Can Land Value Tax Give Baltimore's Neighborhoods Back To Their Residents? 

Exactly, the more money in the hands of the "Serfs Going About Their Daily Lives", the more demand for goods and services, the more people will try to meet those demands, the better the economy. As Will Rogers said in 1932, "The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot. But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellows hands. "

No need to penalize out of state investors, if they are actually investing in business and job creation rather than in land speculation. An annual tax equal to the full potential rental value of the location (adjusted each year based on changing values) removes the possibility of profiting as a land speculator.

@@nthperson Nope. Penalize out of state investors because for the "most" part it is about making profits.

@@donnab.333 The real world is too complex to try to do limited investment to residents of a city or a state. Non-residents (including businesses domiciled elsewhere) can be good members of the community, even though much of their profits do not stay locally. if the firms invest in job-creating capital goods and compensate the community for the value of whatever land they come to control, the dominoes will fall in the right direction toward a full employment environment. It will not happen overnight, but the fundamentals will be in place and the right sort of incentives will stimulate the local economy to the benefit of everyone.

Jews

Who paid it? Either someone who wanted to put the land to use, or someone who thought that public spending, population increase, industrious neighbors --- or subsidies --- would make it even more valuable in the future. Who pocketed it? Likely someone who would proudly proclaim himself a self-made man, with foresight that deserved to be rewarded. Someone who would proudly proclaim to be a smart businessman, worthy of respect and honor from his inferiors. That site could have housed people, and/or employed people or otherwise served them, for decades. And in California, with Proposition 13 keeping annual land and building taxes to a minute and shrinking fraction of the value of the sites, the 34x would be a lot higher.

@@lvtfan Ultimately the person that pays it is us. Even if a well intended person buys the land and develops it for something productive, they will need to pass that cost on. Making matters worst, the municipality taxes the building value. So u have a housing shortage in urban area driving up rent, yet if u create 10 stories of housing, u get taxed per story. Once again, passed on. Not only do u reward bad behavior by not taxing land value, u punish good behavior by taxing building value.

Make your voice heard with your local representative.

Every parcel of land has some potential annual rental value. Whatever that amount is is what the owner ought to be required to pay each year as a "property tax." Put this system into place, and over time governments could begin to eliminate taxing people's wages and even commerce.

@@nthperson the government won't eliminate taxes, just create new ones to collate to pre-existing ones.

@@BigRodd91 Georgism is not about adding new taxes, its about shifting the taxes towards land value from other existing taxes. In other words, it's meant to replace current forms of tax systems. It's worked in multiple municipalities in Pennsylvania where land value tax has gradually replaced property taxes.

@@taoliu3949 Georgism is about adding more taxes. Don't be irrational and idealistic. That's what the politician's who want more taxes want people to think like.

@@BigRodd91 Um, no its not. Pure Georgism advocates to replace ALL taxes with the Land Value Tax. Read Henry George's Progress and Poverty.

Absolutely Nothing! However he is praised in many circles.

Oh, yeah? So, what did *you* do for Baltimore? I'm betting you just want to make racist statements, and I bet you don't even live in Baltimore.

I suspect that Mr. Cummings did not appreciate the causes of the city's decline. Few civic leaders these days do.

Initially, I think he started out wanting to do for the people; but in the end, he became just like the rest of the democrat politicians; & not caring about the local people (unless it was voting season).

'There are solutions to the labor suppressing effects of neoliberalism that would have more impact than increasing land tax.' LVT is a win win, it spurs development and productivity and has no dead weight loss on the economy. It would benefit workers by lowering rents and raising real wages, also allowing better access to land to drive driving up both competition and workers bargaining power, also it was real estate speculation that drove the GFC, and will likely crash the economy again in or around 2026, with a sizeable LVT such land price cycles would be impossible, so I don't see what else would have more impact. 'Property tax should also be progressive instead of flat so that single home owners pay lower rates than landlords, speculators, developers and corporations.' As soon as you create exemptions you create loopholes and perverse incentives. If you want to protect the average person, or particularly the asset rich cash poor pensioners increase their benefits, that would be far better than watering down the tax.

A move to a land-only property tax base is not an overnight cure for the city's economic, social and financial problems. That admitted, it would start to have positive effects in a relatively short period of time. As a former deputy mayor of New York once stated in advocacy of the measure, imposing high taxes on people and on businesses drives people and businesses away. Imposing a high tax on the holding of land will stimulate the owner to develop the land or sell to someone who will; they cannot take the land with them to somewhere else.

