In Democratic, Green and Libertarian circles there is increasing interest in Henry George "land taxes" as the least damaging to economic growth.
It creates jobs without inflation or deficits.
It reconciles common land and resource rights with private tenure, enabling society to collect the value accruing from its actions yet preserving the benefits of private ownership.
It enables the reduction or elimination of payroll taxes and taxes on labour and capital, by shifting the burden to land and natural resources.
It is the only tax of any serious revenue potential that does not bear down on and suppress production and exchange. Unlike income and payroll taxes, it does not penalize work and employment. Unlike sales tax and GST it does not penalize production and trade. But it does assign their true value to natural resources and thereby offers a powerful incentive to husband and preserve them.
Geonomics meshes very comfortably with other tax shifting measures being advocated by many progressive economists and environmentalists. The general idea of green and equitable tax shifting is to stop taxing “goods” like employment, initiative, and economic activity and start taxing “bads” like carbon emissions and other pollutants, traffic congestion, speculative holding of vacant urban lots, and reckless use of common goods like fish, old growth forests, and water. An essential corollary is to stop the subsidizing of “bads” which is all too prevalent in modern society.
Jeffery Smith, the Portland-based founder of Geonomics, suggests that land taxes could not only fund necessary public services but also provide a “Geo-dividend,” a basic income for everyone, as the Alaskan state oil royalty does for Alaskans.
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