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Posted on Monday, May 14, 2012 12:43 PM
 Assaults on the property tax have been commonplace in the US (and Australia,New Zealand, etc.) in the past few decades. We think that the property has a lot wrong with it; but its a situation that calls for a scalpel not an atom bomb. Here are some basic alternative solutions, including the land value tax as a way to abolish the tax on buildings.
Four Ameliorations for
Assessment Increases or Tax Increases: an Analysis
William Batt, Ph.D.,
Joshua Vincent, ED |
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Joshua Vincent: Posted on Wednesday, May 09, 2012 3:47 PM
Flint's Dayne Walling - a Mayor open to ideas and opportunities for his city
The story of Flint Michiganneed not be retold here. The story of Flint is the story of many Rustbelt cities from Troy New York to St. Louis Missouri. Existing for decades as a city with good jobs for all that wanted one, a city that rewarded enterprise and hard work. The downturn of the US automobile industry was recently (But chimerically) reversed by pumping billions of taxpayer dollars to Chrysler and General Motors, yet has had little effect on the city itself. |
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Posted on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 4:40 PM
Canberra Plan 1900s
Canberra Today
In the early part of the 20th century, a rising and
confident Australia decided to create a national capital. It was to be a planned city, and surprisingly
enough an American named Walter Burley Griffinwon the competition to design Canberra.
The Griffin design was linked theoretically and
contextually to the first stirrings of modern planning and to the visionary
land economics of the classical economists.
In the case of Griffin, it was his commitment and enthusiasm to good
economic sense and economic justice learned through his lifelong reading of the
American economist Henry George. |
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Joshua Vincent: Posted on Monday, May 07, 2012 3:39 PM
Philadelphia Pennsylvania like most cities, counties and states have had to deal with tight budgets for nearly half a decade. For many reasons, not least of which are legacy expenses, revenue requirements will be increasing even as economies at the local and regional level still react sluggishly as the great recession of 2008 begins its ebb tide. A complicating factor in Philadelphia's fiscal struggle is the reality that it's tax system is nearly unique in United States as the |
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Joshua Vincent: Posted on Friday, April 20, 2012 11:49 AM
Independence? Perhaps, but not likely
Recently, an
active and conservative member of the Republican Party in central Pennsylvania
sent UrbanTools a copy of something called the "Property
Tax Independence Act" (PTIA)
with the interesting subtitle of "Liberty Equality and
Prosperity". The legislation – more
accurately a proposal for a constitutional amendment in the state of
Pennsylvania – Is given a seemingly official sobriquet of “House
Bill 1776.”
As yet, this is not an
actual bill however. |
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jrv: Posted on Monday, April 09, 2012 4:32 PM
The past 15 years have been very kind to India and its emerging new economy. The past few years however have not been so nice.One problem have been the traditionally sclerotic planning and development authorities who have been sluggish in releasing land for development, along with the overall mistrust of the free flow of capital and labor, dependent on the classic mid-20th century model of Fabian socialism.
Recently, the Indian government reasserted its heavy hand by overturning the previously independent Indian judiciary by putting a tax on international partnerships and acquisitions retroactively to 1962. |
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jrv: Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2012 2:18 PM
Dr. Herbert Barry of Pittsburgh, an UrbanTools Director has shown his adeptness in outreach to all forms of media, including print and now radio. Please call in to the radio show on Friday March 30, to participate in this broadcast.
 I will be interviewed on a radio show, on Friday 30 March 2012, 10:00 to 10:30 AM (Eastern time). Listeners can access it at the phone number 1-424-220-1873. The title I chose for the program is "How to remedy our maladaptive sources of government revenue. |
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Posted on Wednesday, March 21, 2012 6:49 PM
Walt Rybeck, Director, Center for Public Dialogue, calls for correcting the public policies that make slum ownership, land speculation, and other forms of parasitic and exploitive behavior more profitable than honest labor and productive enterprise. His latest book, Re-solving the Economic Puzzle, provides accounts of places in the United States and elsewhere that are applying the proposed reform are presented, proving that it is politically feasible, and offers an ethical cleansing of the economy so that all people can enjoy all the fruits of their efforts. |
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Joshua Vincent: Posted on Wednesday, March 07, 2012 4:16 PM
From the Collar City: You are Invited to a discussion on a new way to tax
Can your town use a new approach to in finance, planning and its relationships with citizens?
Property taxes are both the main source of revenue for local governments, and at the same time the most unpopular. Economically, property taxes as they are currently structured, reward blight and disinvestment, while discouraging real estate markets from operating in more urbanized areas. One tool used by dozens of cities in the US in hundreds of cities elsewhere is the land value tax is the land value tax. |
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Joshua Vincent: Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2012 5:30 PM
Abandoning outdated land values will harmonize Taiwan's many species of land and property taxes...
(photo: CW)
The tax policies of Taiwan has always made it a successful outlier, one of the few Asian Tigers to prosper right after World War II, and doing well until the recent global slump. A lynchpin of that policy is value-based land taxation. Even though the agricultural land tax is moribund (since 1985), it has been argued that the goal of that tax, to free up large estates (in the manner Denmark's |
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