If you buy property, it taxes the land portion it at the level of expected rent for that location/zoning within reasonable bounds of getting the building ready to generate a revenue stream in the case of vacant land. Currently land taxes are often so low that the land/property can be held out of use or waiting for rezoning windfall gains for years and then sold on for capital gains. It removes these perverse incentives as it becomes more costly (and less rewarding on sale) to hold land out of use, so either the landlord puts it to use to generate a yield to pay the tax or s/he sells it to someone who will.

This video is insane nonsense. All land, all real estate is taxed in the United States. Yes, they are simply trying to greatly increase the property tax burden that already exists.

@@alexblake5743 Completely missing the point, it's shifting the tax burden from buildings and productivity to land. It's irrelevant that real estate is already taxed, it is taxed badly, too much in some places and not enough in others. So under someone who invests appropriately in the building on the land is no longer taxed more than someone who either leaves the land undeveloped or under utilises the property. Spurring on development and efficiency rather than punishing it.

@@schumanhuman you are insane.

@@alexblake5743 Is that you best argument? Asserting that it means higher property taxes does not make it so, it's simply a fact that Joshua Vincent has advised how to shift the tax from buildings to land in a revenue neutral way so you are empirically wrong that it means higher property tax. Better to be insane than flat wrong.

The total amount of revenue raised will increase (if not immediately, over time) as development is spurred and the competition to control well-located land parcels cases the rental value of those locations to increase year after year. The further away from the central business district, the rental values of land will be lower, of course, but as residential neighborhoods begin to reoccupied and buildings are renovated or replaced, the land rental values all throughout the city will rise. Investors would have no financial reason to buy up land just to offer it to others under a lease, as the city would be collecting the same amount each year in taxes. People would buy or hold land only if they were going to develop the land to its highest, best use (whatever that might be based on market demand, zoning, building restrictions, etc.).

@@nthperson I'm thinking about real estate developers, they would buy up the land and they would develop it. I'd see it as lowering the barrier to entry for people with more Capital to do bigger projects then individual homeowners. The individual person might have more access, but might get edged out by people who are looking to create rental properties.

@@charlenek11 No public policy works in a vacuum. Every neighborhood has building regulations and zoning restrictions. Some communities pass ordinances that restrict the height of buildings or require compliance with historic preservation. Developers tend to follow demand rather than to create demand. The city can restrict the sale of any city-held land parcels or land with an existing structure to buyers who commit to be owner-occupants for some period of time. The city could charter a public bank charged with providing mortgage financing to income-eligible buyers.

@@nthperson that's fine, but it's hard to visualize the scale of how much income might be lost and how much will have to be made up in other fees on services. A more concrete example would help to show how this particular tax might improve things. Some kind of economic modeling would be nice.

@@charlenek11 Well, there are about 20 communities and a couple school districts in Pennsylvania that have some version of a two-rate property tax. The state capital, Harrisburg, taxes assessed land values at a rate six times greater than it taxes building values. Several successful mayoral administrations led the effort to continue to this differential beginning back in the 1970s. As for modeling, the economics literature is filled with papers on the subject. Here is the link to just one paper, written in 1973 by then Professor of economics at Columbia University, C. Lowell Harriss: www.cooperative-individualism.org/harriss-c-lowell_property-taxation-what's-good-and-what's-bad-1973.pdf

Yes, blame the people that have no money, no power, and no opportunities.

@@kuriadams9138 , everyone have opportunities and chose not to take advantage. If a woman choose to have 3 babies she cannot afford, she exerted her freewill to do nothing with herself. I took birth control pills while I attended school. I have student loans. I used my freewill to choose that path. While I worked as I attended an university, I learned how Black women with babies were able to go for free but only a pinch of them took advantage of that opportunity. I thought that was a slap in the face. I tried to live right all the while the government made it hard for me while making it easy for every woman laying up with every man. Do not think I do not know what it means to not have opportunities. Our elders are suffering and there are people with real disabilities and cannot work, but those people have to get lawyers to retrieve what is theirs anyway. I know a lady who has cancer and was denied disabilities. She is still working and suffering at the same time due to chemo treatments. That woman pays taxes for disabilities and social security. Those benefits are not welfare. Don't tell me these women with NO husbands and have 3 or more children did not have opportunities. They had the opportunity to not have babies they could not afford. Do you even sit in the public schools to see how these girls behave? They refuse to be educated but know how to get pregnant just to get welfare, food stamps and Section 8. This has to STOP. What about our elders? Stand up for them. 20ish, 30ish, 40ish year old women never worked but cintinue to suck the breast of the government as if that is a career. It is time for them to get off their butts and go to work, so our elders can rest.

This is about un-taxing Baltimore's productive economy and freeing up free enterprise from land speculators.