Now, the house I live in is worth around £65,000 where it stands. Move it 40 miles north, £35,000 if you're lucky. Move it 70 miles north that becomes around £95,000. 120 miles to the south east at least £160,000 upwards. The same shifts in value occur whatever the value of the house is. A £1,000,000 house in North Staffordshire is enormous, in parts of London it's a semi.SpinningHugo wrote:
All depends how you structure your transaction taxes.
Taxes on sales of multimillion pound homes aren't very regressive, for example.
So the amount of tax payable, assuming it's a percentage of price at sale, would depend largely on the location. And only be collected whenever a house is sold.
Which comes with all kinds of problems. Firstly, valuation. When the council tax was introduced huge areas were land and property valued by estate agents driving down the road, coming up with a figure and applying it to the whole road or even larger areas. As a result two very different properties were often allocated the same banding. Valuing the entire country, agricultural and urban, would be a huge exercise and likely to be about as "scientific".SpinningHugo wrote: An LVT is also a good idea.
Again, the value of land depends on where it is. Also what it is being used for and what it might be used for if the local planning consideratiins change.
And if the value is determined by what it fetches at sale, that in turn has a knock-on effect on land transfers by sale, and would exert downwards pressure on values. Now, while that in itself may not be a totally bad thing because the economy is being massively distorted by the cost of particularly housing, the other side of that coin is that decreasing land values would in turn mean a decreasing tax take. Or ever increasing tax rates, leading to further devaluation.
Placing much hope in land value taxation is about as realistic as what the US calls "gold bugging", the dogmatic insistence that, despite the real world, currency reverts to being backed by gold or other precious metals.
Hm. So a very wealthy person who owns no or little land or real estate pays very little tax, and someone less wealthy but owning some real estate pays more. There are very wealthy persons who have a great deal of income, earned or otherwise, or have accumulated considerable capital but own maybe half an acre in a less than prime value location.SpinningHugo wrote: Go for taxes on people and things that are in the country and can't escape.
Companies and other corporate bodies are "legally fictional persons". They have to be for much of the law to function, e.g. only what is legally considered a "person" can commence or be subject to a wide range of legal processes.SpinningHugo wrote: I think people (and the left in particular) anthropomorphise companies in a really unhelpful way. They are just legal constructs, they don't have any physical existence. We need to target tax on real world people and make sure it is distibutively fair. Corporation tax looks like a bad way of achieving that to me.
If you cease regarding corporate bodies as legal persons, then who are you going to apply your land value tax to when it is the corporation that owns the land? The individual shareholders on a pro-rata split? Good luck when they are also corporate bodies or the shareholders live abroad. Tax the corporation directly and that problem simply goes away.
If corporations are no longer to be considered "persons" you'll need to re-write a huge amount of law. If they retain "personhood" for some purposes and not others, you still need to rewrite a huge amount of law because considering corporate bodies as fictional persons has being underpinning our law for as long as there have been corporate bodies. Are you saying that the global history of the legal approach to corporations has been an error?
Not considering corporations as legal persons in their own right, and therefore not taxing them as such is a demand usually found amongst the most swivel-eyed of the Ayn Randist "objectivists". Who advocate it because they regard it as giving the very (to them) desirable result of massively reducing the tax take, especially on the wealthy. So automatically a "moral good" in itself while also restricting the role of "big evil government" to keep it out of such "inhuman" socialist activities as a health service, defending the environment and regulation of anything that might hinder the rich making lots of money.
