My main concern with LVT as offered by most of its current libertarian-tropic avatars is that it has the same moral issues as ordinary Real Estate taxes, which is it burdens the poor and struggling equally with the powerful and well heeled. Picketty here is advocating the common sense notion that it be part of progressive taxation and not a replacement (though he doesnt refer directly): Thomas Piketty: Right now, the taxation of property in the U.S. is proportional to your real estate property and doesn’t take into account your mortgage or your financial assets. Paul Solman: It’s not how much equity you have in the house, it’s just how much the house is worth on the open market — you pay a percentage of that? Thomas Piketty: Right, so sometimes, actually, your mortgage is higher than your property value, so you have a negative net worth, but you’re still paying the same property tax. It’d be better to have a progressive tax on net wealth, so that, in effect, we would reduce the property tax for the bottom 90 percent of Americans. We need to return to the type of progressive income taxation that we’ve had in the past, which did not kill U.S. economic growth. U.S. economic growth was actually higher before the 1980s than it has been since then.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/inequality-will-worsen-in-america-unless-pikettys-rx/
Posted on: Sun, 25 May 2014 12:47:36 +0000
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