THE EXACT, DIAMETRIC OPPOSITE of what you
predict, and did instead what Georgists and all competent land
economists predict.

Now, you can choose to learn from that, or you can choose to remain a
total economic ignoramus. Your choice.

Heck, you eventually encourage more job offshoring. A production plant
offshore don't pay the land tax and the US owners don't pay any tax since
Georgists eliminated all other taxes.

I realize that you have a bee in your bonnet about offshoring. Why,
then, do you refuse to know the fact that when producers must pay
taxes to government to pay for services and infrastructure, and must
then pay land rent to idle, parasitic landowners for access to the
services and infrastructure their taxes just paid for, that cost
disadvantage is more likely to drive offshoring of production than a
system where the productive only pay land rent to government for the
services and infrastructure they benefit by, cutting out the parasitic
burden of the idle landowners?

So you get:
- a collapsed economy

Disproved by every economic boom that has resulted from taxing land
rent, and there have been a lot of them.

- 0 revenue except from food

False and absurd. All production requires land.

- no jobs

The exact opposite of historical experience.

- skyhigh gas prices

Also opposite. Taxing land value leads to more compact development,
less commuting, less gas consumption and LOWER gase prices. This is
not disputed by any competent economist.

- 10 hours a day wasted on the car for the fortunate to still have a job

Silliness.

- the rich pays NO TAX AT ALL except for a small apartment they keep here
while their properties in Aruba are tax free too.

On the contrary, the rich own almost all land that is not under
owner-occupied housing, and would thus pay almost all of a land rent
tax, because such a tax is known to be unshiftable.

Are you nuts or what ?

No, just more intelligent and informed than you.

Therefore. If you apply the Henry George model, the food price will
skyrocket 430%.

Nospam is just lying again. That is not the Henry George model, and
it does not resemble the Henry George model in any significant way.
Nospam is just makin' $#!+ up again, as all anti-Georgists inevitably
do.

You refuse to think.

?? ROTFL!! As they say in Japan, "It's mirror time!"

You look at the land value TODAY without considering
what happen.

Wrong. You are making a false and absurd assumption about what will
happen, based on zero fact or logic.

I told you, companies will migrate to cheaper locations.

And I told YOU, if they could make more money that way, they would be
doing it NOW. And they aren't.

You don't seem to understand that a company does not make profits by
refusing to pay for the things it needs to make profits (one of which
is an advantageous location). It makes profits by using the things it
needs and pays for more productively than its competitors.

By moving the plants into cheaper locations, in the end the land value drop
into the city and rise into the countryside. In the end, ALL the land
prices start to equalize to the lowest denominator.

Why isn't that happening now? Land users are already paying the land
rent to private landowners, so why are those land users moving out
into the countryside instead of paying to use the more advantageous
urban locations? Could it be because the better locations are WORTH
IT?

Duh.

If Henry George didn't saw that happening the he was an idiot.

Ahem... Don't look now, Nospam, but...

The following is an open letter written to Mikhail Gorbachev and
signed by dozens of eminent, respected Western economists, including
four (count 'em _four_) Nobel laureates. It recommends a
Georgist-style system for raising public revenue in the Soviet Union:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Open_letter_to_Mikhail_Gorbachev_(1991)

Is it more likely that Nobel laureates are idiots, or that you are?

It is important to understand that there is no honest or valid
argument against the Henry George model, and never has been. All the
opponents of LVT have ever been able to do is lie about it, call its
proponents names, or ignore it.

"The stupidity is never completed without a huge dose of self esteem"
Ancient proverb.

Once again, you might want to check in the mirror...

All the LTV theory it is an obsolete piece of trash. It has been refuted
millions of times.

Yet you cannot point to even one refutation. And no one else can,
either.

Extrapolating to today's situation in US, more than half of US population
is going to be doomed to starvation, while corporations offshoring jobs
will practically pay ZERO IN TAXES.

?? ROTFL!!! This "extrapolation" is nothing but a crude lie. The
hypothetical two-product economy with no land rent does not resemble
the US economy in any way.

Neither does space shuttle resemble the triangle from Pythagoras theorem.
Does that mean the spaceshuttle can be constructed by somebody incapable to
understand basic geometry ?

No, it means that some people understand how reasoning by analogy
works, and others do not.

-- Roy L
.