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Notes -
From my post:
I think we’re in agreement! Land value tax would solve an immense amount of problems, people really sleep on how many issues stem from poor use and distribution of land/property.
Homelessness for one would be far cheaper and easier to solve if we could just reform our zoning and property tax codes. It would also do a lot to help increase fertility, young couple often say buying a house is one of the main reasons they delay having children.
But people love to get theirs and pull up the ladder behind them unfortunately.
Yeah guess I misinterpreted your post as saying both property tax and LVT have this property, as opposed to just the latter. My bad!
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Urbanists like LVT (any LVT, not just the Georgist one) because municipal expenses scale more with people (related to improvements) than area (land), so if you're paying for municipal expenses with an LVT then one landowner's improvements effectively raise the taxes on everyone else's land, thus giving them an incentive to improve to keep up.
Homelessness -- that is, the problem of the unsheltered homeless -- has nothing to do with zoning or property taxes, but rather the characteristics of the homeless themselves.
They say a lot of things. Then you look in the past and see fertility was much higher when people were living 10 to an apartment with only cold water if you were lucky, so maybe what they say isn't accurate.
Exactly. This is good because everyone else benefits from higher economic activity and more value being generated around them. Otherwise you have situations where poorly run businesses can skimp by because they have a prime location and are surrounded by good businesses that actually provide a lot of value. I don’t see the issue.
I agree that sometimes people have revealed preferences, but I think generally it’s good to take folks at their word. Also, it’s disingenuous to act like these situations are equivalent - if people in poor conditions in the past had access to birth control, they would probably have less kids. The aristocracy did this frequently. Humans just like sex.
Do you think that a lack of housing is not a major driver in having kids? If not what is your list of causes for the fertility crisis?
I don't have it as a value that every square inch of land should be put to its highest economic use. And I don't think the taxes on one parcel should go up because improvements on another parcel resulted in an increase in municipal expenses.
No.
One is that there's no longer any economic reason to have kids. That's not particularly new, of course. Two is that the cost of having kids -- not just the economic cost in dollars, but the non-delegable cost in time -- for middle class and above parents just keeps going up. Helicopter parenting is tiring, expensive... and expected. Three is birth control (also not particularly new).
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